Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

Curtis contrasts lived experience with remembered experience. “Romance” is figured as a ghost: the moment you try to grasp it directly, it slips away, because its allure depends on distance, longing, and imagination. What felt ordinary (“prose”) while it happened becomes “poetry” later, when memory edits, heightens, and gives pattern to what was once merely factual. The remark captures a common nineteenth-century preoccupation with sentiment and retrospection: the mind’s tendency to aestheticize the past, turning conversation, travel, or love into a narrative more beautiful than the original event. It also implies a gentle skepticism about chasing “romance” in the present, since its charm often arrives only after the fact.