The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Greek being, next to interest, the best road to the mitre
.... I was intended for the Church: wishing, betimes, to instruct myself
in its ceremonies, I persuaded my schoolmaster's maid-servant to assist
me towards promoting a christening. My father did not like this
premature love for the sacred rites. He took me home; and, wishing to
give my clerical ardour a different turn, prepared me for writing
sermons, by reading me a dozen a day. I grew tired of this, strange as
it may seem to you. 'Father,' said I, one morning, 'it is no use
talking, I will not go into the Church—that's positive. Give me your
blessing, and a hundred pounds, and I'll go up to London, and get a
living instead of a curacy.' My father stormed, but I got the better at
last. I talked of becoming a private tutor; swore I had heard nothing
was so easy,—the only things wanted were—pupils; and the only way to get
them—was to go to London, and let my learning be known. My poor
father!—well, he's gone, and I am glad of it now!—(the speaker's voice
faltered)—I got the better, I say, and I came to town, where I had a
relation a bookseller. Through his interest, I wrote a book of Travels
in Æthiopia, for an earl's son, who wanted to become a lion; and a
Treatise on the Greek Particle, dedicated to the prime minister, for a
dean, who wanted to become a bishop,—Greek being, next to interest, the
best road to the mitre. These two achievements were liberally paid; so I
took a lodging in a first floor, and resolved to make a bold stroke for
a wife. What do you think I did?—nay, never guess, it would be
hopeless. First, I went to the best tailor, and had my clothes sewn on
my back; secondly, I got the peerage and its genealogies by heart;
thirdly, I marched one night, with the coolest deliberation possible,
into the house of a duchess, who was giving an immense rout! The
newspapers had inspired me with this idea. I had read of the vast crowds
which a lady 'at home' sought to win to her house. I had read of
staircases impassable, and ladies carried out in a fit; and common sense
told me how impossible it was that the fair receiver should be
acquainted with the legality of every importation. I therefore resolved
to try my chance, and—entered the body of Augustus Tomlinson, as a piece
of stolen goods. Faith! the first night I was shy,—I stuck to the
staircase, and ogled an old maid of quality, whom I had heard announced
as Lady Margaret Sinclair. Doubtless, she had never been ogled before;
and she was evidently enraptured with my glances. The next night I read
of a ball at the Countess of——. My heart beat as if I were going to be
whipped; but I plucked up courage, and repaired to her ladyship's. There
I again beheld the divine Lady Margaret; and, observing that she turned
yellow, by way of a blush, when she saw me, I profited by the port I
had drunk as an encouragement to my entré, and lounging up in the most
modish way possible, I reminded her ladyship of an introduction with
which I said I had once been honoured at the Duke of Dashwell's, and
requested her hand for the next cotillon. Oh Paul! fancy my triumph! the
old damsel said with a sigh, 'She remembered me very well,' ha! ha! ha!
and I carried her off to the cotillon like another Theseus bearing away
a second Ariadne. Not to be prolix on this part of my life, I went
night after night to balls and routs, for admission to which half the
fine gentlemen in London would have given their ears. And I improved my
time so well with Lady Margaret, who was her own mistress, and had five
thousand pounds,—a devilish bad portion for some, but not to be laughed
at by me,—that I began to think when the happy day should be fixed.
Meanwhile, as Lady Margaret introduced me to some of her friends, and my
lodgings were in a good situation, I had been honoured with some real
invitations. The only two questions I ever was asked were (carelessly),
'Was I the only son?' and on my veritable answer 'Yes!' 'What,' (this
was more warmly put,)—'what was my county?'—luckily, my county was a
wide one,—Yorkshire; and any of its inhabitants whom the fair
interrogators might have questioned about me could only have answered,
'I was not in their part of it.'
- Augustus Tomlinson in Edward Bulwer Lytton's Paul Clifford
- Augustus Tomlinson in Edward Bulwer Lytton's Paul Clifford
Monday, February 25, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
.... Christ never gives up on anybody. Christ is not the enemy of the
damned. He is the finder of the damned. If they don't want to be found,
well there is no imagery of hell too strong like fire and brimstone and
all that for that kind of stupidity. But nonetheless, the point is that
you can never get away from the love that will not let you go....
