[Found at Durendal]
-- The Marquis de Valdegamas
[From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas]
There was madness in any direction, at any hour -- you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
==
Sometimes I imagine this is how all the heretic Catholic bishops felt when they found out Ratzinger was elected Pope.
It's desert ice outside but this diner has thawed my ears
Hot coffee in a clean white mug and a smile when the waitress hears
That I was born in North Carolina
Not an hour from her home town
And we used to play the same pizza parlor pinball
And there's a glance in time suspended as I wonder how it is
We've been swept up just by circumstance to where the coyote lives
Where my days are strips of highway
And she's wiping tables down
Holding on and still waiting for that windfall
But I've come home
Even though I've never had so far to go
I've come home
I pay the check and leave the change from a crumpled ten-dollar bill
Head across the street where VACANCY is burning in neon still
Well the night eats up my body heat
And there's no sign of another
And I find myself slipping down into that black
But things are good I've got a lot of followers of my faith
I've got a whole congregation living in my head these days
And I'm preaching from the pulpit
To cries of "Amen brother"
Closing my eyes to feel the warmth come back
And I've come home
Even though I swear I've never been so alone
I've come home
I just want to be living as I'm dying
Just like everybody here
Just want to know my little flicker of time is worthwhile
And I don't know where I'm driving to
But I know I'm getting old
And there's a blessing in every moment every mile
Thin white terry bars of soap and a couple little plastic cups
Old Gideons Bible in the nightstand drawer saying "Go on open up"
Well I'll kneel down on the carpet here
Though I never was sure of God
Think tonight I'll give Him the benefit of the doubt
I switch off the lights and imagine that waitress outlined in the bed
Her hair falling all around me
I smile and shake my head
Well we all write our own endings
And we all have our own scars
But tonight I think I see what it's all about
Because I've come home
I've come home
By Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
Daughter of the ancient Eve,
We know the gifts ye gave--and give.
Who knows the gifts which YOU shall give,
Daughter of the newer Eve?
You, if my soul be augur, you
Shall--O what shall you not, Sweet, do?
The celestial traitress play,
And all mankind to bliss betray;
With sacrosanct cajoleries
And starry treachery of your eyes,
Tempt us back to Paradise!
Make heavenly trespass;--ay, press in
Where faint the fledge-foot seraphin,
Blest Fool! Be ensign of our wars,
And shame us all to warriors!
Unbanner your bright locks,--advance
Girl, their gilded puissance,
I' the mystic vaward, and draw on
After the lovely gonfalon
Us to out-folly the excess
Of your sweet foolhardiness;
To adventure like intense
Assault against Omnipotence!
Give me song, as She is, new,
Earth should turn in time thereto!
New, and new, and thrice so new,
All old sweets, New Sweet, meant you!
Fair, I had a dream of thee,
When my young heart beat prophecy,
And in apparition elate
Thy little breasts knew wax-ed great,
Sister of the Canticle,
And thee for God grown marriageable.
How my desire desired your day,
That, wheeled in rumour on its way,
Shook me thus with presentience! Then
Eden's lopped tree shall shoot again:
For who Christ's eyes shall miss, with those
Eyes for evident nuncios?
Or who be tardy to His call
In your accents augural?
Who shall not feel the Heavens hid
Impend, at tremble of your lid,
And divine advent shine avowed
Under that dim and lucid cloud;
Yea, 'fore the silver apocalypse
Fail, at the unsealing of your lips?
When to love YOU is (O Christ's Spouse!)
To love the beauty of His house;
Then come the Isaian days; the old
Shall dream; and our young men behold
Vision--yea, the vision of Thabor mount,
Which none to other shall recount,
Because in all men's hearts shall be
The seeing and the prophecy.
For ended is the Mystery Play,
When Christ is life, and you the way;
When Egypt's spoils are Israel's right,
And Day fulfils the married arms of Night.
But here my lips are still.
Until
You and the hour shall be revealed,
This song is sung and sung not, and its words are sealed.
By Henry Adams (1838-1918), sometimes philosopher, cynic and autobiographer.
Gracious Lady:—
Simple as when I asked your aid before;
Humble as when I prayed for grace in vain
Seven hundred years ago; weak, weary, sore
In heart and hope, I ask your help again.
You, who remember all, remember me;
An English scholar of a Norman name,
I was a thousand who then crossed the sea
To wrangle in the Paris schools for fame.
When your Byzantine portal was still young
I prayed there with my master Abailard;
When Ave Maris Stella was first sung,
I helped to sing it here with Saint Bernard.
When Blanche set up your gorgeous Rose of France
I stood among the servants of the Queen;
And when Saint Louis made his penitence,
I followed barefoot where the King had been.
For centuries I brought you all my cares,
And vexed you with the murmurs of a child;
You heard the tedious burden of my prayers;
You could not grant them, but at least you smiled
If then I left you, it was not my crime,
Or if a crime, it was not mine alone.
