Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain

ABSTRACT

We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. First, baseline resting state data for a “washin” period were taken for each participant for 5 days. For the next 9 days, participants read 1/9th of a novel during the evening and resting-state data were taken the next morning. Finally, resting-state data for a “wash-out” period were taken for 5 days after the conclusion of the novel. On the days after the reading, significant increases in connectivity were centered on hubs in the left angular/supramarginal gyri and right posterior temporal gyri. These hubs corresponded to regions previously associated with perspective taking and story comprehension, and the changes exhibited a timecourse that decayed rapidly after the completion of the novel. Long-term changes in connectivity, which persisted for several days after the reading, were observed in bilateral somatosensory cortex, suggesting a potential mechanism for “embodied semantics.”

-  http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/brain.2013.0166

the sign of the Son of God is powerlessness in the world

And to us who come, in the midst of the wicked world torn by malice, to venerate the Infant lying in the manger, what law and wisdom of life are given by this miraculous sign? To what do the angels now call those who come to venerate Christ? They call them to receive into their hearts His humiliation, His persecution, His crucifixion, as the sole sign of the Christian life, as its power and triumph.

For the best self-attestation of the Good is its defencelessness in the face of the of the power of evil. The best attestation of Truth is silence in the face of much-talkative falsehood. The supreme manifestation of Beauty consists in the unadornment by vain adornment. The power of God triumphs by means of itself, not by means of the power of this world. For the world, there is no power of God. The world does not see and does not know the power of God; it laughs at the power of God. But Christians know that the sign of the Son of God is powerlessness in the world - the Infant in the manger.

- from Sergei Bulgakov, 'The Sign of the Manger of Bethlehem' (1935)

continually

A true synthesis, to my mind, results from a free play of contradictions not from a denial - my paradise is one in which Eve is continually tempting Adam, Adam is continually falling, continually being forgiven, and continually forgiving Eve!

- Philip Sherrard, letter to George Katsimbalis (August7, 1950)

Many nations will seek refuge

The Lord listened to the prophets' plea. Our Father did not ignore our doomed race. He sent his Son from heaven to be our Healer. As one of the prophets says: The Lord you seek is coming; suddenly he will come.' .... Again, the Lord himself has said: 'See, I am coming, and I shall dwell in your midst, says the Lord, and many nations will seek refuge with the Lord.'

- Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 12

.... пламенея в ночи

Рождество 1963 года

Спаситель родился
в лютую стужу.
В пустыне пылали пастушьи костры.
Буран бушевал и выматывал душу
из бедных царей, доставлявших дары.
Верблюды вздымали лохматые ноги.
Выл ветер.
Звезда, пламенея в ночи,
смотрела, как трех караванов дороги
сходились в пещеру Христа, как лучи.

 - Иосиф Бродский

Arkady wasn't superstitious but he did believe that momentum only existed if used.

- Martin Cruz Smith, Tatiana

We were wearied, we were worsted

....

Adam contracted for us the debt that we owe, by eating what he ought not,
And until to-day it is demanded of us who are descended from him.
The creditor was not satisfied with seizing the debtor,
But he attacks his children too, demanding the ancestral debt,
And empties the debtor’s house entirely, sweeping everyone away.
And so let us all flee to one who is powerful.
Knowing that we are in dire poverty,
Do you yourself pay back what we owe, for you are rich,
Who come to call back Adam.

..... We were wearied, we were worsted, we were utterly cast out;
We thought we had the law as our redeemer, and it enslaved us;
The prophets too, and they left us on our hope.
And so with infants we bow the knee to you.
Have mercy on us who have been humbled,
Be willing, be crucified, and tear up the record of our debt, you
Who come to call back Adam.

.... Knowing that the law had no strength to save you, I have come myself.
It was not for the law to save you, since it did not fashion you.
Nor was it for the prophets, because they too are my fashioning just as you are.
Mine alone was the task of releasing you from this most heavy debt.
I am being sold for your sake and I shall free you.
I am being crucified for you and you are not being made to die.
I die and I teach you to cry, ‘Blessed are you
Who come to call back Adam.

- Romanos the Melodist, Kontakion 16 (On the Feast of Palms) [translated by Fr Ephrem Lash]

rod out of the stem of Jesse

... Christ Himself is the real Tree of Life; the prototype of that wondrous tree from whose salvation-bringing sight and enjoyment mankind had been removed in consequence of sin, without ever being able to lose the memory of it. He is called indeed in the Old Testament "as the eternal, heavenly Wisdom of God " a "Tree of Life" (Prov. iii. i8) ; even as, with regard to His human nature and origin, He is called a "rod out of the stem of Jesse," and a "branch out of his roots" (Isa. xi. i). And He calls Himself in the New Testament the " true Vine " (John XV. I ff.) ; He speaks of Himself as the "green tree," which must suffer instead of the dry wood, properly destined for fuel (Luke xxiii. 31). The green wood, the gloriously blossoming fruit-laden palm tree (Psalm i. 3 ; xcii. 12), is hanged upon the dry bare tree of the curse (Gal. iii. 13); He consecrates this precisely thereby as a place of blessing, grows into one with it, as a gladdening, world-renewing Tree of Life, at whose roots gushes forth the fountain of everlasting life, whose fruit affords to every one the true and ever satisfying food, and whose leaves are for the healing of the nations (Rev. ii. 7 ; xxii. 2). All that which had expressed itself in the pre-Christian world in efforts after the ideal or real [i.e., by means of types] representation in religious symbolism of the Tree of Life as the compendium of all blessedness, finds here its fulfilment, its Divine ratification, in a blessing extending exceeding abundantly beyond all previous dimly realised conception and even longing.

- Otto Zöckler, The Cross of Christ (1877)

He loved miracles

.... His interest in the divine was more instinctive than formal. He loved miracles. For him, as for a medieval monk, they were everyday possibilities. He was quite capable of embellishing perfectly mundane conversations with the sudden memory of a saintly body, long buried, which had been disinterred uncorrupted and with a fragrant smell. When we were considering which Cavafy poems to use he rang in great excitement to say that the volume had leapt off the shelf and fallen open at the perfect choice.

The Greek sun, taken with some retsina, was good for his spirit in moderate doses; and there was something more generally about the Greek world that played into an intensely emotional side of his thinking. The references didn’t have to be to God — his Sappho Fragments of 1981 are among the most refined things he wrote. He could have gone further with that style, but equally enthralling to him was the mystical world of Greek (and Russian) Orthodoxy, ultimately to him a mood, a kind of scented picture, from which so much of his output flowed.

He said recently that the image of him as a joyless old hermit, surrounded by candles, had been imposed on him by the media. I’m not sure I entirely buy that either, as anyone who has seen the exquisite chapel he created out of a stable at his home may agree. But in the end this was his official look, which only conveyed a small part of his character. It also tended to play down his sheer technical ability as a musician: he was capable of writing some of the most mathematically involved passages available to a composer, known as canons, partly as a result of having studied the music of the renaissance master Josquin des Prez. The last example of this particular knack has yet to be heard. Just before he died he wrote a Requiem (called Requiem Fragments) for me to conduct on some big occasion next year, in order to help celebrate his 70th birthday, which would have fallen on 28 January. Its last 20 pages or so consist of a triple-choir canon, which on paper looks as complicated as these things ever get. If I had been able to ask him how he had conceived this incredible texture — as I did in a similar passage years ago in his Ikon of Light — he would have replied that it just came out like that. It was another miracle.

