Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 175 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  184 Lecture 25: From Roman Empire to Holy Roman Empire • “Popes and Franks” may sound like ballpark food, but the phrase sums up precisely the two power sources that worked to create the catholic world of the Middle Ages. Political Context: 9 th to 15 th Centuries • The second stage in the medieval political context begins with Charles the Great (Charlemagne, 742–814), the son of Pepin III, who is one of the most significant figures in the political and religious history of the West. • Charles was anointed as king of the Franks by Pope Stephen III in 754 and became sole heir of the kingdom in 771. He immediately engaged in a path of conquest and consolidation under his authority. o Between 771 and 799, he conquered Lombardy, the Saxons, Bavaria, the Avars, Pannonia, and Italy. o In 778, he crossed the Pyrenees to conquer Spain, which was in the hands of the Muslims, and was defeated at the Battle of Roncevalles. Thirteen years later, in 801, he conquered Barcelona and made it the center of the Spanish March (a buffer zone separating the Muslim and Frankish kingdoms). • In view of these triumphs, Pope Leo III, on Christmas Day, 800, in the city of Rome, crowned Charlemagne as emperor. It was an extraordinary act, and its implication (that the Franks were the approved continuation of the Roman heritage) was not appreciated by the Byzantines. Eventually, the emperor of the West would claim the formal title of Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne’s military triumphs established his authority firmly over the West; he was crowned emperor in the year 800 by Pope Leo III in Rome. © Hemera/Thinkstock.

• From The Girls (2016)

  —There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before. Did I miss some sign? Some internal twinge? The bees glittering and crawling in the crate of tomatoes? An unusual lack of cars on the road? The question I remember Donna asking me in the bus—casually, almost as an afterthought. “You ever hear anything about Russell?” The question didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand that she was trying to gauge how many of the rumors I’d heard: about orgies, about frenzied acid trips and teen runaways forced to service older men. Dogs sacrificed on moonlit beaches, goat heads rotting in the sand. If I’d had friends besides Connie, I might’ve heard chatter of Russell at parties, some hushed gossip in the kitchen. Might’ve known to be wary. But I just shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything. 5Even later, even knowing the things I knew, it was impossible, that first night, to see beyond the immediate. Russell’s buckskin shirt, smelling of flesh and rot and as soft as velvet. Suzanne’s smile blooming in me like a firework, losing its colored smoke, its pretty, drifting cinders. —“Home on the range,” Donna said as we climbed down from the bus that afternoon. It took me a moment to see where I was. The bus had gone far from the highway, bumping down a dirt road that ended deep in the blond summer hills, cupped with oaks. An old wooden house: the knobby rosettes and plaster columns giving it the air of a minor castle. It was part of a grid of ad hoc existence that included, as far as I could see, a barn and a swampy-looking pool. Six fleecy llamas drowsing in a pen. Far-off figures were hacking at brush along the fence. They raised their hands in greeting, then bent again to their work. “The creek is low, but you can still swim,” Donna said. It seemed magical to me that they actually lived there together. The Day-Glo symbols crawling up the side of the barn, clothes on a line ghosting in a breeze. An orphanage for raunchy children. They had once filmed a car commercial at the ranch, Helen said in her baby voice. “A while ago, but still.” Donna nudged me. “Pretty wild out here, huh?” I said, “How’d you even find this place?” “This old guy used to live here, but he had to move out ’cause the roof was bad.” Donna shrugged. “We fixed it, kind of.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  But we are now interested in what follows, and not in this already accomplished fact. You have always been an ardent preacher of the theory that, on the cutting off of his head, life ceases in a man, he turns to ashes and goes into non-being. I have the pleasure of informing you, in the presence of my guests, though they serve as proof of quite a different theory, that your theory is both solid and clever. However, one theory is as good as another. There is also one which holds that it will be given to each according to his faith. 19 Let it come true! You go into non-being, and from the cup into which you are to be transformed, I will joyfully drink to being!’ Woland raised his sword. Straight away the flesh of the head turned dark and shrivelled, then fell off in pieces, the eyes disappeared, and soon Margarita saw on the platter a yellowish skull with emerald eyes, pearl teeth and a golden foot. The lid opened on a hinge. ‘Right this second, Messire,’ said Koroviev, noticing Woland’s questioning look, ‘he’ll appear before you. In this sepulchral silence I can hear the creaking of his patent leather shoes and the clink of the goblet he has just set down on the table, having drunk champagne for the last time in his life. Here he is.’ A solitary new guest was entering the room, heading towards Woland. Outwardly he did not differ in any way from the numerous other male guests, except for one thing: this guest was literally reeling with agitation, which could be seen even from afar. Flushed spots burned on his cheeks, and his eyes darted about in total alarm. The guest was dumbstruck, and that was perfectly natural: he was astounded by everything, and above all, of course, by Woland’s attire. However, the guest was met with the utmost kindness. ‘Ah, my dearest Baron Meigel,’ Woland, smiling affably, addressed the guest, whose eyes were popping out of his head. ‘I’m happy to commend to you,’ Woland turned to the other guests, ‘the most esteemed Baron Meigel, an employee of the Spectacles Commission, in charge of acquainting foreigners with places of interest in the capital.’ Here Margarita froze, because she recognized this Meigel. She had come across him several times in Moscow theatres and restaurants. ‘Excuse me . . .’ thought Margarita, ‘but that means—what—that he’s also dead? . . .’ But the matter straight away clarified itself. ‘The dear baron,’ Woland went on, smiling joyfully, ‘was so charming that, having learned of my arrival in Moscow, he rang me up at once, offering his services along the line of his expertise, that is, acquainting people with places of interest.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  If fleshly importuning were to fall silent, silent all shapes of earth, sea, air; silent the celestial poles; silent the soul, moving (oblivious of self) beyond the self; silent, as well, all dreams and shallow visions, all words and other signs, silent everything that passes away, all those things that say, if one listens, “We did not make ourselves, He made us who never passes away”; if, after saying this, they too were silent, though alerting us to hear the One who made them; and if He should speak, no longer through them but by Himself, for us to hear His word not as that is relayed by human tongue or angel’s voice, not in cloudy thunder or confused mediation, but if we harkened to Him we love in other things without those other things (as even now we strain upward and, in a mind’s blink, touch the ageless wisdom that outlasts all things else), and if this were made constant, all lesser vision falling away before it, so that this alone held the universe in its grip, in its enfoldment and its glad hidden depths, and eternal life resembled this moment of wisdom that we sigh to be losing—would that not be what is meant by the words “Enter the joy of your God”?—a joy that will be ours when?—only when all things rise (though not all are changed)? That sentence takes the Ciceronian period to new heights. The step-by-step shooshing of the universe mounts by anaphora: “Silent . . . silent . . .” The glimpse of “ageless wisdom” comes in a fleeting way, as a grammatical aside. Then the sentence falls off, fragmenting as the vision is dispersed, ending (in a dazed way) in questions. Scholars have debated how far this “vision” fits Plotinian patterns for the ascent of the mind. What is interesting from a biographer’s point of view is that the experience was communal, not a private ascent, and Monnica had not undergone the intellectual preparation of the liberal arts and abstract sciences that Augustine, in one of his moods, considered necessary for such an exercise. His experience was now at odds with his theory. The theory would have to be modified, if not abandoned. This is the true measure of Monnica’s delayed impact on his thinking. In the overall scheme of The Testimony, the prayer at Ostia shows how the bond of company (socialis necessitudo) can lift one up to heaven—in contrast with the way it dragged Adam down when he joined Eve’s motion away from God.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  199 monasteries. A legend told of Boniface is that he tested the power of a pagan god by felling an oak dedicated to the deity; when a wind blew down the tree as he began cutting and no punishment came to the missionary, the crowd viewing the scene converted to the Christian God. o Boniface worked under the protection of Charles Martel, and in 732, Gregory III appointed him archbishop of all Germany. Martel divided Germany into four dioceses and made Boniface metropolitan (primate) over Germany east of the Rhine (Mainz). o At the Concilium Germanicum in 743, Boniface worked for the reform of the clergy—a constant preoccupation in an age when lack of learning and training often led to less-than- adequate ministers. Boniface then went to work again in Frisia, where he was killed in 754. His life was written by Willibald shortly after his death. Scholar Monks • The monasteries founded by such missionaries as Willibrord and Boniface served as centers of worship, as well as of civilization. Two monk-scholars of the era give evidence for impressive levels of knowledge and scholarship, illustrating the role of monasteries as centers of cultural diffusion. The Venerable Bede, a classic scholar-monk, wrote biblical commentaries; texts on computation, grammar, and natural science; lives of saints; and the monumental Ecclesiastical History of the English People. © Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  **Missing Saturn.