Hadrian the Seventh

Frederick Baron Corvo

He was looking askance at his ms. In two hours, he had written no more than fourteen lines; and these were deformed by erasures of words and sentences, by substitutions and additions. He struck an upward line from left to right across the sheet: laid down his pen: lifted board, c at, books, and ms., from his knees; and laid them by. He could not work.

Oh, how horrible! But we’re all Christians, Flavio; and this is only one of the many funny ways in which we love one another.

Much may be done with the eye in wordy warfare. You may challenge: you may intimidate: you may quell: but you may do none of these things while your opponent refuses to lend his eye to yours.

Neither in woes nor in welcome prosperity, may I be associated with women: for, when they prevail, one cannot tolerate their audacity; and, when they are frightened, they are still greater mischief to their house and their city.

All through the bitter bitter years of His struggle for life, He had known Himself for a fighter. As a fighter, He had expected blows in return for those which He gave. And, when all was said and done, His fighting had not been to Him a source of unmitigated pain. For one thing, He had had pleasure in knowing that He scrupulously fought unscrupulous foes, that He fought a losing battle, that he fought a million times His weight, that he fought bare-handed against armed champions all the time. That knowledge it was—the knowledge that He had contended (not as a hero but) as heroes have contended—which alone upheld him.

Wrong must thou do, or wrong must thou suffer. Then, grant, O blind dumb gods, that we, rather the sufferers than the doers be.

After storm, this was calm and peace, with a vengeance.

The Church of God is not narrow, nor ‘Liberal,’ but Catholic with room for all: for ‘there are diversities of gifts.’

Persuade, if ye can persuade, and if the world will permit you to persuade: but seek not to persuade. Better to live so that men will convince themselves through the contemplation of your ensample. That way only satisfaction lies. Accept, but claim not, obedience.

Jerry Sant became observed. He had the haggard florid aspect, the red-lidded prominent eyes, the pendulous lip of a sorry sort of man. He stood up and began to speak, sometimes dragging a sandy rag or moustache or fingering shiny conical temples, but generally holding on by the lapels of a short-skirted broad-cloth frock-coat, protruding black-nailed thumbs through the buttonholes in a manner acquired during a week in Paris. His style was geological, so to speak, consisting of various strata deposited at various periods. The surface stratum, representing the Kainozoic Time, consisted of the platitudinous bombast characteristic of the common or oratorical demagogue. Below that, corresponding to the Mesozoic Time, came the ridiculous obsequious slang of the bagman of commerce. Below that again, corresponding to the Paleozoic Time, appeared the gelded English which muscleless feckless unfit-for-handicraft little sciolists acquire in school-board spawning-beds. And these rested on stratum of the Azoic Time, to wit the native Pictish Presbyterian jargon of Mr. Sant’s sententious pettifogging spiteful self. These different strata occurred as irregularly as natural strata. They ran one into the other like veins in a fissure, causing displacements resembling those which technically are called Faults; and the tracing and stripping of the same is a task for the ingenious geophilologist.

I have not read such exquisite writing in a while--not good writing, mind you, exquisite. Good writing is something else, probably better because it goes down a good deal smoother; but Corvo's writing is like some incredibly fine meal, not a good idea for standard fare, but on occasion, little is better.
Corvo brings a combination of style and insight that will make your skin tingle. Look at the passage about "wordy warfare." Or the last passage, the geologic description of a man. Corvo may strike you as pedantic--I often found myself lost in his forests of multisyllabic words, bumping into towering trunk after towering trunk of unknown words. But, O, what a writer!
His tolutiloquence, I don't think, is due to a sesquipedalian nature, but rather comes from an attempt to mundify his readers by a contorpulicative prose that combats the lethific writing of so many of his contemporaries. But, he, looking back, probably thought it was all a rhodomontade.

Forgive me, and pray for the repose of His soul. He was so tired.

The Scandal of Service: Jesus Washes Our Feet

Jean Vanier

He made a point of washing the toilets—and he did this until the end of his life.

To accept to go down a path of pain and suffering, to give one's life, to accept to become humble, like a slave, without rights, to take the last place: all this goes against the normal desires in the human heart. Our desire is to be someone, to show who one is through our origins, qualities, capacities, and basic rights. To be willing to give up these things is not easy for Jesus, for Jesus remains a human being, like us in all things except sin. This is, however, the path of love linked to pain that is given to him by the Father, a path on which he will live a total communion with the Father and reveal his radical love for his friends “to the end.” It is urgent that Peter understand.

