In the poem's milieu, the late Middle Ages, when man's mood begins to darken into pessimism and deepening melancholy about the transience of earthly life, this tension becomes more pressing, even fraught with panic. Man's ultimate goal, Paradise, appears now more fragile and inaccessible. Art and literature present man diminished, pathetic, even comic--and therefore less worthy of such an attainment. In Pearl, the antagonists of this drama of faith are man and God, so bound by love yet so irreconcilable by nature. The poet aims at a definition of their relationship, existential rather than theoretical, and displays a certain attitude toward this relationship, which weaves in and out of the poem's emotional crises like a pervasive contrapuntal theme. The poem shows man at a moment of profound loss and spiritual confusion. In the dream, where desire battles actuality, the hero gravitates toward an ideal realm, seeking to fathom the mystery of ultimate reality, to reconcile his loss with the universal scheme of things, and to find consolation. His personal desire is gradually transformed and expanded to its anagogic form as the nostalgia for Paradise. He attempts to unite himself with the divine, at least through understanding, so that he can transcend the contradictions of this life. The divine beckons him to itself and ravishes him with its perfection, only to reject him, withdrawing at his searching touch into its awesome mystery. Yet it leaves a profound claim upon his life with its promise of final "cnawing" and immortality.

-Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl: Image of the Ineffable. A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism



et quid erat quod me delectabat, nisi amare et amari? sed non tenebatur modus ab animo usque ad animum quatenus est luminosus limes amicitiae, sed exhalabantur nebulae de limosa concupiscentia carnis et scatebra pubertatis, et obnubilabant atque obfuscabant cor meum, ut non discerneretur serenitas dilectionis a caligine libidinis. utrumque in confuso aestuabat et rapiebat inbecillam aetatem per abrupta cupiditatum atque mersabat gurgite flagitiorum. invaluerat super me ira tua, et nesciebam. obsurdueram stridore catenae mortalitatis meae, poena superbiae animae meae, et ibam longius a te et sinebas, et iactabar et effundebar et diffluebam et ebulliebam per fornicationes meas, et tacebas. o tardum gaudium meum! tacebas tunc, et ego ibam porro longe a te in plura et plura sterilia semina dolorum superba deiectione et inquieta lassitudine.

-Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions




It’s a depressing thing what’s going on with the person in the song, but it’s essentially about how when things are very awful, if you are looking for some place to turn, you’re not the type of person who can really stand to say, “Well, maybe tomorrow’s better.” Because you know tomorrow’s not better. People are gonna tell you, “You don’t know that! You don’t know about tomorrow!” But sometimes, yes you do. Sometimes you know it for a fact it’s gonna be worse. Maybe if you can go to sleep and never wake up, then you can put some faith in that. If you can’t sleep, then you can see tomorrow like a fucking train coming at you. And if it gets closer and closer, you can make out the paint on its grill as it’s coming up to meet you and you can say, “No, tomorrow’s almost here and I can already tell just as it’s about to kill me. It’s the same as the one that I just tried to abandon.” And you’re not suicidal, you say, “No, I would never do that, I’m Catholic,” but at the same time, you get in one of these moods and I will wager that every person has been in one where you go, “Well you know what wouldn’t be so bad right now would be death.”

-John Darnielle introducing Isaiah 45:23 at The Fillmore in San Francisco, 11/14/09

Si bene calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est.
'If you reflect well on it, life is a shipwreck everywhere.'


Qualis nox fuit illa, di deaeque,
quam mollis torus! Haesimus calentes
et transfudimus hinc et hinc labellis
errantes animas. Valete curae
mortales. Ego sic perire coepi.
'O gods, O goddesses - what a night was that!
How soft the bed, as we hotly clung
to one another, and with every wandering kiss
we poured our souls into each other!
I bade farewell to mortal cares,
and so began to die.'



-from Petronius' Satyricon

QUAESTIO MIHI FACTUS SUM -- I have been made a question unto myself.


-- St. Augustine.




Religion is for lovers, for men and women of passion, for real people with a passion for something other than talking profits, people who believe in something, who hope like mad in something, who love something with a love that surpasses understanding.


There is no merit in loving moderately, up to a certain point, just so far.


Religion, I say at the risk of being misquoted, is for the unhinged. (That is, for lovers.)


Religion on my telling is a pact or covenant with the impossible. To have a religious sense of life is to long with a restless heart for a reality beyond reality, to tremble with the possibility of the impossible.


It is love that drives our search to know.


-- John D. Caputo, On Religion

The band was playing one of those songs of Hank Williams, the one about the wild side of life, and the music floated over the car tops and touched me. I felt lost from everybody, and from myself included, laying on a wagon sheet in a pasture-land of cars. Only the tune of the song reached me, but the tune was enough. It fit the night and the country and the way I was feeling, and fit them better than anything I knew. What few stories the dancing people had to tell were already told in the worn-out words of songs like that one, and their kind of living, the few things they knew and lived to a fare-thee-well were in the sad high tune. City people probably wouldn't believe there were folks simple enough to live their lives out on sentiments like those--but they didn't know. Laying there, thinking of all the things the song brought up in me, I got more peaceful. The words I knew of it, about the wild side of life, reminded me of Hud and Lily, but more than that, the whole song reminded me of Hermy and Buddy and the other boys I knew. All of them wanted more and seemed to end up with less; they wanted excitement and ended up stomped by a bull or smashed against a highway; or they wanted a girl to court; and anyway, whatever it was they wanted, that was what they ended up doing without. That song ended, and another one began, and it ended and then I got up and went back into the dark arena.

-Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By


The way things happened, one thing after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn't tell if you were young or old.

-Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood


It is hardly surprising if we are driven by blasts of storms when our chief aim on this sea of life is to displease wicked men.

-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy


If the enjoyment of any earthly blessing brings with it any measure of happiness, the memory of that splendid day can never be destroyed by the burden however great of growing evil.

-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy


It is the nature of human affairs to be fraught with anxiety; they never prosper perfectly and they never remain constant.

-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy


In all adversity of fortune, the most wretched kind is once to have been happy.

-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Tua Fata Docebo

I recently finished All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, by Larry McMurtry. There's pretty much no possible way I can talk about this book, no way that I can recommend it highly enough. It's nothing short of absolutely brilliant.

' "I shouldn't have given you that story," she said. "It would make a great cartoon."
"Go to San Francisco with me," I said, "We'll compete for it. If your cartoon is better than the novel I write I'll burn the novel."
"No, you should never burn things," Jill said, looking at me seriously for a second. "What you should do is give them to the sea." '
(143)

'I have no real resistance to temptation, drunk or sober. Very few attractive temptations come my way and when they do I almost always yield to them. I can't smash them away like they were badminton birdies. I just don't have any moral coordination, as Jenny Salomea well knew.'
(26)


Also, I've been reading Virgil's Aeneid:

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbrum
On they went, darlking in solitary night, far into the gloom.

O gnate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum. Ostedent terris hunc fata neque ultra esse sinent.
O my son, ask not of the heavy grief that your people must bear. Of him the Fates shall give a glimpse to earth, nor suffer him to stay.