- Robert Farrar Capon, The Father Who Lost Two Sons
- Robert Farrar Capon, The Father Who Lost Two Sons
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Bruce Chatwin's Journey to Mount Athos
Nicholas Shakespeare
The Telegraph 16 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
..... In 1985, following his second visit to Australia, where he had picked up a mysterious illness, Chatwin was in Greece, grinding out another draft of The Songlines, when he interrupted his work to make a pilgrimage to Mount Athos. Before leaving, he wrote breezily to the Australian novelist Murray Bail: “Athos is obviously another atavistic wonder.”
Up until that moment Chatwin had not impressed friends as religious. “There was never, not a word talked about God,” says Patrick Leigh Fermor, his host in Greece, reflecting on their conversations over five months. Elizabeth was, and remains, a practising Catholic. In preparation for their wedding, Chatwin had taken religious instruction from a Jesuit in London. “Nearly became a Catholic,” he wrote in his notebook. Then, just before they were married, Elizabeth’s parish priest in New York State gave her a leaflet explaining why she should not marry a non-Catholic. “That put Bruce off forever,” says Elizabeth. Thereafter, his religious faith became subsumed in his nomadic theory: he believed that movement made religion redundant and only when people settled did they need it.
Since his illness, there were signs of a sea change. One entry in his notebooks reads: “The search for nomads is a search for God.” Another: “Religion is a technique for arriving at the moment of death at the right time.” While recuperating with Elizabeth in Nepal, his thoughts had turned to a man’s athos “in the Greek sense of abode or dwelling place – the root of all his behaviour for good or bad, his character, everything that pertained to him.”
Of Chatwin’s friends, the diarist James Lees-Milne and the artist Derek Hill were regular visitors to the sacred, all-male enclave of Mount Athos. He importuned both to take him. Lees-Milne recorded in August 1980: “No, Bruce, I said, ‘you can't’. I was, I fear, rather bossy.” Next, Chatwin asked Hill, who had visited 15 times. Hill was a friend of the Abbot of Chilandari monastery, who could facilitate their permits. Finally, in May 1985, Hill agreed to accompany Chatwin. He told me: “I was slightly apprehensive because he was a great complainer. I thought he’d find the monks smelly or the beds hard or that the loos stank. But it was a revelation to him.”
One afternoon after his usual maté (mistaken by the cook for hashish), Chatwin walked to the monastery of Stavronikita, once painted by Edward Lear. He puffed towards it with his heavy rucksack. “The most beautiful sight of all was an iron cross on a rock by the sea,” he wrote. From where he stood – just below the monastery – the black cross appeared to be striving up against the white foam.
Then these words: “There must be a god.”
Beyond this entry in his notebook, Chatwin was uncharacteristically silent. “He didn’t talk about it, but I knew by his whole bearing that it had affected him,” said Hill. The artist had known Chatwin for 20 years and had no doubt that as Bruce gazed down on that iron cross he was ambushed by a spiritual experience that unfroze something in him. “I think it hit him like a bomb.”
Elizabeth says: “When he came back, he said to me, ‘I had no idea it could be like that.’ It wasn’t like his other voyages of discovery. It was completely internal.”
The memory of that moment returned to Chatwin a year later when he collapsed, hallucinating, in Zurich. One of his hallucinations was of a fresco of Christ on Mount Athos. Back in England, during a brief period of remission, he went several times to see Kallistos Ware, a Bishop of the Greek Orthodox faith living in Oxford, to discuss the possibility of becoming Orthodox. “What he wanted was to be received by baptism on the Holy Mountain since the Holy Mountain had played such a decisive part in his conversion,” Ware tells me.
Unknown virtually to anyone, Chatwin planned a second trip to Athos in which, as part of the baptism ceremony, he would renounce the devil, breathe and spit on him and return to Christ. “I offered to receive him myself,” Ware says, “but we were overtaken by events.” On January 19 1989, Chatwin died in Nice. At his memorial service in the Greek Orthodox Church in Bayswater, Ware relayed his wishes to a frankly astonished congregation: “Bruce was always a traveller and he died before all his journeys could be completed and his journey into Orthodoxy was one of his unfinished voyages.”