** People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist’s daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals. Even now, I can see in my mind’s rather peculiar eye an extraordinary shattering and shifting of light; inconstant but ravishing colors […] I remember singing “Fly Me to the Moons” as I swept past those of Saturn, and thinking myself terribly funny. I saw and experienced that which had been only dreams, or fitful fragments of aspiration.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And, finally, Woland also flew in his true guise. Margarita could not have said what his horse’s bridle was made of, but thought it might be chains of moonlight, and the horse itself was a mass of darkness, and the horse’s mane a storm cloud, and the rider’s spurs the white flecks of stars. Thus they flew in silence for a long time, until the place itself began to change below them. The melancholy forests drowned in earthly darkness and drew with them the dim blades of the rivers. Boulders appeared and began to gleam below, with black gaps between them where the moonlight did not penetrate. Woland reined in his horse on a stony, joyless, flat summit, and the riders then proceeded at a walk, listening to the crunch of flint and stone under the horses’ shoes. Moonlight flooded the platform greenly and brightly, and soon Margarita made out an armchair in this deserted place and in it the white figure of a seated man. Possibly the seated man was deaf, or else too sunk in his own thoughts. He did not hear the stony earth shudder under the horses’ weight, and the riders approached him without disturbing him. The moon helped Margarita well, it shone better than the best electric lantern, and Margarita saw that the seated man, whose eyes seemed blind, rubbed his hands fitfully, and peered with those same unseeing eyes at the disc of the moon. Now Margarita saw that beside the heavy stone chair, on which sparks glittered in the moonlight, lay a dark, huge, sharp-eared dog, and, like its master, it gazed anxiously at the moon. Pieces of a broken jug were scattered by the seated man’s feet and an undrying black-red puddle spread there. The riders stopped their horses. ‘Your novel has been read,’ Woland began, turning to the master, ‘and the only thing said about it was that, unfortunately, it is not finished. So, then, I wanted to show you your hero. For about two thousand years he has been sitting on this platform and sleeping, but when the full moon comes, as you see, he suffers from insomnia. It torments not only him, but also his faithful guardian, the dog.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Helen realized she’d left her knife at home. Suzanne shouted at her, according to trial documents, but the group dismissed plans to go back for it. They were already coasting, in thrall to a bigger momentum. —They parked the Ford along the road, not even bothering to hide it. As they made their way to Mitch’s gate, their minds seemed to hover and settle on the same movements, like a single organism. I can imagine that view. Mitch’s house, as seen from the gravel drive. The calm fill of the bay, the prow of the living room. It was familiar to them. The month they’d spent living with Mitch before I’d known them, running up delivery bills and catching molluscum from dank towels. But still. I think that night they might have been newly struck by the house, faceted and bright as rock candy. Its inhabitants already doomed, so doomed the group could feel an almost preemptive sorrow for them. For how completely helpless they were to larger movements, their lives already redundant, like a tape recorded over with static. —They’d expected to find Mitch. Everyone knows this part: how Mitch had been called to Los Angeles to work on a track he’d made for Stone Gods, the movie that was never released. He’d taken the last TWA flight of the night out of SFO, landing in Burbank, leaving his house in the hands of Scotty, who had cut the grass that morning but not yet cleaned the pool. Mitch’s old girlfriend calling in a favor, asking if she and Christopher could crash for two nights, just two nights. Suzanne and the others had been surprised to find strangers in the house. No one they had ever met. And that could have been the abortive moment, a glance of agreement passing between them. The return to the car, their deflated silence. But they didn’t turn back. They did what Russell had told them to do. Make a scene. Do something everyone would hear about. —The people in the main house were preparing to go to bed, Linda and her little boy. She’d made him spaghetti for dinner and had snuck a forkful from his bowl but not bothered to make anything for herself. They were sleeping in the guest bedroom—her quilted weekend bag leaking clothes on the floor. Christopher’s grimy stuffed lizard with its jet button eyes. Scotty had invited his girlfriend, Gwen Sutherland, to listen to records and use Mitch’s hot tub while Mitch was away. She was twenty-three, a recent graduate of the College of Marin, and she’d met Scotty at a barbecue in Ross. Not particularly attractive, but Gwen was kind and friendly, the kind of girl that boys are forever asking to sew on buttons or trim their hair. They had both had a few beers. Scotty smoked some weed, though Gwen had not.

