The Erotic Aspect of Gift

In simple human terms, a love that is inseparable from an interest in the other is always more commendable, more truly selfless, than the airless purity of disinterested expenditure, because it recognizes the otherness and delights in the splendor of the other. The Christian thought of God’s creative agape has nothing to do with the sublime and sublimely disinterested abyss of the One, but belongs to the thought of the Trinity: it is a love always of recognition and delight, desiring all and giving all at once, giving to receive and receiving to give, generous not in thoughtlessly squandering itself, but in truly wanting the other.

—David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003)

The Revelation of God

But the word that has reached its highest point in the cry [on the Cross], and so is no longer articulated, breaks through and demolishes the last wall of separation, the heart of Jesus himself, and—as in a parable—externally, the curtain between God and man: blood and water flow outwards, God himself pours himself out….Where the word falls silent, the true message is proclaimed loudly: the message of the heart of God, broken open. And if the real ‘place’ of the Christian event at first lets man hear no word, since the place lies in man’s death, yet it more importantly makes visible an event of God (in the most literal sense of the word: ‘the look on him whom they have pierced’). In this death, the ‘heart of God’ breaks open, the last realities in God’s heart, beyond which there is nothing more, so that in death, and only in death, that which remains unutterable in life becomes speech...

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 7: The New Covenant (1969)

...like being seasick on dry land.

"Of course I can guess, of course I guessed the first time I saw you, what kind of state you are in. I've had some experience, and I don't mean it as a joke when I tell you it's like being seasick on dry land. It's a condition in which you can't remember the real names of things and so in a great hurry you fling temporary names at them. You do it as fast as you can. But you've hardly turned your back on them before you've forgotten what you called them. A poplar in the fields which you called 'the tower of Babel,' since you either didn't or wouldn't know that it was a poplar, stands waving anonymously again, and so you have to call it 'Noah in his cups.'"

—Franz Kafka, "Conversation with the Supplicant" (1909) (trans. Willa & Edwin Muir 1948)

...a fugitive awareness...

The young man standing opposite me smiled. Then he dropped on his knees and with a dreamy look on his face told me: "There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that then they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were."

—Franz Kafka, "Conversation with the Supplicant" (1909) (trans. Willa & Edwin Muir 1948)

'A real woman!'

SMIRNOV

That's a woman for you! That's the kind I appreciate! A real woman! Not one of these soft weak females, but a creature of fire, gunpowder, fireworks! I'm almost sorry to have to kill her!

—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, "The Bear" (1888) (trans. Elisaveta Fen 1954)

'It has taken me thirty years to come to simplicity.'

It has taken me thirty years to come to simplicity. Earlier, I made a lot of what I thought were beautiful shots with much backlighting and many effects, absolutely none of which were motivated by anything in the film at all. As soon as we had a painting on the wall, we thought it should have a glow around it. It was terrible and I can hardly stand to see my own films on television anymore. I look for two minutes and then I thank God that there is a word called simplicity.

—Sven Nykvist, quoted in "Shooting With Ingmar Bergman: A Conversation with Sven Nykvist" (AFI 1984)

...a subtle change that relaxes the statement...

Clashes between New Yorker poets and facts have been constant. "The checking department says it should be 'strait' not straits,'" Katharine S. White wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in 1945, about the first line of "Large Bad Picture." "But if you prefer the sound of the latter I don't think we need to be too literal." Bishop, we learn in the new volume of correspondence between the poet and The New Yorker, yielded to most editorial requests, and this time was no different.

"It's good to have a standard," said Alice Quinn, formerly the poetry editor at The New Yorker and the caretaker of the Bishop legacy. "Accuracy was one of the three qualities Bishop strove for: accuracy, mystery and spontaneity."

It was copy editors, though, who made their mark on Bishop's most famous poem, changing a colon to a semi-colon in Bishop's "One Art" ("The art of losing isn't hard to master;"), a subtle change that relaxes the statement rather than making it a declaration. In general, grammatical mistakes—whether intentional or accidental—are tolerated far less than unfounded facts.

—Michael H. Miller, "Whose Line Is It, Anyway?" The New York Observer, Daily Transom (Feb. 16, 2011)

'The sleeper's visions are as turbulent as his day.'

[I]t was a very frequent theme of moralists that virtue is marked by the disappearance of dreams that translate the appetites and involuntary movements of the mind and body. "The sleeper's visions," said Seneca, "are as turbulent as his day." Plutarch cited Zeno in affirming that it is a sign of progress when a person no longer dreams that he derives pleasure from indecent actions. And he alluded to those individuals who have enough strength in their waking hours to combat and resist their passions, but who at night, "throwing off opinions and laws," cease to feel any shame: then there awakens what is immoral and licentious within them.

—Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (The History of Sexuality, Volume 3) (1984) (trans. R.H. 1986)

They Suffer Because of Their Love

Both the person who is transported by natural beauty and the one snatched up by the beauty of Christ must appear to the world to be fools, and the world will attempt to explain their state in terms of psychological or even physiological laws (Acts 2:13). But they know what they have seen, and they care not one farthing what people may say. They suffer because of their love, and it is only the fact that they have been inflamed by the most sublime of beauties—a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified—that justifies their sharing in that suffering.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (1967)

Go down, beauteous Sun

Works of art can die as a result of being looked at by too many dull eyes, and even the radiance of holiness can, in a way, become blunted when it encounters nothing but hollow indifference. But this remains but an external offense to beauty which may be rectified by purifying the heart and by exhuming what has been buried under the ruins. Hölderlin exclaimed in this vein: "Go down, beauteous Sun. They paid but little heed to thee; they knew thee not, thou holy one... for me thou graciously go'st down and up, O Light! And my eyes surely recognize thee, Splendour!" And even if works of art should die, even if the 'holy Sun' itself should die, how could the highest beauty die if it were true that its form had attained a living immortality?

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, (1967)