Last September, after finishing with Elizabeth the editing of Chatwin’s letters, I decided to visit Mount Athos. My aim was simple: to find that simple metal cross. But an English priest warned me on the eve of my departure: “Nobody goes to Athos by accident. Whatever you think you are going for is not the reason.”
Mount Athos is actually a finger of steep wooded land that extends 37 miles into the Aegean, culminating in a 9,842ft peak of crystalline limestone. The peninsula is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who stopped off here on her way to Cyprus and jealously forbade any subsequent woman to set foot. This rule, enshrined in AD 970 in the charter of the Grand Lavra, the first of Athos’s 20 monasteries, stated that monks “may not defile their eyes with the sight of anything female”, a stricture not relaxed even in favour of chickens. Under Greek law, a woman caught on Athos today faces an automatic prison sentence of up to 12 months.
“With no one to nag them, the monks often live to a hundred,” says a stout pilgrim whose whiskers sprout at a brigandish angle from his chin. We are on board the ferry from Ouranoupolis, the only way to reach Athos.
It’s a bright, hot day. I elect to walk to the monastery of Vatopedi where I am staying the night. The journey takes all afternoon, the white cobbled path twisting through woods of Spanish chestnut, past ruined stone fountains, over bridges spanning dried-up rivers. Thirsty and perspiring, I long for a freshwater stream to plunge in – although, from a former British diplomat, John Ure, I have gathered that Athonite monks deplore nakedness. Ure told me how, as a young pilgrim here, he once stripped off to splash himself in a stream, when a hermit emerged from a cave above him, screamed and ran off covering his eyes. Later, Ure arrived at the Grand Lavra to find the monks in a state of excitement. They had received a visit from one of the holiest hermits on the peninsula, who had broken his vow of silence to report a vision he had seen: John the Baptist baptising in his local stream – his telltale body radiating with “a shining whiteness unlike any normal mortal”. Already they were discussing the erection of a stained-glass window.
The gatekeeper at Vatopedi is Father Theano from Brisbane. Does he miss Australia? “The grace of God sustains you. You forget the past and keep an eye on the future.” He is dead to the world he has left behind, which is why he wears black. But Father Theano is far from gloomy. He brims with news of a minor miracle that occurred at Vatopedi last July. An old monk, Father Joseph, had died in huge pain with a terrible expression on his face. “We couldn’t close his mouth. We asked the Abbot if we should bind it shut, but he said, ‘No, let it hang open’ – and when we came out of the liturgy his mouth was closed in a tremendous smile. Look, I have a photo,” and from his black robe Father Theano produces a portrait of a bearded corpse with cheeks like polished doorknobs, beaming. “That is what sanctification is. It comes from within you.”
Vatopedi, founded in 972, is the peninsula’s second oldest monastery and its largest. Its luxuriant church accommodates 107 monks from 12 countries. I watch them at vespers flit across the water-veined marble floor. Their destination: half a dozen holy icons which they proceed to kiss in a way that reminds me of a scatter of swallows sipping the surface of a glassy pond; then, adjusting their hats, they sit down in squeaking stalls, faces in mid-distance reverie, beneath frescoes that Robert Byron, revered by Chatwin beyond all writers, considered the finest in the world.
Chatwin was so enthralled by the chanting of the Kyrie eleison, the words unchanged for more than a millennium, that he made a scene with some noisy Greek pilgrims, “demanding hushes at once and interrupting the service”. My solecism is to sit cross-legged. From nowhere, a black stick appears and wallops me – the wielder, a small wax-faced monk whose long white beard accounts for a quarter of him.
Chastened, I uncross my legs and go on listening. To the singers, the plainsong serves to enthrone their veneration for the Mother of God. Whatever one’s belief – and as Patrick Leigh Fermor reminds us, “no living man, after all, is in a position to declare their premises true or false” – the mysterious scallops of sound are absolutely transporting to hear live. “To anyone who has sojourned beneath the Holy Mountain,” Robert Byron wrote of Athos, “there cannot but have come an intensification of his impulse to indefinable, unanalysable emotion.”
In roughly such a state, Chatwin must have shouldered his rucksack and wandered down to Stavronikita.
Father Theano watches me leave. He arrived on Athos 20 years ago, but has never done the walk to Stavronikita. “I liked walking when I was young, but all things in moderation.”