All children wander with the truant Time.
Pardon me too! You pardoned once your Son!
For He said to you:—"Wist ye not that I
Must be about my Father’s business?" So,
Seeking his Father he pursued his way
Straight to the Cross towards which we all must go.
So I too wandered off among the host
That racked the earth to find the father’s clue.
I did not find the Father, but I lost
What now I value more, the Mother,—You!
I thought the fault was yours that foiled my search;
I turned and broke your image on its throne,
Cast down my idol, and resumed my march
To claim the father’s empire for my own.
Crossing the hostile sea, our greedy band
Saw rising hills and forests in the blue;
Our father’s kingdom in the promised land!
—We seized it, and dethroned the father too.
And now we are the Father, with our brood,
Ruling the Infinite, not Three but One;
We made our world and saw that it was good;
Ourselves we worship, and we have no Son.
Yet we have Gods, for even our strong nerve
Falters before the Energy we own.
Which shall be master? Which of us shall serve?
Which wears the fetters? Which shall bear the crown?
Brave though we be, we dread to face the Sphinx,
Or answer the old riddle she still asks.
Strong as we are, our reckless courage shrinks
To look beyond the piece-work of our tasks.
But when we must, we pray, as in the past
Before the Cross on which your Son was nailed.
Listen, dear lady! You shall hear the last
Of the strange prayers Humanity has wailed.
Mysterious Power! Gentle Friend!
Despotic Master! Tireless Force!
You and We are near the End.
Either You or We must bend
To bear the martyrs’ Cross.We know ourselves, what we can bear
As men; our strength and weakness too;
Down to the fraction of a hair;
And know that we, with all our care
And knowledge, know not you.You come in silence, Primal Force,
We know not whence, or when, or why;
You stay a moment in your course
To play; and, lo! you leap across
To Alpha Centauri!We know not whether you are kind,
Or cruel in your fiercer mood;
But be you Matter, be you Mind,
We think we know that you are blind,
And we alone are good.We know that prayer is thrown away,
For you are only force and light;
A shifting current; night and day;
We know this well, and yet we pray,
For prayer is infinite,Like you! Within the finite sphere
That bounds the impotence of thought,
We search an outlet everywhere
But only find that we are here
And that you are—are not!What are we then? the lords of space?
The master-mind whose tasks you do?
Jockey who rides you in the race?
Or are we atoms whirled apace,
Shaped and controlled by you?Still silence! Still no end in sight!
No sound in answer to our cry!
Then, by the God we now hold tight,
Though we destroy soul, life and light,
Answer you shall—or die!We are no beggars! What care we
For hopes or terrors, love or hate?
What for the universe? We see
Only our certain destiny
And the last word of Fate.Seize, then, the Atom! rack his joints!
Tear out of him his secret spring!
Grind him to nothing!—though he points
To us, and his life-blood anoints
Me—the dead Atom-King!
A curious prayer, dear lady! is it not?
Strangely unlike the prayers I prayed to you!
Stranger because you find me at this spot,
Here, at your feet, asking your help anew.
Strangest of all, that I have ceased to strive,
Ceased even care what new coin fate shall strike.
In truth it does not matter. Fate will give
Some answer; and all answers are alike.
So, while we slowly rack and torture death
And wait for what the final void will show,
Waiting I feel the energy of faith
Not in the future science, but in you!
The man who solves the Infinite, and needs
The force of solar systems for his play,
Will not need me, nor greatly care what deeds
Made me illustrious in the dawn of day.
He will send me, dethroned, to claim my rights,
Fossil survival of an age of stone,
Among the cave-men and the troglodytes
Who carved the mammoth on the mammoth’s bone.
He will forget my thought, my acts, my fame,
As we forget the shadows of the dusk,
Or catalogue the echo of a name
As we the scratches on the mammoth’s tusk.
But when, like me, he too has trod the track
Which leads him up to power above control,
He too will have no choice but wander back
And sink in helpless hopelessness of soul,
Before your majesty of grace and love,
The purity, the beauty and the faith;
The depth of tenderness beneath; above,
The glory of the life and of the death.
When your Byzantine portal still was young,
I came here with my master Abailard;
When Ave Maris Stella was first sung,
I joined to sing it here with Saint Bernard.
When Blanche set up your glorious Rose of France,
In scholar’s robes I waited on the Queen;
When good Saint Louis did his penitence,
My prayer was deep like his: my faith as keen.
What loftier prize seven hundred years shall bring,
What deadlier struggles for a larger air,
What immortality our strength shall wring
From Time and Space, we may—or may not—care;
But years, or ages, or eternity,
Will find me still in thought before your throne,
Pondering the mystery of Maternity,
Soul within Soul,—Mother and Child in One!
Help me to see! not with my mimic sight—
With yours! which carried radiance, like the sun,
Giving the rays you saw with—light in light—
Tying all suns and stars and worlds in one.
