The things we couldn't explain

I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people,  fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

-- John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

The Quality of the Piece is Irrelevant

Lancer returns from the cozy abyss of the semi-successful Hollywood actor-writer to visit with his old workmates.  This returning to the bar is an important event for him, though you cannot understand why, as he was around for only a few months, and yet when he bounds through the front door he acts as if he is falling in with beloved college chums at a ten-year reunion.  He has a collection of people with him who look as though they were manufactured by aliens. He introduces them to you and they claim to have heard all about you, and they smile and beam at you and you do not know exactly why but after a time it becomes clear that Lancer has told them stories relating to your ability to render yourself useless.  His dirty-blond hair has been bleached and he is deeply tanned; he is playing the part of a wisecracking swimming pool cleaner in a television pilot, he says.  You ask him if he is enjoying himself and he replies by pointing to the breasts of one of his new friends.  You ask him if this part he is playing is good or bad and he says that the quality of the piece is irrelevant--he is a working actor in Hollywood and the odds against this happening are so great the he would take the part of a singing shitpile if it kept him out of bars like this one. "But you seem to think it's the greatest thing in the world to be back," you say.

"Only because I don't have to be back," he says. "I mean with you I'm sure it's different--you work, you have your wife, you'll probably have kids, right? You're all squared away, but I have dreams, you know? Big dreams. And none of them were going to come true in a place like this."

--Patrick deWitt, Ablutions (2009)

The Best Preparation for Loving the World

There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally. And many there are, who, without bringing forward any theory, yet consider practically that the love of many is something superior to the love of one or two; and neglect the charities of private life, while busy in the schemes of an expansive benevolence, or of effecting a general union and conciliation among Christians. Now I shall here maintain, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, and with our Saviour's pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us.

—John Henry Newman, "Love of Relations and Friends" (1836)

'all the happenings in one humble lifetime'

Four decades later the beams of headlights from executive cars in the station car park lit up a freak plague of daddy longlegs, and one fugitive publishing gentleman in a flapping raincoat striding around a field now lying fallow for EU subsidies. You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap—I mean, it's not ruddy Luxembourg we live in—but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.

—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

'Come back, oh, come back!'

The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house, I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes—a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker—varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it along the Say. Sticklebacks in jars. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? Hedgeless, featureless fields. ... Stubble was burnt, and the air tasted of crisp bacon sarnies. My thoughts flew off with other fairies, and we were past Saffron Walden when the train juddered to a halt.

—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

John Henry Newman's Personal Terror

Discovering no external assurance that history was guided by the hand of God, he looked out upon society and saw suffering, disease, squalor, misery, men falling away from Christianity and not returning, the long procession of the world, its Babel of languages, the astrologers of Chaldaea and the chariots of Egypt, and he shrank away with a sensitive horror. This bogy of skepticism was no bogy; it was his personal terror, the dead hand which scrabbled at him in the night when his faith was sleeping.

—Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (1957)

The Adhesive Friction that Makes an Individual Possible"

They wrote for roughly twenty minutes and then each, in turn, read aloud what he or she had written.  Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible.  It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence.  It was in the handwriting that might melt into runoff.  But there were a thousand high times the members experience, given a chance to encounter the crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows.  They laughed loud and often.  They worked into themselves, finding narratives that rolled and tumbled, and how natural it seemed to do this, tell stories about themselves.

[...]

Curtis B. could not find his wristwatch. When he found it, finally, in the medicine cabinet, he could not seem to attach it to his wrist.  There it was, the watch. He said this gravely.  There it was, in my right hand. But the right hand could not seem to find its way to the left wrist. There was a spatial void, or a visual gap, a rift in his field of vision, and it took him some time to make the connection, hand to wrist, pointed end of wristband into buckle. To Curtis this was a moral flaw, a sin of self-betrayal.

--Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007)

Making us God

True, this offer no longer seems to arouse much interest in a certain number of people, adepts of a Christianity which claims to want to be not "moderately" but fully "modern", perfectly adapted to a world hostile to all mystical excesses, whether moral or metaphysical...."Would a man with good sense today still want to become God?" What a surprising lack of ambition in this "modern" Christianity!...Let us conclude that "a Christianity which offers man something less than making him God is too modest..." [Quoting Joseph Ratzinger].

—Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace (1980)