One of John’s leitmotifs was God as light. He relished the way light could not be contained, as God’s benign spirit cannot. When he was free to express some part of this conjunction he could write masterpieces. Sometimes these were very long and sometimes very short. We’ll hear them all during 2014 — an anniversary year all the more poignant now — and I am certain none will be more affecting, Mozart-like, than this Requiem.

Peter Phillips is director of the Tallis Scholars

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/music/9082101/remembering-my-friend-john-tavener/

Christ the Wisdom of God

.... so that Wisdom building herself a house within her undefiled body, the Word became flesh; and the form of God and the form of a slave coming together into one person, the Creator of times was born in time; and He Himself through whom all things were made, was brought forth in the midst of all things.

 

- Leo the Great, Letter 31 (to Pulcheria Augusta)

From stbenedictstable.ca, conversation with the late Robert Farrar Capon:

He spoke quite powerfully about learning from that, and of having to work through something of a faith crisis. Several times, he made reference to mortality and to the reality of our all dying; something which has long been a big part of his theological horizon but which had now become personal. “This has been a year for me to realize that I am not ‘getting’ this,” he said. 

I am not called upon to ‘get’ this, I am not called upon to improve, I am not called upon to get better. And in the toils of the medical establishment you are always told that you will get better, you must get better, you can get better and so on. And I don’t have to. I know I’m not going to get better permanently; nobody is. I’m going to end up dead permanently. Because life after death is a blind alley, in terms of an existence somewhere else than here. My life is in Christ, and therefore in life and in death I am in him. It’s all him. That’s all we know.

“That’s all we know,” and after a year that he characterized as being marked by a “black depression,” he had to decide “if I believed any of this stuff.” He most surely did. “We are not saved from our sins,” he told me. “We’re saved in our sins. We’re not saved from our deaths, we’re saved in our deaths. My death is my salvation. Physically, it is the moment of my salvation, if you want to pinpoint a moment. That’s why we’re supposed to die daily to sin. Sin is always there, and we’re supposed to die daily to it. That doesn’t mean that you have to improve. That’s the mistake of religion.”

That’s the mistake of religion; to replace the radical proclamation of death/resurrection with a set of practices by which to try to improve, progress, or otherwise convince the Divine Fox that we’re worth the bother. Robert Farrar Capon spent the better part of the last forty years trying proclaiming death/resurrection, and many of us are the better for it.

People should not have to fuss

Vladyka Zenobius said that if you are guest, never try to explain fasting rules to your hosts. Eat what they have cooked and then go to confession. People should not have to fuss around you and ask, "Are you allowed to eat this or not? What about this?"

- Elder Zenobius: A Life in Continuity with Pre-Revolutionary Russia (Holy Trinity Publications, 2013)

adapts to our weaknesses

The Saviour provides for our needs, for each in a different way. For those who lack joy, he is the Vine; for those who need to enter, he is the Door; for those who need to pray, he is the Mediator and the High Priest. Again, for those who are sinners, he becomes the Sheep to be slain on their behalf. He becomes 'all things for all men', while remaining what he is by nature. For while continuing to hold the unchangeable dignity of the Son, he adapts to our weaknesses like a skilled doctor or a sympathetic teacher.

- St Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 10.5

the good old spaciousness of Orthodoxy

I rather like the remarks of a well-known English Dominican when asked a question following a retreat at St John's Abbey in Minnesota concerning the Roman Catholic Church in America.  Changing the changeable they would amount to this, in Orthodox terms:

The Enlightenment insisted on a fundamental dichotomy between tradition and progress. Freedom lay in our liberation from tradition - which as we all know is represented above all by the Orthodox Church, its dogma and liturgy.  But this dichotomy is essentially alien to Orthodoxy. For us, authentic progress always implies a return to tradition, and authentic tradition pushes us forwards towards the Kingdom of God. America is *the* country of the Enlightenment and I suspect that some Orthodox have bought into a way of thinking that is alien to our tradition, and so identify themselves as traditional or progressive. I refuse to accept to be placed in either box. I am just an Orthodox Christian, which means that I am both deeply conservative and utterly progressive! A wise commentator said that he feared that American Orthodox were becoming Puritans, sectarians. They were losing the good old spaciousness of Orthodoxy.

the great solvent

Capitalism is, after all, the way of life based on the principle that the most important activity is profit-making. That activity led the wealthy in the direction of continentalism. They lost nothing essential to the principle of their lives in losing their country. It is this very fact that has made capitalism the great solvent of all tradition in the modern era. When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country.

- George Grant, Lament for a Nation

A Last Stroll

23. A Last Stroll

Our tours have now taken us through nearly every part of the city and to most of its historical monuments. But, as we have perhaps learned on our strolls, Istanbul is much more than just an inhabited museum, for the old town has a beauty and fascination that go quite beyond its history and its architecture. One is apt to feel this when seated at a çayevi or meyhane in a sun-dappled square, or while taking one’s keyif in a vine-shaded café beside the Bosphorus. Little has been said of the Stamboullus themselves, but the visitor will surely have experienced innumerable examples of their grave friendliness and unfailing hospitality. Much of the pleasure of visiting or living in this city derives from the warm and relaxed company of its residents. “Hoş geldiniz!” (Welcome), they say to the stranger who arrives in their city or their home; and when one leaves one is sent off with a “Güle Güle!” (Go with Smiles), as if to lessen the inevitable sadness of departure. But how can one not feel sad when leaving this beautiful city.

But before we leave let us take one last stroll through Stamboul, to visit an enchanting place which we have somehow missed on our earlier tours. This is the venerable district of Kum Kapı, which lies at the foot of the Second and Third Hills along the Marmara shore. There are no monuments here of any historic or architectural importance, just a wonderful old Stamboul neighbourhood. The harbour of Kum Kapı, the ancient Kontoscalion, is the last of the Byzantine ports still left on the Marmara coast of the city. It is always filled with  picturesque caiques and the quayside is often carpeted with brilliantly-dyed fishing nets spread there to be dried and mended. The fish market there is one of the liveliest and most colourful in the city; the shouts and cries of the fishmongers are liable to be in any of several languages: Turkish, Greek, Armenian and even Laz, raucous and ribald in all four.

From the port a cobbled road leads down under the railway line and through the now almost vanished remnants of the ancient Porta Kontoscalion. In Turkish times this was known as Kum Kapı, the Sand Gate, whose name now survives in that of the surrounding neighbourhood. Up until the beginning of this century one could still see on the tower to the left of this gate the imperial monogram and coat of arms of Andronicus II Palaeologus (1282–1328).