It’s late in the morning when the castle-like building comes into sight, perched on a cliff above the Aegean. There is no swell and the sea is smoother than shell. Suddenly I spot it. A small black metal cross on a ledge of white rock, facing the bay.
It’s too dangerous to clamber down, so I stand and contemplate it. I shall not attempt to describe the sensation of trying to shed the load of a 19-year involvement, but my anticipation is shot through by an extraordinary blankness. I realise that I had been willing for some sign or emotion, however slight, to tell me that my journey was really over.
After a long interval I turn and walk up the hill to the monastery, where a surprise awaits me.
Fumblingly at the gate, I explain my mission to the monk who brings out a silver tray containing the traditional offering of loukoumi (Turkish Delight), tsipouro (ouzo) and water. He invites me inside to look at the church. I follow him though a door, into a chapel at once more intimate than at Vatopedi, small, dark, marvellous. In pride of place beneath the gold corona, staring out from the top of a base shaped like a squat grandfather clock, is a glassed-in icon of a bearded man.
The face is composed of mosaic fragments and there is a deep gash from the left brow down to the lip.
The monk explains that the icon arrived over the sea of its own volition from Byzantium.
“And the gash?”
Caused either by pirates who tossed it into the sea, or else by an oyster that a local fisherman found clamped to its forehead when he dragged it up in his net.
“Who is he?”
The monk gives me an impatient glance. “Saint Nicholas” – to whom Stavronikita is dedicated.
A name can mean nothing. But in that moment, in that space, it humbled me to learn, as I gazed around at frescoes that depicted scenes from the life of my patron saint, a name can mean more than a lot.
* Under the Sun: the Letters of Bruce Chatwin, selected and edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, will be published in September by Cape
Nicholas Shakespeare
The Telegraph 16 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
..... In 1985, following his second visit to Australia, where he had picked up a mysterious illness, Chatwin was in Greece, grinding out another draft of The Songlines, when he interrupted his work to make a pilgrimage to Mount Athos. Before leaving, he wrote breezily to the Australian novelist Murray Bail: “Athos is obviously another atavistic wonder.”
Up until that moment Chatwin had not impressed friends as religious. “There was never, not a word talked about God,” says Patrick Leigh Fermor, his host in Greece, reflecting on their conversations over five months. Elizabeth was, and remains, a practising Catholic. In preparation for their wedding, Chatwin had taken religious instruction from a Jesuit in London. “Nearly became a Catholic,” he wrote in his notebook. Then, just before they were married, Elizabeth’s parish priest in New York State gave her a leaflet explaining why she should not marry a non-Catholic. “That put Bruce off forever,” says Elizabeth. Thereafter, his religious faith became subsumed in his nomadic theory: he believed that movement made religion redundant and only when people settled did they need it.
Since his illness, there were signs of a sea change. One entry in his notebooks reads: “The search for nomads is a search for God.” Another: “Religion is a technique for arriving at the moment of death at the right time.” While recuperating with Elizabeth in Nepal, his thoughts had turned to a man’s athos “in the Greek sense of abode or dwelling place – the root of all his behaviour for good or bad, his character, everything that pertained to him.”
Of Chatwin’s friends, the diarist James Lees-Milne and the artist Derek Hill were regular visitors to the sacred, all-male enclave of Mount Athos. He importuned both to take him. Lees-Milne recorded in August 1980: “No, Bruce, I said, ‘you can't’. I was, I fear, rather bossy.” Next, Chatwin asked Hill, who had visited 15 times. Hill was a friend of the Abbot of Chilandari monastery, who could facilitate their permits. Finally, in May 1985, Hill agreed to accompany Chatwin. He told me: “I was slightly apprehensive because he was a great complainer. I thought he’d find the monks smelly or the beds hard or that the loos stank. But it was a revelation to him.”
One afternoon after his usual maté (mistaken by the cook for hashish), Chatwin walked to the monastery of Stavronikita, once painted by Edward Lear. He puffed towards it with his heavy rucksack. “The most beautiful sight of all was an iron cross on a rock by the sea,” he wrote. From where he stood – just below the monastery – the black cross appeared to be striving up against the white foam.
Then these words: “There must be a god.”
Beyond this entry in his notebook, Chatwin was uncharacteristically silent. “He didn’t talk about it, but I knew by his whole bearing that it had affected him,” said Hill. The artist had known Chatwin for 20 years and had no doubt that as Bruce gazed down on that iron cross he was ambushed by a spiritual experience that unfroze something in him. “I think it hit him like a bomb.”
Elizabeth says: “When he came back, he said to me, ‘I had no idea it could be like that.’ It wasn’t like his other voyages of discovery. It was completely internal.”
The memory of that moment returned to Chatwin a year later when he collapsed, hallucinating, in Zurich. One of his hallucinations was of a fresco of Christ on Mount Athos. Back in England, during a brief period of remission, he went several times to see Kallistos Ware, a Bishop of the Greek Orthodox faith living in Oxford, to discuss the possibility of becoming Orthodox. “What he wanted was to be received by baptism on the Holy Mountain since the Holy Mountain had played such a decisive part in his conversion,” Ware tells me.
Unknown virtually to anyone, Chatwin planned a second trip to Athos in which, as part of the baptism ceremony, he would renounce the devil, breathe and spit on him and return to Christ. “I offered to receive him myself,” Ware says, “but we were overtaken by events.” On January 19 1989, Chatwin died in Nice. At his memorial service in the Greek Orthodox Church in Bayswater, Ware relayed his wishes to a frankly astonished congregation: “Bruce was always a traveller and he died before all his journeys could be completed and his journey into Orthodoxy was one of his unfinished voyages.”
Last September, after finishing with Elizabeth the editing of Chatwin’s letters, I decided to visit Mount Athos. My aim was simple: to find that simple metal cross. But an English priest warned me on the eve of my departure: “Nobody goes to Athos by accident. Whatever you think you are going for is not the reason.”
Mount Athos is actually a finger of steep wooded land that extends 37 miles into the Aegean, culminating in a 9,842ft peak of crystalline limestone. The peninsula is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who stopped off here on her way to Cyprus and jealously forbade any subsequent woman to set foot. This rule, enshrined in AD 970 in the charter of the Grand Lavra, the first of Athos’s 20 monasteries, stated that monks “may not defile their eyes with the sight of anything female”, a stricture not relaxed even in favour of chickens. Under Greek law, a woman caught on Athos today faces an automatic prison sentence of up to 12 months.
“With no one to nag them, the monks often live to a hundred,” says a stout pilgrim whose whiskers sprout at a brigandish angle from his chin. We are on board the ferry from Ouranoupolis, the only way to reach Athos.
It’s a bright, hot day. I elect to walk to the monastery of Vatopedi where I am staying the night. The journey takes all afternoon, the white cobbled path twisting through woods of Spanish chestnut, past ruined stone fountains, over bridges spanning dried-up rivers. Thirsty and perspiring, I long for a freshwater stream to plunge in – although, from a former British diplomat, John Ure, I have gathered that Athonite monks deplore nakedness. Ure told me how, as a young pilgrim here, he once stripped off to splash himself in a stream, when a hermit emerged from a cave above him, screamed and ran off covering his eyes. Later, Ure arrived at the Grand Lavra to find the monks in a state of excitement. They had received a visit from one of the holiest hermits on the peninsula, who had broken his vow of silence to report a vision he had seen: John the Baptist baptising in his local stream – his telltale body radiating with “a shining whiteness unlike any normal mortal”. Already they were discussing the erection of a stained-glass window.
The gatekeeper at Vatopedi is Father Theano from Brisbane. Does he miss Australia? “The grace of God sustains you. You forget the past and keep an eye on the future.” He is dead to the world he has left behind, which is why he wears black. But Father Theano is far from gloomy. He brims with news of a minor miracle that occurred at Vatopedi last July. An old monk, Father Joseph, had died in huge pain with a terrible expression on his face. “We couldn’t close his mouth. We asked the Abbot if we should bind it shut, but he said, ‘No, let it hang open’ – and when we came out of the liturgy his mouth was closed in a tremendous smile. Look, I have a photo,” and from his black robe Father Theano produces a portrait of a bearded corpse with cheeks like polished doorknobs, beaming. “That is what sanctification is. It comes from within you.”
