I have an idea that it was the obstacles which kept you so true to me.

Madame de Clèves knelt by the bed, and fortunately for her the light did not fall on her face.

-Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves

Desire is about wanting more than it is about getting. It is the hunger that highlights the food; the patience that heightens the faith; the arousal that anticipates the sex. The salt of a lover's lips or the sweet juice of grapes is not just pleasurable anymore: with desire, they become exquisite. Desire is the discipline to live on that edge between wanting and satisfaction. It is not for the timid or the fickle. [...]

Yearning itself may even come to be experienced as a pleasure. The Song is concerned with the provocative question of whether the exquisite sensation of wanting another could surpass in any realistic sense the pleasure of actual consummation. The surprising claim that it cann does seem to be the premise of the song, which stays focused on the experience of yearning, not its relief.


-Carey Ellen Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs

I found this in a National Geographic:
The moon is beautiful, but I do not live on the moon.


And I've been trying to get my head around this, from Thomas Aquinas. I'm terribly suspicious, but it's also weirdly appealing on some level.
In things that have knowledge, desire follows knowledge. The senses only know being as it is, here and now, but the intellect knows it absolutely and for all time. Therefore everything that has an intellect naturally desires to exist forever. However a natural desire cannot be in vain. Therefore every intellectual substance is incorruptible.

More soon. It's Week 1 of the 3-week-long insanity I put myself through every semester: finals.

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

— John Darnielle

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

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

-A.E. Housman

My foolish heart leads me on, and I obey my heart.

-Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain The Knight of the Lion

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.


"I ask you, what is a human life? Is it not a maimed happiness -- care and weariness, weariness and care, wit the baseless cozenage of a brighter tomorrow?"


Religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice -- inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome.


"I have vowed unto God above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to perform it."


Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness.


"There is indeed one element in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson writes, "that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits."


"Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many."


Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting; still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.


"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.'"


A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through.


The man's interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal.


Wrong living, impotent aspirations; "What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I," as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir.


"My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold."



-William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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