Loss and grief will be with us our whole life through, because growth in Jesus’ love is a long process that involves struggle. This struggle is not so much against disobeying moral laws and commandments, but the struggle to trust in Jesus’ call, in his promises of love and his invitation to give our lives totally to him. It is the struggle to let the Holy Spirit take over our lives, guide and inspire us in all we do. It is a struggle to remain constantly open and faithful to the Holy Spirit on this new path of love.

And no matter how beautiful a community may be, community life still remains difficult, due to all our inner resistance and our need to feel important. There is such a fear in us of not existing if we are not held in esteem and this fear will remain with us all our lives. Transformation takes time and continues through times of joy and times of purification, until our last breath.

It seems, leaving off where the last one started, the stories keep going on and on--and they are the same story.

1. Wash toilets
2. Forever.
3. Trust.
4. Die

a little brown man goes out every day, even as a great man of fame, to clean the toilets that people use. He does it because other people shouldn't have to. He does it because he loves the people who use the toilets. He does it because he doesn't want to. He does it because he is afraid to. And there will come a time when he is tired and he wonders why he is doing it? What if the good story he is trusting in turns out to be false? But on he goes, cleaning toilets; his knees hurt, his back aches, his fingers rot, he gets sick and he's still cleaning the toilets, and finally the day comes when he dies.

The Stranger

Albert Camus

To which I had nothing to say, so I said nothing.

Still that phase lasted a few months only. Afterward, I had prisoner’s thoughts. I waited for the daily walk in the courtyard or a visit from my lawyer. As for the rest of the time, I managed quite well, really. I’ve often thought that had I been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky just overhead, I’d have got used to it by degrees. I’d have learned to watch for the passing birds or drifting clouds, as I had come to watch for my lawyer’s odd neckties, or, in another world, to wait patiently till Sunday for a spell of love-making with Marie. Well, here, anyhow, I wasn’t penned in a hollow tree trunk.

When the bell rang again and I stepped back into the dock, the silence of the courtroom closed in around me, and with the silence came a queer sensation when I noticed that, for the first time, the young journalist kept his eyes averted. I didn’t look in Marie’s direction. In fact, I had no time to look, as the presiding judge had already started pronouncing a rigmarole to the effect that “in the name of the French people” I was to be decapitated in some public place.

Camus is what I imagine Kafka would have been like when he was drunk. Camus has the same heavy unreal feeling of Kafka, but he speckles it with shiny bits of wit, and you wonder if the whole thing isn't him poking fun at you for living a life you imagine so much more real and superior than his characters. There's a good deal of Nabokov in him too. But only if you allow that Nabokov was old enough to be before him.
I wonder how much our moods are influenced by what we read?
I wonder how much what we read is influenced by our moods?
In one case a man may read The Stranger and begin to feel horrible and see the influences of that distance from life and care all around him and begin to think that perhaps he is not so unlike the stranger and perhaps he too is a murderer because the sun is hot.
In another case a man may be struggling with abandonment and feelings of anger and sadness at life and read The Stranger and see in the stranger the feelings he feels, and then with a moment he has misread the book and made it into a mirror image of what is going on inside him.
Perhaps he should keep a log to note dates and times of the moments when feelings occur, that way at least he could prove that he felt a certain way before facing the book. It seems to me though, the big problem is figuring out how to discriminate between the two questions, because no doubt it is in a mix of the two that we live our lives.
The stranger (character, not book) seemed to be a man who didn't care much about anything, that was pushed about a good deal by his life, but also did not ever have reason to care--after all he was only passing through, a stranger. But he did feel things, I think strongly. Yet in the relationships he has and in his trial he is described in such a way as to make you think he doesn't feel much of anything about it. Actually, the more I think of it, the stranger seemed mostly to be bewildered and confused, as if his emotions were a bunch of fish in a tank that is being shaken and stirred up--they never had the time to settle down and let you take a look at them because they were constantly being thrust into situations the muddied the water and moved them away from their proper places and proper faces.
It comes from a special ignorance. Camus puts a casual ignorance into the stranger that comes to a point in key places and you've got to marvel at his mastery. That the stranger could say when his sentence was passed down to him, "some public place" as if, in this situation where every word would seem to be of the most importance, he couldn't be troubled to remember it. But what if that was the language of the judge? What if the stranger is a stranger because the land is strange to him not because he is strange to the land?
Maybe the stranger should have run for it.