Vatopedi, founded in 972, is the peninsula’s second oldest monastery and its largest. Its luxuriant church accommodates 107 monks from 12 countries. I watch them at vespers flit across the water-veined marble floor. Their destination: half a dozen holy icons which they proceed to kiss in a way that reminds me of a scatter of swallows sipping the surface of a glassy pond; then, adjusting their hats, they sit down in squeaking stalls, faces in mid-distance reverie, beneath frescoes that Robert Byron, revered by Chatwin beyond all writers, considered the finest in the world.
Chatwin was so enthralled by the chanting of the Kyrie eleison, the words unchanged for more than a millennium, that he made a scene with some noisy Greek pilgrims, “demanding hushes at once and interrupting the service”. My solecism is to sit cross-legged. From nowhere, a black stick appears and wallops me – the wielder, a small wax-faced monk whose long white beard accounts for a quarter of him.
Chastened, I uncross my legs and go on listening. To the singers, the plainsong serves to enthrone their veneration for the Mother of God. Whatever one’s belief – and as Patrick Leigh Fermor reminds us, “no living man, after all, is in a position to declare their premises true or false” – the mysterious scallops of sound are absolutely transporting to hear live. “To anyone who has sojourned beneath the Holy Mountain,” Robert Byron wrote of Athos, “there cannot but have come an intensification of his impulse to indefinable, unanalysable emotion.”
In roughly such a state, Chatwin must have shouldered his rucksack and wandered down to Stavronikita.
Father Theano watches me leave. He arrived on Athos 20 years ago, but has never done the walk to Stavronikita. “I liked walking when I was young, but all things in moderation.”
It’s late in the morning when the castle-like building comes into sight, perched on a cliff above the Aegean. There is no swell and the sea is smoother than shell. Suddenly I spot it. A small black metal cross on a ledge of white rock, facing the bay.
It’s too dangerous to clamber down, so I stand and contemplate it. I shall not attempt to describe the sensation of trying to shed the load of a 19-year involvement, but my anticipation is shot through by an extraordinary blankness. I realise that I had been willing for some sign or emotion, however slight, to tell me that my journey was really over.
After a long interval I turn and walk up the hill to the monastery, where a surprise awaits me.
Fumblingly at the gate, I explain my mission to the monk who brings out a silver tray containing the traditional offering of loukoumi (Turkish Delight), tsipouro (ouzo) and water. He invites me inside to look at the church. I follow him though a door, into a chapel at once more intimate than at Vatopedi, small, dark, marvellous. In pride of place beneath the gold corona, staring out from the top of a base shaped like a squat grandfather clock, is a glassed-in icon of a bearded man.
The face is composed of mosaic fragments and there is a deep gash from the left brow down to the lip.
The monk explains that the icon arrived over the sea of its own volition from Byzantium.
“And the gash?”
Caused either by pirates who tossed it into the sea, or else by an oyster that a local fisherman found clamped to its forehead when he dragged it up in his net.
“Who is he?”
The monk gives me an impatient glance. “Saint Nicholas” – to whom Stavronikita is dedicated.
A name can mean nothing. But in that moment, in that space, it humbled me to learn, as I gazed around at frescoes that depicted scenes from the life of my patron saint, a name can mean more than a lot.
* Under the Sun: the Letters of Bruce Chatwin, selected and edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, will be published in September by Cape
Friday, February 22, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is
undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic
pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we
realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which
cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in
defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in
literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can
believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably,
there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to
pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he
actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in
the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the
difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to
outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we
cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making
mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than
we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most
easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When
someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know
what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept
the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the
surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is
uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves
altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children,
the proper guide to what we should read.
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
Friday, February 15, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
III. The Crossroads
Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.
So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?
All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?
- Auden, The Quest
Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.
So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?
All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?
- Auden, The Quest
Saturday, February 9, 2013
alarmed by holiness, comfortable in wickedness
... For many people in the church resemble that servant. They are afraid
to attempt a better way of life but not of resting in idleness. When
they advert to the fact that they are sinners, the prospect of grasping
the ways of holiness alarms them, but they feel no fear in remaining in
their wickedness.
- St Gregory the Great, 40 Gospel Homilies 9.3
- St Gregory the Great, 40 Gospel Homilies 9.3
Saturday, February 2, 2013
with the eyes of our own weakness
But here and now the Word which is implicit in the Beginning and in the End is become immediately explicit, and that which hitherto we could only passively fear as the incomprehensible I AM, henceforth we may actively love with comprehension that THOU ART. Wherefore, having seen Him, not in some prophetic vision of what might be, but with the eyes of our own weakness as to what actually is, we are bold to say that we have seen our salvation.
....
And because of His visitation, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore at every moment we pray that, following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace.
- W.H. Auden, Meditation of Simeon in For the Time Being
Let us all run to meet HIm
St Sophronius: 'Let us all run to meet Him.... let there be no one who does not share in this meeting, let no one refuse to carry a light. We add to this the bright shining of candles. In this way we show forth the divine splendour of the coming of Him who makes all things bright, in the abundance of whose eternal light all things are bathed in light when the evil shadows have been driven away. In this way we show the brightness of soul with which we must go to meet Christ.... we must hurry out to meet Him who is truly light, enlightened by the beams of His brightness and nearing in our hands the light which shines for all men.... that is why we go in procession with lamps in our hands and hasten, bearing lights showing both that the light has shone upon us, and signifying the glory which is to come...'
(PG 87:329 in Liturgical Practice of the Fathers (Wilmington, 1988).
(PG 87:329 in Liturgical Practice of the Fathers (Wilmington, 1988).
Friday, February 1, 2013
The Giveaway
"The Giveaway"
Saint Bridget was
A problem child.
Although a lass
Demure and mild,
And one who strove
To please her dad,
Saint Bridget drove
The family mad.
For here's the fault in Bridget lay:
She Would give everything away.
To any soul
Whose luck was out
She'd give her bowl
Of stirabout;
She'd give her shawl,
Divide her purse
With one or all.
And what was worse,
When she ran out of things to give
She'd borrow from a relative.
Her father's gold,
Her grandsire's dinner,
She'd hand to cold
and hungry sinner;
Give wine, give meat,
No matter whose;
Take from her feet
The very shoes,
And when her shoes had gone to others,
Fetch forth her sister's and her mother's.
She could not quit.
She had to share;
Gave bit by bit
The silverware,
The barnyard geese,
The parlor rug,
Her little niece-
's christening mug,
Even her bed to those in want,
And then the mattress of her aunt.
An easy touch
For poor and lowly,
She gave so much
And grew so holy
That when she died
Of years and fame,
The countryside
Put on her name,
And still the Isles of Erin fidget
With generous girls named Bride or Bridget.
Well, one must love her.
Nonetheless,
In thinking of her
Givingness,
There's no denial
She must have been
A sort of trial
Unto her kin.
The moral, too, seems rather quaint.
WHO had the patience of a saint,
From evidence presented here?
Saint Bridget? Or her near and dear?
(from The Love Letters of Phyllis Mcginley, New York, Viking Press, 1957)
Saint Bridget was
A problem child.
Although a lass
Demure and mild,
And one who strove
To please her dad,
Saint Bridget drove
The family mad.
For here's the fault in Bridget lay:
She Would give everything away.
To any soul
Whose luck was out
She'd give her bowl
Of stirabout;
She'd give her shawl,
Divide her purse
With one or all.
And what was worse,
When she ran out of things to give
She'd borrow from a relative.
Her father's gold,
Her grandsire's dinner,
She'd hand to cold
and hungry sinner;
Give wine, give meat,
No matter whose;
Take from her feet
The very shoes,
And when her shoes had gone to others,
Fetch forth her sister's and her mother's.
She could not quit.
She had to share;
Gave bit by bit
The silverware,
The barnyard geese,
The parlor rug,
Her little niece-
's christening mug,
Even her bed to those in want,
And then the mattress of her aunt.
An easy touch
For poor and lowly,
She gave so much
And grew so holy
That when she died
Of years and fame,
The countryside
Put on her name,
And still the Isles of Erin fidget
With generous girls named Bride or Bridget.
Well, one must love her.
Nonetheless,
In thinking of her
Givingness,
There's no denial
She must have been
A sort of trial
Unto her kin.
The moral, too, seems rather quaint.
WHO had the patience of a saint,
From evidence presented here?
Saint Bridget? Or her near and dear?
(from The Love Letters of Phyllis Mcginley, New York, Viking Press, 1957)
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