• From The Girls (2016)

  A farm boy who’d defected from Travis AFB when he’d discovered it was the same bullshit scene as his father’s house. He’d worked in Big Sur for a while, then drifted north. Gotten caught up in a group fermenting around the borders of the Haight, the hobby Satanists who wore more jewelry than a teenage girl. Scarab lockets and platinum daggers, red candles and organ music. Then Guy had come across Russell playing guitar in the park one day. Russell in the frontier buckskins that maybe reminded Guy of the adventure books of his youth, serials starring men who scraped caribou hides and forded frigid Alaskan rivers. Guy had been with Russell ever since. Guy was the one who would drive the girls later that summer. Tighten his own belt around the caretaker’s wrists, that big silver buckle notching into the tender skin and leaving behind an oddly shaped stamp, like a brand. But that first day he was just a boy, giving off a dirty fritz like a warlock, and I glanced back at him with a thrilled shiver. Suzanne stopped a girl walking by: “Tell Roos to get Nico back to the nursery. He shouldn’t be out here.” The girl nodded. Suzanne glanced at me as we kept going, reading my confusion. “Russell doesn’t want us to get too attached to the kids. Especially if they’re ours.” She let out a grim laugh. “They aren’t our property, you know? We don’t get to fuck them up just because we want something to cuddle.” It took me a moment to process this idea that parents didn’t have the right. It suddenly seemed blaringly true. My mother didn’t own me just because she had given birth to me. Sending me to boarding school because the spirit moved her. Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn’t be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you’d hoped. —The kitchen was much darker than outside, and I blinked in the sudden wash. All the rooms smelled pungent and earthy, some mix of high-volume cooking and bodies. The walls were mostly bare, except for streaks of a daisy-patterned wallpaper and another funny heart painted there, too, like on the bus. The window sashes were crumbling, T-shirts tacked up instead of curtains. Somewhere nearby, a radio was on. There were ten or so girls in the kitchen, focused on their cooking tasks, and everyone was healthy looking, their arms slim and tan, their hair thick. Bare feet gripping the rough boards of the floor. They cackled and snipped at one another, pinching exposed flesh and swatting with spoons. Everything seemed sticky and a little rotten. As soon as I put the bag of potatoes on the counter, a girl started picking through them. “Green potatoes are poisonous,” she said. Sucking her teeth, sifting through the sack.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Inside the museum, Austerlitz continued, I did not meet another living soul, either in the well-proportioned stairway or in the three exhibition rooms on the first floor. All the more uncanny in the ambient silence, which was merely emphasized by the creaking of the floorboards beneath my feet, seemed the exhibits assembled in the glass-fronted cases reaching almost to the ceiling, and dating without exception from the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century. There were plaster casts of the jaws of many different kinds of ruminants and rodents; kidney stones which had been found in circus camels, as large and spherically perfect as skittle balls; the cross section of a piglet only a few hours old, its organs rendered transparent by a process of chemical diaphanization and now floating in the liquid around it like a deep-sea fish which would never see the light of day; the pale blue fetus of a foal, where the quicksilver injected as a contrast medium into the network of veins beneath its thin skin had formed patterns like frost flowers as it leached out; the skulls and skeletons of many different creatures; whole digestive systems in formaldehyde; pathologically malformed organs, shrunken hearts and bloated livers; trees of bronchial tubes, some of them three feet high, their petrified and rust-colored branches looking like coral growths; and in the teratological department there were monstrosities of every imaginable and unimaginable kind, Janus-faced and two-headed calves, Cyclopean beasts with outsized foreheads, a human infant born in Maisons-Alfort on the day when the Emperor was exiled to the island of St. Helena, its legs fused together so that it resembled a mermaid, a ten-legged sheep, and truly horrific creatures consisting of litthke more than a scrap of skin, a crooked wing, and half a claw. Far the most awesome of all, however, so said Austerlitz, was the exhibit in a glass case at the back of the last cabinet of the museum, the life-sized figure of a horseman, very skillfully flayed in the post- Revolutionary period by the anatomist and dissector Honoré Fragonard, who was then at the height of his fame, so that every strand in the tensed muscles of the rider and his mount, which was racing forward with a panic-stricken expression, was Clearly visible in the colors of congealed blood, together with the blue of the veins and the ocher yellow of the sinews and ligaments. Fragonard, who was descended from the famous family of Provencal perfumiers, said Austerlitz, had apparently dissected over three thousand bodies and parts of bodies in the course of his career, and consequently he, an agnostic who did not believe in the immortality of the soul, must have spent all the hours of his days and nights intent upon death, surrounded by the sweet smell of decay, and, as I imagine, moved by a desire to secure for the frail body at least some semblance