A short distance along we come to the picturesque village square of Kum Kapı. (Another discovery of our strolls is that Istanbul is really a collection of villages, usually clustering around a mosque or a market square such as the one we see here.) The square has an old street fountain in its centre and is surrounded by the stalls and barrows of a fish and fruit and vegetable market, as well as several excellent fish restaurants. (Up until the early 1970s one of these restaurants was called Cansız Balık, the Dead Fish, but its one-eyed owner has apparently been persuaded that the sign frightened away customers and so he has changed its name.) Our own favourite is Yorgo's, where one can enjoy huge bowls of delicious fish soup while being serenaded by choirs of birds that nest in the vines clambering along the walls of this paradisical taverna. When we have had our fill and more we can sit by the window and watch the infinitely varied procession of local life passing through this most colourful square. At times like this we feel that the old town, for all its faults and flaws, has managed to retain some of the humane qualities of communal life and rich connections with the past that have been lost in most modern cities. In that mood we think of our own strolls through Stamboul and of the dear friends who were our companions here, many of them now departed and some gone forever. We think too of Evliya Çelebi, who has been our companion-guide for so long, and wonder what he might say if he could once again walk through the streets of his beloved town, so changed but so much the same. Knowing him as we do, we imagine that he might repeat the words of his contemporary, the historian Solak Dede, whom Evliya quotes in the Seyahatname: "'Oh, my God,’ said Solak Dede after finishing his Description of Constantinople. 'let this town flourish tell the end of time!'"

- Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely, Strolling Through Istanbul: A Guide to the City (Redhouse Press, 1973)  2nd edition

thinking faith was childish when I only meant that I’d been a child the last time I took it seriously

Q. You say you came back to religion “freely, as an adult, after 20-odd
years of atheism.” Can you describe your initial switch to atheism?
How old were you? Were there particular texts or experiences that
influenced your move away from religion?

A. Oh, it was just the usual teenage discovery that the world is a lot
larger than childhood’s ordering of it. I was in a church-going
family, and at thirteen or fourteen I started caring a lot more about
sex, music and politics than I did about God — and the box of
symbolism and stories I’d left behind seemed to shrink as I moved away
from it, until it was impossible to imagine ever fitting inside again.
In fact I made the classic mistake of thinking faith was childish when
I only meant that I’d been a child the last time I took it seriously.
I was never argued out of faith, it was much more passive than that —
and I wasn’t argued back in, either.

- Francis Spufford in New York Times interview
 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/despite-everything-francis-spufford-talks-about-unapologetic/?_r=0

There are three things I cannot take in: non-dogmatic faith, non-ecclesiological Christianity and non-ascetic Christianity. These three - the Church, dogma and asceticism  - constitute one single life for me.

- Archimandrite Sophrony, letter to David Balfour (1945)

...on a scale of joy I weigh them

Hey, what do you deal in – sorrow?
What are you selling there – despair?
I’m a buyer and a dealer,
and I’m dealing and I’m wheeling
days and nights, and even moments:
on a scale of joy I weigh them,
buy them up and then resell them,
half are black
and half in blazes,
at fairs, in markets, and on highways
who should happen in my pathway,
in whoever’s path I happen
I count Mammon!…
I’m a buyer and a dealer
and I’m dealing and I’m wheeling…
What are you selling – corpses? Rags?
Or long-since-departed dads?
Hey, a buyer’s slipped a way,
he’s dying but will be reborn.
 (1917)

– Peretz Markish (translation Amelia Glaser)

Amor, ergo sum

.... there is certainly one underlying element that is fundamental to any understanding of human personhood, and that is the quality of love. Without love we are not human. It is love that lies at the heart of the human mystery, love that expresses the Christological and Trinitarian image within us, love that enables us to act as priests of the creation and mediators. During the early part of the seventeenth century, inaugurating a fresh era in philosophy, Rene Descartes chose as his point of departure the principle Cogito, ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am." He might have done better - since the human animal is far more than simply an animal that thinks - to have taken as his starting-point the affirmation Amo, ergo sum, "I love, therefore I am"; or better still, Amor, ergo sum, "I am loved, therefore I am." In the words of Fr Dimitru Staniloae, "If I am not loved, I am unintelligible to myself." As Paul Evdokimov sates, the greatest event between God and the human person - and we may add, between one human person and another - is to love and be loved. If we can make love the starting-point and end-point in our doctrine of personhood, our Christian witness in the twenty-first century will prove altogether creative and life-giving.

- Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Orthodox Theology in the Twenty-first Century (2012)

Александр Николаевич Волков - Гранатовая чайхона

http://tashkentpamyat.ru/volkov-aleksandr-nikolaevich-khudozhnik-.html

also: http://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/en/collection/_show/image/_id/333

Volkov, Aleksandr Nikolayevich
Pomegranate coloured chaikhana (Central Asian tea room with large divans)
1924
Oil on canvas
105 х 116

The name of the painting has a metaphorical sense. The pomegranate is
one of the most widespread motifs in the art and poetry of the Orient.
A chaikhana is the traditional place of relaxation and socializing in
Central Asia, where it is possible to spend the whole day, sipping tea
and without hurrying, thoroughly discussing all the news. It is not
just the name of the canvas that is metaphorical. The artist uses the
principle of creating an Uzbek ornament, where the drawing consists of
endless combinations of one and the same form. The constant change in
rhythms of the pattern creates an impression of variety. The
pomegranate fruit is itself the source of the composition's structure.
It is depicted as a real object, as the motif of the teapot, and as a
generalizing image, since even the figures of the people are perceived
through the contours and drawing of the pomegranate seeds. The
pomegranate colour, poured over the entire canvas, completes the list
of associations, creating a capacious symbol of the Orient.

Although, let us be honest, merely conversing with people who have gotten themselves hopelessly lost in this cold world, and what's worse, in their own selves, is not enough to transform them. For transformation, you need to show them hope, show them the opening to a new life, a new world, in which meaninglessness, suffering, and cruel injustice do not triumph, but where, reigning omnipotent over everything, are faith, hope, and love. And then you need not only show them this new world from afar, pointing towards it, but you need to bring them to thus world by yourself. You need to take them by the hand to the physical presence of The Lord God Himself. Only then will they recognize Him, the One Whom they have long truly loved deep inside their hearts, their one and only Creator, Savior, and Father. Only then will life truly be transformed.

- Archimandrite Tikhon, Everyday Saints and Other Stories

There's different and then there's different, but where's the true counter-cultural?

“I think church should be odd, the language should be a little different, the music should be a little different. You should know there is something about this that is a little different from the rest of your world, that we are entering into a sacred and holy place that should always have something to say about your actual life and about our world, but it is slightly odd. I think odd and holy are sometimes the same.”
http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/274751/publisher_ID/40/

The cowl might make the monk if it were not for satire.

Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humour founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack. Attack without humour, or pure denunciation, forms one of the boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary, because invective is one of the most readable forms of literary art, just as panegyric is one of the dullest. It is an established datum of literature that we like hearing people cursed and are bored with hearing them praised, and almost any denunciation, if vigorous enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon breaks into a smile.

…

For society to exist at all there must be a delegation of prestige and influence to organized groups such as the church, the army, the professions and the government, all of which consist of individuals given more than individual power by the institutions to which they belong. If a satirist presents, say, a clergyman as a fool or hypocrite, he is, qua satirist, attacking neither a man nor a church. The former has no literary or hypothetical point, and the latter carries him outside the range of satire. He is attacking an evil man protected by his church, and such a man is a gigantic monster: monstrous because not what he should be, gigantic because protected by his position and by the prestige of good clergymen. The cowl might make the monk if it were not for satire.

