"the rattle of everything that led to the future"

The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six o'clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised in a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them. The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood. After a few minutes this unpleasant vision was broken by the presence of Pitts's pick-up truck grinding to a halt below the window. He returned to his bed and shut his eyes and against the closed lids hellish red trunks rose up in a black wood.

—Flannery O'Connor, "A View of the Woods" (1957; reprinted 1965 in Everything That Rises Must Converge)

the real vocation of a theologian

For Balthasar, challenging misremembering is essential to the contemporary theological task. Challenging Hegelian thought is absolutely crucial, since this discourse represents the most powerful act of misremembering that Christianity encounters in the modern world....Still, important as the enterprise is, it is not on a par with the real vocation of the theologian, which is remembering the live voices of the tradition as they witness to the mystery of the triune God revealed in Christ, and as they attest to the logic of love.

—Cyril O'Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering (2014)

'the multitudinous beauties of her body'

. . . And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.

He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that which he discovered in her. He was another man reveling over her. There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that it drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one man’s capacity.

He lived in a passion of sensual discovery with her for some time—it was a duel: no love, no words, no kisses even, only the maddening perception of beauty consummate, absolute through touch. He wanted to touch her, to discover her, maddeningly he wanted to know her. Yet he must not hurry, or he missed everything. He must enjoy one beauty at a time. And the multitudinous beauties of her body, the many little rapturous places, sent him mad with delight, and with desire to be able to know more, to have strength to know more. For all was there.

—D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

'the unfathomed distances in himself'

From the first, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge, it was so strong and came out of the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him, because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent?

—D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

Death is Such a Physical Thing

"The worst of my disequilibrium had passed in a couple of years. I wouldn't bore even a highly paid psychiatrist with the details of my love life, my sex life, during this period, except to say that it was quite a lot less than nothing--that is, I couldn't bear to have so much as a single sexual thought, let a single desire so much as flicker in my mind, during the two years after I was widowed. Not only because my grief made me loyal to my wife, but also because I was grieving for someone who was dead, and death is such a physical thing. I didn't want physical things. I didn't even like facts about things, and in a secret way I came to hate the truth itself. 

This extra dimension of loneliness, this revulsion for the world and even, at first, for the stuff of which it was composed, seemed unique at the time. But I think I see now that it was completely typical, and that what revolted me above all was the understanding that everything passes away." 

--Denis Johnson, The Name of the World (2000)

Looking From Either Side of the Same Frame

"The friendship was all in my mind, but Bill was not. I saw him once or twice a week. He worked in the Museum of Art. I often visited a particular drawing there, and Bill was the guard who generally stood near it, wearing blue pants and a white shirt with a breast tag bearing his name: W. Connors. I introduced myself once, and he told me his first name. A black man, somewhere in his late forties.

That I should be so affected by this drawing as to come around all the time, hungering at it, I thought might be understandable to a person who'd spent enough time in its presence to have been penetrated, similarly penetrated, maybe without the complicity of the artgoer, but penetrated anyway by its message. I felt a kinship with Bill--an illusory kinship, like the strange shocking wedding you experience with a figure who turns his face toward you as you flicker past in a train--to inhabit a frame for them, as they inhabit a frame for you--looking from either side of the same frame, I think you get it, in a moment that blinks on and blinks off, but never changes, a picture, in other words. Anyhow I liked thinking we shared something, each of us involved so much with what was going on in the same frame, Bill Connors and I."

--Denis Johnson, The Name of the World (2000)