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  A WORD FROM HIS INMOST BEING goes direct to our most guarded self: “My heart’s fellow will love in me what You [Lord] tell us is lovable, deplore in me what You tell us is deplorable” (T 10.5). Yet this man with such modern access to us was considered peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture. He did not even speak Greek, the language of the international intelligentsia. His contemporary critic Julian of Eclanum called him a guru of the outback, “what passes for a philosopher with Africans” (U 5.11). Stranded in ancient Numidia (modern Algeria), the country of his birth, Augustine was for thirty-five years the bishop of a modest port city, Hippo Regius, where he could only be (in Julian’s sophisticated sneer) “the donkey protector” to fellow Africans (U 4.56). We should not make too much of Augustine’s church office—there were almost seven hundred bishops in Africa alone, where one was consecrated on the average every week (VDM 11, 225). Augustine went into the later iconography of his church wearing all the episcopal finery of the late Middle Ages—miter, crozier, gloves, ring, and so on. But he dressed in the gray clothes of a monk, and celebrated the rites of his church in that everyday garb. His influence came not from his ecclestical rank, but from his writings, which were staggering in quantity—his own incomplete review of his books numbered ninety-three. There are, besides, almost three hundred of his letters and over four hundred sermons (out of the estimated eight thousand that he preached). What he said of the learned pagan Varro was even truer of him: “Though he read so much that we are amazed he found time to write, he wrote so much that few, we believe, can have read it all” (CG 6.2). Augustine dictated to relays of stenographers, often late into the night (L 139.3, 224.2). He employed teams of copyists. His sermons, several a week, were taken down by his own or others’ shorthand writers. In some seasons, he preached daily. His letters were sent off in many copies. He paced about as he dictated, a reflection of the mental restlessness and energy conveyed in the very rhythms of his prose (VDM 414). He was a tireless seeker, never satisfied. Like Aeneas, the hero of his favorite poem, he sailed toward ever-receding shores (Aeneid 6.61). Impatient with all preceding formulations, even his own, he was drawn to and baffled by mystery: “Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God.” (S 117.5) We seek one mystery, God, with another mystery, ourselves. We are mysterious to ourselves because God’s mystery is in us: “Our mind cannot be understood, even by itself, because it is made in God’s image” (S 398.2). Augustine’s description of the human urgency toward truth was an unwitting exercise in self-portraiture:

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  62 Lecture 9: Extreme Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries o In the infancy gospel of James, the perpetual virginity of Mary is ensured by the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus. When Jesus is born, time stops and all creation grows silent; he appears first as a shining light and only slowly takes the form of an infant. o In the infancy gospel of Thomas, the child Jesus is the source of both cure and blessing to his family and neighbors, so overwhelming are his acts; Jesus is portrayed as captive to his own extraordinary powers, only slowly learning how to turn them to good. • The Acts of Paul, Andrew, John, Peter, and Thomas (all composed in the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries) continue the literary tradition of the canonical Acts of the Apostles but focus almost exclusively on the apostles as wonder-workers who triumph over all, even in their death as martyrs. • Although naive in some ways—they are filled with animal tales, nature wonders, and strange deeds—these narratives convey a sense of Christianity as a movement that exercises supernatural power and poses a radical threat to conventional mores. o The order of the household is threatened by a version of the “good news” that demands of its hearers—especially women— virginity and singleness. The apostles are itinerant wonder- workers who find their way into households and “seduce” wives by their preaching, convincing them to commit to a celibate life; the elevation of virgins and widows means women are not defined by biological or domestic roles. o Women in these accounts are definitely not “submissive to their husbands” but either leave them or assume leadership roles in the assembly; most impressively, Paul’s follower Thecla cuts her long hair, dresses as a man, baptizes herself, and undertakes a career in preaching.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Then somewhere, already ceasing to comprehend anything, she saw dark cellars where some sort of lamps burned, where girls served meat sizzling on red-hot coals, where her health was drunk from big mugs. Then she saw polar bears playing concertinas and dancing the Kamarinsky 16 on a platform. A salamander-conjurer 17 who did not burn in the fireplace . . . And for the second time her strength began to ebb. ‘One last appearance,’ Koroviev whispered to her anxiously, ‘and then we’re free!’ Accompanied by Koroviev, she again found herself in the ballroom, but now there was no dancing in it, and the guests in a numberless throng pressed back between the columns, leaving the middle of the room open. Margarita did not remember who helped her to get up on the dais that appeared in the middle of this open space in the room. When she was up on it, to her own amazement, she heard a clock strike midnight somewhere, though by her reckoning it was long past. At the last stroke of the clock, which came from no one knew where, silence fell on the crowd of guests. Then Margarita saw Woland again. He walked in surrounded by Abaddon, Azazello and several others who resembled Abaddon—dark-haired and young. Now Margarita saw that opposite her dais another had been prepared for Woland. But he did not make use of it. What struck Margarita was that Woland came out for this last great appearance at the ball looking just the same as he had looked in the bedroom. The same dirty, patched shirt 18 hung on his shoulders, his feet were in worn-out bedroom slippers. Woland had a sword, but he used this bare sword as a cane, leaning on it. Limping, Woland stopped at his dais, and immediately Azazello was before him with a platter in his hands, and on this platter Margarita saw a man’s severed head with the front teeth knocked out. Total silence continued to reign, broken only once by the far-off sound, inexplicable under the circumstances, of a doorbell, coming as if from the front hall. ‘Mikhail Alexandrovich,’ Woland addressed the head in a low voice, and then the slain man’s eyelids rose, and on the dead face Margarita saw, with a shudder, living eyes filled with thought and suffering. ‘Everything came to pass, did it not?’ Woland went on, looking into the head’s eyes. ‘The head was cut off by a woman, the meeting did not take place, and I am living in your apartment. That is a fact. And fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  his spirits rose, just as they did at home on Sunday afternoons; he sometimes even hummed to himself, and cracked the whip around the pony’s ears now and then. And these light and dark sides of the minister Elias were reflected in the mountainous landscape around us. I remember, said Austerlitz, how we were once driving through the endless Tanat valley, with nothing on the hillsides to right and left of us but crooked bushes, ferns, and rusty-hued vegetation, and then, for the last part of the way up to the col, only gray rock and drifting mist, so that I was afraid we were coming to the very ends of the earth. But on another day, when we had just reached the Pennant pass I saw a gap open up in the banked clouds towering high in the west, and the rays of the sun cast a narrow beam of light down to the valley floor lying at a dizzying depth below us. Where there had been nothing a moment ago but fathomless gloom, there now shone a little village with a few orchards, meadows, and fields, surrounded by black shadows but sparkling green like the Islands of the Blest, and as we walked down the road from the pass beside the pony and trap everything grew lighter and lighter, the mountainsides emerged from the darkness shining brightly, the fine grasses bending in the wind shimmered with light, the silvery willows gleamed down on the banks of the stream; before long we had descended from the barren heights and found ourselves among trees and bushes again, beneath the softly rustling oaks and maples, and rowans already laden with red berries. Once, I think when I was nine, I went away with Elias to a place in South Wales where the flanks of the mountains had been ripped open on both sides of the road, and the woods mauled and cut down. I don’t remember the name of the village we reached at nightfall. It was surrounded by pithead stocks of coal spilling down into the alleys here and there. We had been given a room in the house of one of the church elders, from which there was a view of a winding tower with a gigantic wheel turning now this way and now that in the gathering dusk, and further down the valley tall flames and showers of sparks shot high into the sky from the smelting furnaces of an iron and steel works, at regular intervals of about three or four minutes. When I was in bed Elias sat on a stool by the window, looking out in silence for a long time. I think that it was the sight of the valley first illuminated by the firelight, then sinking back into darkness, which inspired him to preach on a text from Revelation next morning, delivering a sermon on the wrath of the Lord, on the war and the devastation of the dwellings of men, a diatribe in which, so the elder told him when we left, he had surpassed himself. If the congregation had been almost petrified by terror during the sermon, I myself could hardly have had the divine power invoked by Elias more permanently impressed on my mind than by the fact that a bomb had dropped in broad daylight that afternoon in the little town at the end of the

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Unlike Uncle Evelyn, said Austerlitz after a while, taking from his jacket pocket a kind of folder containing several postcard-sized photographs, Great-Uncle Alphonso, who was about ten years older and continued the line of the naturalist Fitzpatricks, looked positively youthful. Always even-tempered, he spent most of his time out of doors, going on long expeditions even in the worst of weather, or when it was fine sitting on a camp stool somewhere near the house in his white smock, a straw hat on his head, painting watercolors. When he was thus engaged he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes. The faint images that Alphonso transferred onto paper, said Austerlitz, were barely sketches of pictures—here a rocky slope, there a small bosky thicket or a cumulus cloud— fragments, almost without color, fixed with a tint made of a few drops of water and a grain of malachite green or ash-blue. I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea. In his childhood, he said, he used to walk beside the chalk cliffs of Devon and Cornwall, where hollows and basins have been carved and cut out of the rock by the breakers over millions of years, admiring the endless diversity of the semi-sentient marvels oscillating between the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, the zooids and corallines, sea anemones, sea fans and sea feathers, the anthozoans and crustaceans over which the tide washed twice a day while long fronds of seaweed swayed around them, and which then, as the water went out, revealed their wonderfully iridescent life in the rock pools exposed once more to the light and the air, showing all the colors of the rainbow —emerald, scarlet and rosy red, sulfur yellow, velvety black. At that time the whole southwest coast of the island was surrounded by a colorful fringe ebbing and flowing with the tides, and now, said Uncle

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  on the ground to fall asleep, resting in a curious position on his side with his wings outspread, and finally disappeared into the top hat again. After the conjuror’s exit the lights slowly dimmed, and when our eyes were used to the darkness we saw a quantity of stars traced in luminous paint inside the top of the tent, giving the impression that we were really out of doors. We were still looking up with a certain sense of awe at this artificial firmament which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, was almost close enough for us to touch its lower rim, when the whole circus troupe came in one by one, the conjuror and his wife, who was very beautiful, with their equally beautiful, black-haired children, the last of them carrying a lantern and accompanied by a snow-white goose. Each of these artistes had a musical instrument. If I remember correctly, said Austerlitz, they played a transverse flute, a rather battered tuba, a drum, a bandoneon, and a fiddle, and they all wore Oriental clothing with long, fur-edged cloaks, while the men had pale green turbans on their heads. At a signal between themselves they began playing in a restrained yet penetrating manner which, although or perhaps because I have been left almost untouched by any kind of music all my life, affected me profoundly from the very first bar. I cannot say what it was that the five circus performers played that Saturday afternoon in the circus tent beyond the gare d’Austerlitz for their tiny audience, drawn from heaven knows where, said Austerlitz, but it seemed to me, he added, as if the music came from somewhere very distant, from the East, I thought, from the Caucasus or Turkey. Nor can I say what was suggested to my mind by the sounds produced by the players, none of whom, I am sure, could read musical notation. Sometimes I seemed to hear a long-forgotten Welsh hymn in their melodies, or then again, very softly yet making the senses swirl, the revolutions of a waltz, a landler theme, or the slow sound of a funeral march, which put me in mind of the curiously halting progress of a uniformed guard of honor escorting a body to its last resting place, and of how, in their ceremonious manner, they pause every time before taking the next step, with one foot suspended an inch above the ground for the briefest of moments. I still do not understand, said Austerlitz, what was happening within me as I listened to this extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music conjured out of thin air, so to speak, by the circus performers with their slightly out-of-tune instruments, nor could I have said at the time whether my heart was contracting in pain or expanding with happiness for the first time in my life. Why certain tonal colors, subtleties of key, and syncopations can take such a hold on the mind is something that an entirely unmusical person like myself can never understand, said Austerlitz, but today, looking back, it seems to me as if the mystery which touched me at the time was summed up in the image of the snow-white goose standing motionless and

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Bonaventura differs from Thomas in giving proof that the world is not eternal. The mark of a foot, which represents created matter, is not of the same duration as the foot itself, for the mark was made at some time by the foot. And, following Plato as against Aristotle, he declared that matter not only in its present form but also in its essence is not eternal. The world is not thinkable without man, for it has all the marks of a habitation fitted up for a human being. Christ would not have become incarnate without sin. In the doctrine of the immaculate conception, Bonaventura agreed with Thomas in denying to Mary freedom from original sin and disagreed with his fellow Franciscan, Duns Scotus, whose teaching has become dogma in the Roman Catholic communion. It is as a mystic and as the author of the life of St. Francis, rather than as a dogmatician that Bonaventura has a characteristic place among the Schoolmen.1562 He evidently drew from the mystics of St. Victor, used their terminology1563 and did not advance beyond them. His mysticism has its finest statement in his Journey of the Mind to God.1564 Upon this pilgrimage of the soul to the highest divine mysteries, no one can enter without grace from above. Nor can the journey be continued without earnest prayer, pure meditation, and a holy life. Devout prayer is the mother and beginning of the upward movement towards God. Contemplation leads us first outside ourselves to behold the works of God in the visible world. It then brings us back to consider God’s image in ourselves arid at last we rise above ourselves to behold the divine being as He is in Himself.1565 Each of these activities is twofold, so that there are six steps in the progress of the soul. In the final step, the soul contemplates the Trinity and God’s absolute goodness. Beyond these six steps is the state of rapture, the ecstatic vision, as the Sabbath day of rest followed the six days of labor. The doorway to this mystical life is Christ. The experience, which the soul shall have hereafter, is an ocean of beatific ecstasy. No one can know it but the one who receives it; he only receive it who desires it; be only desire it who is inflamed by the baptizing fire of the Holy Spirit. It is a grace not a doctrine, a desire not a concept, a habit of prayer not a studious task, a bride not a teacher. It is of God not of man, a flame of ardent love, transferring us into the presence and being of God.1566 As in the case of Bernard, so also in the case of Bonaventura, this mystical tendency found expression in devout hymns. § 110. Duns Scotus.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  man, and of more interest and value than all the ancient and modern classics combined. If ever God spoke and still speaks to man, it is in this book. § 76. Character of the New Testament. In these inspired writings we have, not indeed an equivalent, but a reliable substitute for the personal presence and the oral instruction of Christ and his apostles. The written word differs from the spoken only in form; the substance is the same, and has therefore the same authority and quickening power for us as it had for those who heard it first. Although these books were called forth apparently by special and accidental occasions, and were primarily addressed to particular circles of readers and adapted to peculiar circumstances, yet, as they present the eternal and unchangeable truth in living forms, they suit all circumstances and conditions. Tracts for the times, they are tracts for all times; intended for Jews and Greeks of the first century, they have the same interest for Englishmen and Americans of the nineteenth century. They are to this day not only the sole reliable and pure fountain of primitive Christianity, but also the infallible rule of Christian faith and practice. From this fountain the church has drunk the water of life for more than fifty generations, and will drink it till the end of time. In this rule she has a perpetual corrective for an her faults, and a protective against all error. Theological systems come and go, and draw from that treasury their larger or smaller additions to the stock of our knowledge of the truth; but they can never equal that infallible word of God, which abideth forever. "Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O God, art more than they." The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times. It has a Greek body, a Hebrew soul, and a Christian spirit which rules both. The language is the Hellenistic idiom; that is, the Macedonian Greek as spoken by the Jews of the dispersion in the time of Christ; uniting, in a regenerated Christian form, the two great antagonistic nationalities and religions of the ancient world. The most beautiful language of heathendom and the venerable language of the Hebrews are here combined, and baptized with the spirit of Christianity, and made the picture of silver for the golden apple of the eternal truth of the gospel. The style of the Bible in general is singularly adapted to men of every class and grade of culture, affording the child the simple nourishment for its religious wants, and the profoundest thinker inexhaustible matter of study. The Bible is not simply a popular book, but a book of all nations, and for all societies, classes, and conditions of men.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The exalted Logos-Messiah has the keys of death and Hades.843 He is a sharer in the universal government of God; he is the mediatorial ruler of the world, "the Prince of the kings of the earth" "King of kings and Lord of lords."844 The apocalyptic seer likewise brings in the idea of life in its highest sense as a reward of faith in Christ to those who overcome and are faithful unto death, Christ will give "a crown of life," and a seat on his throne. He "shall guide them unto fountains of waters of life; and God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes."845 IV. The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology). This is most fully set forth in the farewell discourser, of our Lord, which are reported by John exclusively. The Spirit whom Christ promised to send after his return to the Father, is called the Paraclete, i.e., the Advocate or Counsellor, Helper, who pleads the cause of the believers, directs, supports, and comforts them.846 He is "another Advocate" (a[llo" paravklhto"), Christ himself being the first Advocate who intercedes for believers at the throne of the Father, as their eternal High priest. The Spirit proceeds (eternally) from the Father, and was sent by the Father and the Son on the day of Pentecost.847 He reveals Christ to the heart and glorifies him (ejme; doxavsei¼_ he bear" witnes" to him »marturhvsei peri; ejmou'¼_ he call" to remembrance and explain" hi" teaching »uJma'" didavxei pavnta kai; uJpomnhvsei uJma'" pavnta a{ ei|pon uJmi'n ejgwv); he leads the disciples into the whole truth (oJdhghvsei uJma'" eij" th;n ajlhvqeian pa'san¼_ he take" out of the fulnes" of Christ and show" it to them »ejk tou' ejmou' lambavnei kai; ajnaggelei' uJmi'n ¼. The Holy Spirit i" the Mediator and Intercessor between Christ and the believer, a" Christ i" the Mediator between God and the world. He i" the Spirit of truth and of holines". He convict" »ejlevgcei¼ the world, that i" all men who come under hi" influence, in respect of sin »peri; aJmartiva"¼, of righteousnes" »dikaiosuvnh"¼, and of judgment »krivsew"¼_ and thi" conviction will result either in the conversion, or in the impenitence of the sinner. The operation of the Spirit accompanie" the preaching of the word, and i" alway" internal in the sphere of the heart and conscience. He i" one of the three witnesse" and give" efficacy to the other two witnesse" of Christ on earth, the baptism »to; u}dwr), and the atoning death (to; ai|ma) of Christ.848 V. Christian Life. It begins with a new birth from above or from the Holy Spirit. Believers are children of God who are "born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."849 It is a "new" birth compared with the old, a birth "from God," as compared with that from man, a birth from the Holy "Spirit," in distinction from carnal birth, a birth "from heaven," as opposed to earthly birth.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the loose. In America she’d starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male. I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine—the martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones and collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh on. It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in an art gallery on the Rue de Sèze, surrounded by the men and women of Matisse, that I am drawn back again to the proper precincts of the human world. On the threshold of that big hall whose walls are now ablaze, I pause a moment to recover from the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the world is rent asunder and the color of life splashes forth in song and poem. I find myself in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost. I have the sensation of being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from whatever place, position or attitude I take my stance. Lost as when once I sank into the quick of a budding grove and seated in the dining room of that enormous world of Balbec, I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those interior stills which manifest their presence through the exorcism of sight and touch. Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art. Only those who can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is there in the heart. Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle of light caroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood, flecking the tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold outside the windows. On the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the surf, fusing into the mysterious quick and prism of a protoplasmic realm, uniting her shadow to the dream and harbinger of death. With the close of day, pain rising like a mist from the earth, sorrow closing in, shuttering the endless vista of sea and sky.