—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

death a symbol of birth

....

 

I was amazed at how even infants weep as they leave the womb weeping because they come out from darkness into light and from suffocation they issue forth into this world! Likewise, death, too, is for the world a symbol of birth, and yet people weep because they are born out of this world, the mother of suffering, into the Garden of splendors. Blessed is He Who through His Cross has flung open Paradise!

 

.....

 

- from St Ephrem, On Paradise

a lifting by priestly love

Robert Farrar Capon, 1923 - September 5, 2013

A sort of benediction, from The Supper of the Lamb

I wish you well. May your table be graced with lovely women and good men. May you drink well enough to drown the envy of youth in the satisfactions of maturity. May your men wear their weight with pride, secure in the knowledge that they have at last become considerable. May they rejoice that they will never again be taken for callow, black-haired boys. And your women? Ah! Women are like cheese strudels. When first baked, they are crisp and fresh on the outside, but the filling is unsettled and indigestible; in age, the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling comes at last into its won. May you relish them indeed. May we all sit long enough for reserved to give way to ribaldry and for gallantry to grow upon us. May there be singing at our table before the night is done, and old, broad jokes to fling at the stars and tell them we are men.

We are great, my friend; we shall not be saved for trampling that greatness under foot. Ecce tu pulcher es, dilecte mi, et decorus. Lectulus noster floridus. Tigna domorum nostrarum cedrina, laquearia nostra cypressina. Ecce iste venit, saliens in montibus, transilens colles. *

Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world, but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them all by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts — for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem.

Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He makes all things new, Our Last Home will be home indeed.

*  Oh, how beautiful you are, my beloved! Oh, how beautiful you are! Your eyes are like doves! Oh, how handsome you are, my lover! Oh, how delightful you are! The lush foliage is our canopied bed; the cedars are the beams of our bedroom chamber; the pines are the rafters of our bedroom.  (Song of Songs 1: 15 - 17)

Of Dimitrios Sotir

Of Dimitrios Sotir (162-150 B.C.)

Everything he had hoped for turned out wrong!

He had seen himself doing great things,
ending the humiliation that had kept his country down
ever since the battle of Magnesia—
seen himself making Syria a powerful state again,
with her armies, her fleets,
her great fortresses, her wealth.

He had suffered in Rome, become bitter
when he sensed in the talk of friends,
young men of the great families,
that in spite of all their delicacy, their politeness
toward him, the son
of King Selefkos Philopator—
when he sensed that in spite of this there was always
a secret contempt for the Hellenizing dynasties:
their heyday was over, they weren’t fit for anything serious,
were completely unable to rule their peoples.
He had cut himself off, had become indignant, and had sworn
it would not be at all the way they thought.
Why, wasn’t he himself full of determination?
He would act, he would fight, he would set things right again.

If he could only find a way of getting to the East,
only manage to escape from Italy,
then all this strength he feels
inside him, all this energy,
he would pass on to his people.

Only to find himself in Syria!
He was so young when he left his country
he hardly remembered what it looked like.

But in his mind he had always thought of it
as something sacred that you approach reverently,
as a beautiful place unveiled, a vision
of Greek cities and Greek ports.

And now?
                        Now despair and sorrow.
They were right, the young men in Rome.
The dynasties born from the Macedonian Conquest
cannot be kept going any longer.

It doesn’t matter. He had made the effort,
fought as much as he could.
And in his bleak disillusion
there’s one thing only
that still fills him with pride: how even in failure
he shows the world his same indomitable courage.

The rest: they were dreams and wasted energy.
This Syria—it almost seems it isn’t his homeland—
this Syria is the country of Valas and Herakleidis.

- C. P. Cavafy in Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

 Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

            The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

            Because the barbarians are coming today.
            What laws can the senators make now?
            Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

            Because the barbarians are coming today
            and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
            He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
            replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

            Because the barbarians are coming today
            and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

            Because the barbarians are coming today
            and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

            Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
            And some who have just returned from the border say
            there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

  - C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip
Sherrard. 

http://www.cornucopia.net/blog/back-to-the-walls/

.... Tense times for those watching developments on the Yedikule gardens front. Much seems to depend on whether the Greek community decides to abandon 1500 odd years of history for a couple of flats. A fatal signature could be applied any day now. Meanwhile, a grain of hope must be gained from the echo-credentials of Patriarch Bartholomew (Al Gore called him the 'Green Patriarch'), who on Sunday morning, at 9.00, will be holding a special prayer for the environment. On September 8, the birthday of the Virgin Mary, the Patriarch traditionally visits the market gardens on the Land Walls to confer hs blessing on them. He will surely not wish give his blessing to a brand new block of flats, which the Fatih municipality is keen to add to its bulging portfolio (a famous mint field has been marked down by them as a car park).

Meanwhile the newly formed School of Historical Yedikule Gardens is gaining momentum. On Sunday afternoon, Aleksander Shopov, one of the key figures in the initiative to save the gardens, is presenting a workshop at the exceptionally beautiful Kilise Bostan, a garden known to date back to at least the 16th century, to which all are welcome. Shopov is a lively and engaging speaker, and his talk will be quite fascinating. The garden is very easy to find, just inside the Belgrade Gate, the second gate as you make your way along the walls from the Sea of Marmara. The workshop starts at 4pm and will last an hour. The theme, appropriately enough, is remedies for ailing plants in the 16th century. It will conclude with a symbolic planting of ruccola to mark Peace Day –  ‘roka against rockets’. On Tuesday, September 3, Emrah Altınok of Istanbul Technical University is holding a seminar at the garden entitled ‘It was full of mulberry trees here’, in which he will discuss the Küçükçekmece Water Basin, on the Thracian edge of the city, and the prevailing regime of de-agriculturalisation in Turkey.

Cornucopia, meanwhile, strongly urges its Greek readers to exert as much influence as possible on the Greek foundation that has the power to sign away the Belgrade Church's most precious heirloom.

for he has forgotten self

Seamus Heaney - St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?St Kevin and the blackbird
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

... singing is the breath of the spirit that consecrates the act of existence.

- Natalie Curtis, The Indian's Book (1907)

 You cannot turn your back on today's technological culture (and the
western philosophy which lies behind it) and ignore it, but you can
study it without feelings of inferiority, and judge or condemn it - as
is your right - not for its few good things, but on the points which
have effectively convinced you, after serious study, that this
civilization as it now stands constitutes a deadly threat to the
possibility of living an acceptable life, to that which in ancient
philosophy, we say it for one last time, was seen as man's ultimate
aim, and which it called the best life.

- Zissimos Lorenzatos, Second Notebook 1975

Three conditions for asking

There are three conditions, though, for asking a question. The first is that we genuinely seek to learn - not to doubt, ridicule, dismiss, reject. The second is that we accept limits to our understanding. Not everything is intelligible at any given moment.  This should induce in us a certain humility. Not every answer survives the test of time. Not everything that we do not understand is intelligible. Faith is not opposed to questions, but is opposed to the shallow certainty that we think at the moment is all there is. Third is that when it comes to the faith, we learn by living and understand by doing. We learn to understand music by listening to music. We learn to appreciate literature by reading literature. There is no way of understanding Shabbat without keeping Shabbat, no way of appreciating how Jewish laws of family purity enhance a marriage without observing them. Judaism, like music, is something that can only be understood from the inside, by immersing yourself in it..... every question asked in reverence is the start of a journey towards God.

- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Haggadah

there is a measure

... the civilization which is now in the process of being formed... is not only a civilization wholly other than those which have appeared up until now, but in addition is, I would say, a different world altogether. In our years, technology, whether or not that was its intention, is well on the way to destroying everywhere the systems which - as we said - were initially based on agriculture and animal husbandry, in East and West, and to abandon both them and the ancient cosmologies, philosophical visions, religions and myths, as well as the question which is of most moment for the whole world, physically and metaphysically: what for man constitutes the 'best life', as the Greeks formulated it. And it has not set out to destroy these systems alone, but every system or vision like them which has sustained smaller groups of human beings within the world, from the jungle to the steppe and from the savannah to the tundra.... If technological civilization in the course of its progress - whether this will be long or short we do not know - oversteps those difficult limits which the agricultural civilization knew as 'measure', μετρα in Greek (whether by doing physical damage or metaphysical harm), we can be sure that the Erinyes, 'the handmaidens of justice', will find the transgressor, track him down, and stop him. This law, one of the great themes of an age-old spirituality, has always functioned on all levels, for it was formulated not only in the Greek world around 500 BC by Heraclitus and the Tragedians, but before them by the Hebrews in the Psalms: 'Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over' and in the Proverbs: 'Remove not the ancient landmark, that thy fathers have set'.

- Zissimos Lorenzatos, Second Notebook 1975

Within the realm of grace

I am and I am not a universalist. I am one if you are talking about what God in Christ has done to save the world. The Lamb of God has not taken away the sins of some — of only the good, or the cooperative, or the select few who can manage to get their act together and die as perfect peaches. He has taken away the sins of the world — of every last being in it — and he has dropped them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. On the cross, he has shut up forever on the subject of guilt: “There is therefore now no condemnation. . . .” All human beings, at all times and places, are home free whether they know it or not, feel it or not, believe it or not.

"But I am not a universalist if you are talking about what people may do about accepting that happy-go-lucky gift of God’s grace. I take with utter seriousness everything that Jesus had to say about hell, including the eternal torment that such a foolish non-acceptance of his already-given acceptance must entail. All theologians who hold Scripture to be the Word of God must inevitably include in their work a tractate on hell. But I will not — because Jesus did not — locate hell outside the realm of grace. Grace is forever sovereign, even in Jesus’ parables of judgment. No one is ever kicked out at the end of those parables who wasn’t included in at the beginning.

- Robert Farrar Capon

Everything is from, belongs to, and is for Him

The closer one comes to the end of life, the stronger is his love for the dead. Is this not a premonition of meeting them? You joyfully sense not only them, but also the setting and things associated with them - objects, an old Gospel, a chair, a forest path, the smell of hay, the sound of bells. Apparently, nothing ever dies of what a person somehow needed on earth, of what somehow brought him toward God. Everything is from, belongs to, and is for Him. If, as Dionysios the Areopagite said, 'all things pre-exist in God', it is impossible for anything good - whether now, in the past, or in the future - to not exist in God. We will encounter everything - all the warmth of the earth, everything cleansed and holy; it will seize and embrace us, and we will never more be separated from it. We are not going to a Hindu Nirvana, but to the House of God, where we will use our eyes to search for, and will find everyone whom we had come to love on earth.

 

-  Sergei Fudel, At The Walls Of The Church

The uncompromising acceptance of death which is so characteristic of this culture is assisted by the fact that the people are no strangers to it, and from their earliest years they see the older generations one by one succumbing to the onset of infirmity which, it is accepted without fuss, will lead to the stones of the burial ground. Children are allowed freely into rooms where people are sitting with the dead, they see the open coffins of the Orthodox funeral, and with the rest of the congregation they go up to kiss the dead person at the end of the funeral service in the ritual of ‘the last farewell’. And the community’s physical care for the body does not end with the funeral service, for after the required number of years in the ground the bones are dug up by the relatives to be washed with water and wine, put in the church over Saturday night and Sunday morning, and then set aside in the ossuary. The exhumation is an encounter with the nature of physical existence so sharp that invariably someone is moved to remark involuntarily, ‘Look at what we are!’ or, ‘That’s what man is—a handful of little bones’, and someone else to reply, ‘We are only temporary here’. So the dissolution of the flesh is in its own terms the final reality, and this is faced with a certain robust realism which defies any easy comfort referring to the life of the soul in paradise: ‘A fat lot I’ll see when I’m under the earth!’ and ‘No-one’s come back to tell us!’ It is an acceptance of death firmly based on a repeated confrontation with the limits of physical existence — a continual following through of the cycle of life from the birth of a child onto the earth from which it came, to the return of the body to the earth when that life is finished.

But although the people accept death, because they must, they do not thereby weaken in their love of life. It is this life in which people eat, drink, and feel the light of the sun, in which they dance, laugh, and love, which is celebrated with such passion, this life in which even the simplest things occasion the most profound delight—the planting of chickpeas in the vineyard so that the worker among the vines can ‘go eating’, a drink of cold water from a mountain spring, a special find of mushrooms in the autumn which are borne back pierced through one after the other on a long withy, the use of the round leaves of the arbutus as spoons to scoop off the froth from buckets of new milk, or the rosy translucent vein of pine wood which smells wonderfully of resin and burns with a brilliant flare. It is this world of precise and personal experiences that represents life, and this world which man, because he cannot bear to leave it, leaves behind to his children who inherit it in his stead and in their turn re-people it and hold the past in their memories.

- Juliet du Boulay, The Violence of Death, in Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (2009)

 [In memory of Subdeacon Joseph Woog (August 14, 1944 - August 5, 2013)]

Ithaka - C.P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

Edwin Muir: The Transfiguration

The Transfiguration

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held for ever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.


But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—
Glad to be so—and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.

- Edwin Muir

It makes a terrible mess,
said the Cup,
But I love running over.

- James Broughton, High Kukus

Outwitting hell With human obviousness.

Cattivo Tempo

Sirocco brings the minor devils
A slamming of doors
At four in the morning
Announces they are back,
Grown insolent and fat
On cheesy literature
and corny dramas,
Nibbar, demon
of ga-ga and bêtise,
Tubervillus, demon
Of gossip and spite.

Nibbar to the writing-room
Plausibly to whisper
The nearly  fine,
The almost true;
Beware of him, poet,
Lest, reading over
Your shoulder, he find
What makes him glad,
The manner arch,
The meaning blurred,
The poem bad.

Tubervillus to the dining-room
Intently to listen,
Waiting his cue;
Beware of him, friends,
Lest the talk at his prompting
Take the wrong turning,
The unbated tongue
In mischief blurt
The half-home-truth,
The fun turn ugly,
The jokes hurt.

Do not underrate them; merely
To tear up the poem,
To shut the mouth
Will defeat neither:
To have got you alone
Self-confined to your bedroom
Manufacturing there
From lewdness or self-care
Some whinging unmanaged
Imp of your own,
That too is their triumph.

The proper riposte is to bore them;
To scurry the dull pen
Through dull correspondence,
To wag the sharp tongue
in pigeon Italian,
Asking the socialist
Barber to guess
Or the monarchist fisherman to tell
When the wind will change,
Outwitting hell
With human obviousness.

- W. H. Auden

It quite easy to be enlightened,
said the Lamp,
once you get turned on.

- from James Broughton, High Kukus

more than one way to conquer

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

- Raymond Chandler, letter in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1997)

beyond the wreckage of taboos

The Australian 'prison poet' Peter Kocan writes: The ills multiply as we unlearn / The ancient wise humility of men / Who saw, beyond the wreckage of taboos, / Despair and madness, hatred and disease / The promised payment in the promised coin. He gives voice to what many social conservatives feel: that to reject the time-honoured wisdom and experience of the traditional ordering of our culture, and a sense of humility in the face of this shared and profound experience, will ultimately land us in a bad place. They are suspicious of novelty and innovation in most areas of life - less in the technological realm perhaps, definitely more in the moral.  Believers too - although believers do not have to be social conservatives perhaps most of us are are - believers believe that things - ideas and especially actions -  have consequences, specifically that actions considered sinful lead in one unhappy direction. One might say that we believe that human life - our moral, cultural life - is like a fragile ecosystem, delicately balanced, and that we think tampering with this system can have unintended consequences, even disastrous ones.

The final thing to be concluded from the words of Jesus is that the martyr suffers with Christ as a member of the mystical body of Christ. When we say that the martyr suffers with Christ, we mean that his suffering is not described fully by simply saying that he suffers for Christ. Many soldiers have died for their king. But the martyr's death differs from the soldier's death in that the martyr does not only suffer for Jesus, rather he is led into his own death by the death of Christ. The passion and death of Christ, because it is "the Son of man," the one who became man, who suffers, extends over the entire Church as his mystical body. Therefore the one who confesses Jesus in baptism is baptized into the death of Jesus, and therefore too the one who gives thanks to God in the Eucharist for having sent us his son Jesus participates in Jesus, in that he eats the broken body of the Lord and drinks the cup with the blood of the New Covenant. Because we are baptized into the death of the Lord and are fed with the blood of the Lord, it is unavoidable for everyone who belongs to the Church to have a share in the suffering of Christ....  baptism by water and baptism by blood come from the same Lord, prefigured in the symbol, as Cyril of Jerusalem has shown, of the blood and water that flowed from the side of Jesus.

Erik Peterson, Witness to the Truth

in the moment of his confession

A third conclusion to be drawn from the words of Jesus concerns the fact that the martyr demonstrates the public claim of the Church of Jesus Christ. As it belongs to the concept of the martyr to be brought for reckoning before the public organs of the state - in councils and synagogues, before governors and kings - to be subjected to a public judicial proceeding and the penalties of the public law, so too the public confession of the name of Jesus belongs to the concept of the martyrs. But insofar as the martyr before the court. in the public realm of the state, confessed him who will return publicly in the glory of the Father in order to judge this word, both Jews and Gentiles, in this very confession the martyr leaps beyond this world's concept of "public" and demonstrates in his words the public claim of another, a coming new world. He who confesses Jesus publicly on this earth is, in the moment of his confession, confessed publicly by Jesus in heaven. The significance of the act of confession on earth is matched by Jesus' solemn confession of the name of his confessor before God and the holy angels (cf. Luke 12:8). Because it is a confession of faith and not a confession of guilt, the words that the martyr speaks before the organs of the public authority are not human words but words that the Holy Spirit of the Father in heaven speaks in the confessors of Jesus Christ. Though the world sees in the confessor's words only a confession of guilt and not a religious profession, the Church knows that in the simple confession "I am a Christian," testified before the representatives of the state, God's Holy Spirit speaks, in that the public claim of the dominion of Jesus Christ is also testified to. The Church also knows that when the martyr steps forward as a witness for Christ the heavens open, as happened at the stoning of Stephen, and the Son of Man becomes visible, he who in heaven before the angels not only solemnly confesses his confessor, but also, when he stands at the right hand of God, makes known the future tribunal, before which the judges of this world... will receive their judgement.

- Erik Peterson, Witness to the Truth

So what are we to do?

All of our striving is concerned with acquiring the love commanded of us by Christ. When this spirit of Christ-like love enters within us our souls thirst for the salvation of all people. We are appalled that by no means everyone wishes for himself what we ask for all in our prayers. Worse, we often meet with refusal, even hostility. How can people be saved when there is such perversion? We live in an age, the events of which make the tragedy of our fall more and more evident. To take my own life: for over half a century I have prayed, sometimes weeping bitter tears, sometimes in wild despair, for the peace of the whole world and the salvation, if it be possible, of all. And what do you suppose? To this hour, in my old age, I see every evil increasing in its dynamics. The close of mankind’s earthly history is scientifically thinkable and may become technically realizable tomorrow. We are nonplussed by the utterly irrational character of the happenings of our time. So what are we to do? Despair and reject the everlasting Gospel? And if we decide on rejection what else in the whole world is there to satisfy us? Positively nothing could separate us from Him, however bitter the trials that we must suffer. He has opened our eyes to infinity, and now we cannot close them and prefer the blindness of new-born puppies. “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world,” said the Lord. And now we stand before the Living Absolute - which is exactly what, and only what, we are seeking.

— Elder Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is

learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones

Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.
- Dana Gioia, Commencement address at Stanford, June 17, 2007

It is a great honor to be asked to give the Commencement address at my
alma mater. Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a
bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person
never really escapes his or her childhood.

At heart I'm still a working-class kid—half Italian, half Mexican—from
L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this
audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction
and Jackie Brown—two films that capture the ineffable charm of my
hometown.

Today is Father's Day, so I hope you will indulge me for beginning on
a personal note. I am the first person in my family ever to attend
college, and I owe my education to my father, who sacrificed nearly
everything to give his four children the best education possible.

My dad had a fairly hard life. He never spoke English until he went to
school. He barely survived a plane crash in World War II. He worked
hard, but never had much success, except with his family.

When I was about 12, my dad told me that he hoped I would go to
Stanford, a place I had never heard of. For him, Stanford represented
every success he had missed yet wanted for his children. He would be
proud of me today—no matter how dull my speech.

On the other hand, I may be fortunate that my mother isn't here. It
isn't Mother's Day, so I can be honest. I loved her dearly, but she
could be a challenge. For example, when she learned I had been
nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she
phoned and said, "Don't think I'm impressed."

I know that there was a bit of controversy when my name was announced
as the graduation speaker. A few students were especially concerned
that I lacked celebrity status. It seemed I wasn't famous enough. I
couldn't agree more. As I have often told my wife and children, "I'm
simply not famous enough."

And that—in a more general and less personal sense—is the subject I
want to address today, the fact that we live in a culture that barely
acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists.

There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a
cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players,
Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can
name.

Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights,
painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and
composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social
thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays,
and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least,
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia
O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk,
Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture
was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a
broad range of human achievement.

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak
English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed
Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with
comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like
Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert
Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis
Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert
Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general
interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average
American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of
arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our
national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or
altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has
impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one.
When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or
entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.

There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life
that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a
child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the
marketplace.

Of course, I'm not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but
it is interesting how our political process grows more like the
entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance
on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation,
democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics "show
business for ugly people."

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent
commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has
mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine
Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the
"Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the
reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is
holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David
Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new
movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market.
I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore
my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market
is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented
prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts
a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not
focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all,
culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not
belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent
view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our
culture is failing us.

There is only one social force in America potentially large and strong
enough to counterbalance this profit-driven commercialization of
cultural values, our educational system, especially public education.
Traditionally, education has been one thing that our nation has agreed
cannot be left entirely to the marketplace—but made mandatory and
freely available to everyone.

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high
school in this country had a music program with choir and band,
usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even orchestra. And every high
school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And
there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary
magazine, as well as studio art training.

I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available
to the new generation of Americans. This once visionary and democratic
system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic
school boards, county commissioners, and state officials, with the
federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an
expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today
a child's access to arts education is largely a function of his or her
parents' income.

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we
experienced this colossal cultural and political decline? There are
several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues
by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame.
Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their
ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become
wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become
almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and
political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals,
and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general
culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds
and the broader public, the results would not only transform society
but also artistic and intellectual life.

There is no better place to start this rapprochement than in arts
education. How do we explain to the larger society the benefits of
this civic investment when they have been convinced that the purpose
of arts education is mostly to produce more artists—hardly a
compelling argument to either the average taxpayer or financially
strapped school board?

We need to create a new national consensus. The purpose of arts
education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct.
The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings
capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

This is not happening now in American schools. Even if you forget the
larger catastrophe that only 70 percent of American kids now graduate
from high school, what are we to make of a public education system
whose highest goal seems to be producing minimally competent
entry-level workers?

The situation is a cultural and educational disaster, but it also has
huge and alarming economic consequences. If the United States is to
compete effectively with the rest of the world in the new global
marketplace, it is not going to succeed through cheap labor or cheap
raw materials, nor even the free flow of capital or a streamlined
industrial base. To compete successfully, this country needs continued
creativity, ingenuity, and innovation.

It is hard to see those qualities thriving in a nation whose
educational system ranks at the bottom of the developed world and has
mostly eliminated the arts from the curriculum.

I have seen firsthand the enormous transformative power of the arts—in
the lives of individuals, in communities, and even society at large.

Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of
learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging
ones. I worry about a culture that bit by bit trades off the
challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment.
And that is exactly what is happening—not just in the media, but in
our schools and civic life.

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure—humor, thrills,
emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously
terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than
challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends
a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and
transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a
play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the statistical studies that
are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is
dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of
its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic
entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members
increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual
screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these
individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go
out—to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about
three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are
vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens?
Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends
on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts.
These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of
individual awareness and social responsibility.

Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about
to enter. For the last few years you have had the privilege of being
at one of the world's greatest universities—not only studying, but
being a part of a community that takes arts and ideas seriously. Even
if you spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing
Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors
were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics,
technology, and ideas.

Distinguished graduates, your support system is about to end. And you
now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an
active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in
it so meaningfully that you change it?

That's no easy task, so don't forget what the arts provide.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the
world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods.
Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking
to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and
physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be
expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.

Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it
remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, "It is a way of
remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget." Art awakens,
enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity. You don't outgrow art.
The same work can mean something different at each stage of your life.
A good book changes as you change.

My own art is poetry, though my current daily life sometimes makes me
forget that. So let me end my remarks with a short poem appropriate to
the occasion.

[PRAISE TO THE RITUALS THAT CELEBRATE CHANGE]

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,
old robes worn for new beginnings,
solemn protocol where the mutable soul,
surrounded by ancient experience, grows
young in the imagination's white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor
but our trust in what they signify, these rites
that honor us as witnesses—whether to watch
lovers swear loyalty in a careless world
or a newborn washed with water and oil.

So praise to innocence—impulsive and evergreen—
and let the old be touched by youth's
wayward astonishment at learning something new,
and dream of a future so fitting and so just
that our desire will bring it into being.

lambs before wolves

There are certain humane types who are inclined to attribute everything that happens in the world to mere misunderstanding. If it were up to them, it would have been a mere misunderstanding whereby Christ was crucified and the apostles were killed; when the hour of martyrdom again comes to the Church, these same people are inclined to attribute it all to a misunderstanding. On the contrary: the words of Jesus now show them not a human misunderstanding but a divine necessity makes martyrs. Jesus' saying, "Is it not necessary that the Son of Man suffer these things? " applies to all the Church's sufferings. As long as the Gospel is preached in this world - and that means to the end of time - the Church will also have martyrs. If the message of Jesus had merely been a philosophical doctrine about which one had to discuss for years on end, for centuries, there would never have been martyrs. And if individual human beings died for such a philosophy of Christ - they would still not be martyrs in the Christian sense of the word. To emphasize the point one more time: not human convictions and opinions, to put it even more pointedly not even human zeal for the faith makes martyrs, but only Christ himself, who issues the summons to martyrdom and thereby makes martyrdom a special grace: this Christ, who is preached by the Church in the Gospel, offered up in the sacrifice of the altar, and whose name all those who are baptized in the name of Jesus Christ are bound in their conscience to confess. We forget so often that in this world the Gospel is preached by lambs before wolves, and that according to Jesus' own words, the message of the Kingdom of God is delivered - now as then - to an adulterous and sinful generation (Mark 8:38). How can one actually expect that the wolves won't fall on the sheep? Perhaps it is rather to be expected that the disciples of Jesus would be ashamed of him and his words before this "adulterous and sinful generation."  But he who predicted Peter's betrayal reckoned with this possibility, too. Certainly, there may be times in which martyrs are fewer and times in which they are more; but to say that at certain times there are no martyrs at all would be to deny the Church's existence at that time.

- Erik Peterson, Witness to the Truth (1937)

And a little further down they passed the Shingle Beach, and Dr. Gallagher, who knew Canadian history, said to Dean Drone that it was strange to think that Champlain had landed there with his French explorers three hundred years ago; and Dean Drone, who didn't know Canadian history, said it was stranger still to think that the hand of the Almighty had piled up the hills and rocks long before that; and Dr. Gallagher said it was wonderful how the French had found their way through such a pathless wilderness; and Dean Drone said that it was wonderful also to think that the Almighty had placed even the smallest shrub in its appointed place. Dr. Gallagher said it filled him with admiration. Dean Drone said it filled him with awe. Dr. Gallagher said he'd been full of it ever since he was a boy; and Dean Drone said so had he.

Then a little further, as the Mariposa Belle steamed on down the lake, they passed the Old Indian Portage where the great grey rocks are; and Dr. Gallagher drew Dean Drone's attention to the place where the narrow canoe track wound up from the shore to the woods, and Dean Drone said he could see it perfectly well without the glasses.

Dr. Gallagher said that it was just here that a party of five hundred French had made their way with all their baggage and accoutrements across the rocks of the divide and down to the Great Bay. And Dean Drone said that it reminded him of Xenophon leading his ten thousand Greeks over the hill passes of Armenia down to the sea. Dr. Gallagher said the he had often wished he could have seen and spoken to Champlain, and Dean Drone said how much he regretted to have never known Xenophon.

- Stephen Leacock,  from 'The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias', in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Right is right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.

 – G.K. Chesterton

There are moments when even a person wholly devoted to this world and
to the things of the flesh awakens from the slumber which possesses
him. He suddenly sees everything clearly, he sees that his previous
life on earth was nothing but a chain of errors, weaknesses,
transgressions, betrayals of God, that his actions were naturally the
seeds of future punishments and that all his virtues will not
withstand the gaze of the Eternal Judge. Beholding all this, he
condemns himself, trembling to the core of his being, and,
disillusioned with himself, through this despair turns with hope to
God. This disposition towards repentance is nothing but the “rushing
of a mighty wind” which precedes the descent of the Holy Spirit (Acts
2:2).

- Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, from a sermon at Pentecost

                     .... The Holy Ghost
does not abhor a golfer's jargon,
a lower Austrian accent, the cadences even
of my own little anglo-american
musico-literary set (although difficult,
saints may at least think in algebra
without sin): but no scared nonsense can stand Him....

                                   .... about
catastrophe or how to behave in one
I know nothing, except what everyone knows -
that if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

- W. H. Auden, from 'Whitsunday In Kirchstetten'

Sanctity is the reality of communion with the Holy Spirit. For this reason, the whole question of the Church comes down to its sanctity, its being filled with the Holy Spirit, the individuals of whom the Church consists, being filled with the Holy Spirit.   

- Sergei Fudel, At the Walls of the Church

.... The Catholic imagination saw all things, sunrise, moonlight,
chocolate ice-creams, a friend’s face, a lover’s touch, as metaphors
for the divine. It was the richness of this world and the power of the
stories, he wrote, that persuaded Catholics to stay in the church when
they couldn’t take the nitpicking rules any more. They stayed on their
own terms. And they read his books—making him a rich man, with a condo
in the John Hancock building, and giving him both on paper and online
a parish after all.

For God loved him, Andrew Greeley, loved him with all his stupidities,
his blunderings, his spitefulness, his spiritual sloppiness; his
inability ever to forgive a bad review, his failure to achieve
anything before ten o’clock in the morning, his unblinking belief that
the Bears and the Bulls (Miserere eis, Domine!) would win this season.
All of it. God—whom he often called “She”, partly to stir up trouble,
partly for the soundest theological reasons, since all opposites were
resolved in Him or Her—loved him and all created beings with the
passion of a lover, that can’t-live-without-you ecstasy. And couldn’t
stop now, or ever.

- The Economist, obituary for Andrew Greely

....

Pleased with his one good remark,
A cuckoo repeats it;
Well-satisfied,

Some occasional heavy feeder
Obliges
With a florid song.

....

- from W H Auden, 'Ascension Day, 1964'

This account of the healing of a blind man begins with the all too
familiar question: who is to blame?

The disciples ask the Lord if the responsibility for this man's
tragedy rests with the man himself or with his parents. In fact they
put it very pointedly. They ask: whose sin has resulted in this
blindness?

It is only an ancient response to affliction to see it as the fruit of
some hidden guilt!  We ourselves often think about misfortune - the
misfortune of others, our own misfortune - in just this very way.
Someone must be guilty of something. Someone somewhere must be to
blame.

In this story, our Lord contradicts this kind of thinking.  For while
the disciples ask out of the conviction that bad things are the result
of blameworthy actions, they are in fact completely wrong. The Lord
says: neither the blind man nor his parents sinned. The blindness is
not a punishment, not a consequence of someone doing something wrong
and blameworthy.

The disciples' attempt to pin blame on someone is similar in attitude
to that of the Pharisees. The Pharisees are very quick to judge, to
'connect the dots', to condemn. They pass judgement not only on the
blind man - you are a sinner through and through, since you were born
- but on the Lord Jesus Christ - we know that this man is a sinner.
These are people skilled in blame and put-downs. They are
mean-spirited.

But of them the Lord says:  your guilt remains.  They are guilty
because wilfully spiritually blind and mean-spirited.

In short, in place of affirming misfortune and tragedy as the guilty
and just consequence of sin, the Lord's offers a liberating judgement,
a miracle of healing and forgiveness, a gift of reconciliation, a new
life.

But the self- righteousness of the Pharisees, so thick with
condemnation of others, is revealed as guilt. They respond to
suffering by heaping on more suffering -  they punish, humiliate,
drive away, and make miserable with with doubt and guilt.

Their attitude is so very, very far from the example of the Lord, who
came not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved
through him. (John 3:17).

.... Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That's exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called "hope toward God."

"It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy," Weil writes, "in order to find reality through suffering." This is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love....

- Christian Wiman, "Love Bade Me Welcome (Gazing Into the Abyss)"

reciting by heart the poems you would have written

Time has taught you
how much inspiration
your vices brought you,
what imagination
can owe temptation
yielded to,
that many a fine
expressive line
would not have existed,
had you resisted:
as a poet, you
know this is true,
and though in Kirk
you sometimes pray
to feel contrite,
it doesn’t work.
Felix Culpa, you say:
perhaps you’re right.

You hope, yes,
your books will excuse you,
save you from hell;
nevertheless,
without looking sad,
without in any way
seeming to blame
(He doesn’t need to,
knowing well
what a lover of art
like yourself pays heed to),
God may reduce you
on Judgment Day
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.

- W. H. Auden, from the epilogue to his elegy to Louis MacNeice in About the House (1965), 23.

The Student (Chekov)

A reading for Holy Friday

At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows' gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression -- all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.

The gardens were called the widows' because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. A camp fire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man's coat, was standing by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a caldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had supper. There was a sound of men's voices; it was the labourers watering their horses at the river.

"Here you have winter back again," said the student, going up to the camp fire. "Good evening."

Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.

"I did not know you; God bless you," she said.

"You'll be rich."

They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience, who had been in service with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children's nurse, expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman, who had been beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf mute.

"At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself," said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, "so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!"

He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:

"No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?"

"Yes, I have," answered Vasilisa.

"If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, 'I am ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.' And our Lord answered him thus: 'I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.' After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind. . . . He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten. . ."

Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.

"They came to the high priest's," he went on; "they began to question Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: 'He was with Jesus, too' -- that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned. And all the labourers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said: 'I don't know Him.' A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus' disciples and said: 'Thou, too, art one of them,' but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned to him: 'Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?' For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the evening. . . . He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly -- bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: 'He went out and wept bitterly.' I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing. . ."

T he student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson, and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.

The labourers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though Easter would be the day after to-morrow.

Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her. . . .

He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present -- to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter's soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. "The past," he thought, "is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another." And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour -- he was only twenty-two -- and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.

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