Help me to know! not with my mocking art—
With you, who knew yourself unbound by laws;
Gave God your strength, your life, your sight, your heart,
And took from him the Thought that Is—the Cause.
Help me to feel! not with my insect sense,—
With yours that felt all life alive in you;
Infinite heart beating at your expense;
Infinite passion breathing the breath you drew!
Help me to bear! not my own baby load,
But yours; who bore the failure of the light,
The strength, the knowledge and the thought of God,—
The futile folly of the Infinite!
A work in progress...
About the Faith
The Baltimore Catechism
Theology for Beginners, by Frank Sheed
The Tridentine Creed
Scripture
Genesis
Exodus
Joshua
Judges
1 & 2 Samuel (1 & 2 Kings in some older Bibles)
Tobit
Job
Wisdom
The Gospel According to St. Mark
The Gospel According to St. John
The Acts of the Apostles
Hebrews
1 & 2 Peter
Church Fathers
Letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch
First and Second Apology, by St. Justin Martyr
The Incarnation of the Word, by St. Athanasius
Sermons of St. John Chrysostom (selected)
The Confessions, by St. Augustine
Letters of St. Leo the Great (selected)
Spiritual/Moral Reading
Introduction to Devout Life, by St. Francis de Sales
The World's First Love, by Bishop Fulton Sheen
In Defense of Purity, by Dietrich von Hildebrand
The Practice of the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence
The Story of a Soul, by St. Therese of Lisieux
Transformation in Christ, by Dietrich von Hildebrand
The Secret of the Rosary, by St. Louis de Montfort
Literature
Beowulf
The Golden Legend (selections)
The Song of Roland
The Divine Comedy, by Dante
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Understanding the Times
On the Threshold of Hope, by Pope John Paul II
The Syllabus of Errors, by Pope Pius IX
Iota Unum, by Romano Amerio
The Devastated Vineyard, by Dietrich von Hildebrand
Found here, but who knows from whence it came?
==
Below is a list of the 106 books most likely to languish, unread, on the bookshelves of people who only want to seem cultured and well-read. If you want to play along:
green for the titles you've read on your own,
teal for the ones you had to read for school,
purple for the ones you started but didn't finish,
red for the ones you hated,
blue for those you'd recommend
orange for those you'd like to/plan to read
Let the List begin
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Ulysses
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
Moby Dick
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Illiad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - Excerpts
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
[From Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare, I.3]
There is no measure in the occasion that breeds;
therefore the sadness is without limit.[...]
I wonder that thou, being, as thou sayest thou art,
born under Saturn, goest about to apply a moral
medicine to a mortifying mischief. I cannot hide
what I am: I must be sad when I have cause and smile
at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait
for no man's leisure, sleep when I am drowsy and
tend on no man's business, laugh when I am merry and
claw no man in his humour.[...]
I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in
his grace, and it better fits my blood to be
disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob
love from any: in this, though I cannot be said to
be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied
but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with
a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I
have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my
mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do
my liking: in the meantime let me be that I am and
seek not to alter me.
-Don John
[From The Sacred Heart, by Dietrich von Hildebrand, p. 124]
The first miracle of our Lord at the wedding of Cana is one of the three mysteries of the feast of Epiphany. The Gospel says: "He manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him." The Church sees in this miracle the manifestation of the divinity of Christ primarily. Yet, it also is a revelation of the boundless superabundance of divine love. The first miracle of Christ was neither the healing of the sick, nor the restoration of a natural good--like the sight to the blind--nor even an indispensable good like the multiplication of the loaves. The transmutation of water into wine was not an indispensable good either for the couple or for the wedding as such. It served merely to heighten the joy of the feast. It was not even absolutely lacking, but was only in insufficient quantity. Divine superabundance! Christ our Redeemer, who continually exhorts us to seek only the one thing necessary, manifesting such an interest in the wedding taking place in cloudless joy, that the bridegroom should not be humiliated or perturbed by the insufficiency of wine!
Divine, boundless superabundance of love! What an abyss separates it from the hard zeal of many pious people who are moved and interested only when either something vital to their neighbor's eternal welfare or at least some elementary indispensable good is at stake. That the wine was not sufficient for a wedding would strike those "pious souls" as a trifle not deserving their attention. They forget that the sublime words of St. Aloysius, Quid ad aeternitatem? "What is this to eternity?" should be applied to one's own person only, but never to one's neighbor.
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Recent Comments
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Mark said:
I think the Marquis, being placed somehow in his wonderful 14th century, would have run screaming. read more
on "God wanted the world to be a valley of tears" -
Sommo said:
[this is good]read more
on "That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil" -
bobr512_41 said:
O, well, thank you for the article that you wrote article! A lot of time I was trying to find... read more
on Jesus, Party Animal -
Matushka Elizabeth said:
Okay, Let the List begin...let me see what I can do with this... green for the titles you've read on... read more
on A Book List
on "That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil"