Now my years are spent in lamentation...

Now my years are spent in lamentation, and you, Lord, my eternal Father, are my only solace. I have broken up into times, whose order I know not, and in tumultuous changes my recollections, the innermost sinews of my soul, are being torn apart, until I should flow together again in you, purified and melted in the fire of your love.

—St. Augustine, Confessions (398)

Animated Expressions of Divine Wisdom

In Augustine’s Platonic theism, beings made in God’s image have the capacity to see themselves as God sees them — not as insignificant assemblages of particulars in space and time, whose value must be arbitrarily assigned, but as animated expressions of divine wisdom…[Augustine] sees himself disfigured over time because he lacks the unified view God has of him in eternity. When God sees Augustine, God represents him as perfected, and if Augustine could see himself through God’s eyes, he would have no difficulty making his life out to be significant and intelligible.

—James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (1992)

'Jeez, it's beautiful, really beautiful'

He sits on the bench for over an hour, calms at last. The river languishes by, stippled and quivering like the play of light on a metallic cloth. Across from him, the dormitories of the business school lance their reflections into the water, and the automobiles in the distance seem tiny and alive. He feels the earth under him germinating in the spring night, the sweet assuasive air. In the sky the stars are studded in the warm intimate velvet of the night.

Jeez, it’s beautiful out. A play of yearnings, lost and never articulate. Makes ya think. He sighs. Real beautiful, makes ya think. The woman with whom he could share this. I’m gonna be something.

Awe. Night like this makes you know there’s a God, dumb atheists. Jeez, it’s beautiful, really beautiful, it makes ya think things are gonna be okay.

He sits there, absorbed in the night. I ain’t like the other guys, theah’s somethin’ special in me. He sighs again. Boy, to … to … He fumbles for his thought as though his hand were groping for a fish in the water. Jeez to …

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

the past is not strictly unalterable

As Augustine correctly saw, one cannot imagine, and there could not be, any entirely discrete past event unaffected by what came later, just as, to use his example, a note in music is only situated and defined by its place in a sequence, such that the end of a musical composition still to be heard can change the nature of what we have already heard. Certainly there are limits to alteration, even though they cannot be specified: the note remains this note, however far the new relations it enters into may re-disclose it. Nevertheless, these reflections reveal that the past is not strictly unalterable and that the remembered past, although provisional and revisable, is not a sort of hypothesis that can never be confirmed, but is rather the ontologically real past.

—John Milbank, Being Reconciled (2003)

Resentment

Absurdly, [resentment] demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future. I know that the time-sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around, disordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened.

—Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities (1964)

'a man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom'

"Oh, nothing, of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile. "Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me; and I begin to suspect that a man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been, from what he sees them to be, now."

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

'however serious, however trifling'

... there was a company of little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of his organ, and whose principle of life was the music, which the Italian made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of occupation—the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her cow—this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian turned a crank; and behold! every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron; the soldier waved his glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book, with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to-and-fro along the page; the milk-maid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted gold into his strong-box;—all at the same turning of a crank. Yes; and moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on the lips! Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement—however serious, however trifling—all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobbler’s shoe finished, nor the blacksmith’s iron shaped out; nor was there a drop less of brandy in the toper’s bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the milk-maid’s pail, nor one additional coin in the miser’s strong-box; nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maiden’s granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

'composed of Eros and of dust'

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleagured by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—W.H Auden, from "September 1, 1939," lines 99-110 (1939)

'the hospitals alone remind us / Of the equality of man'

Nothing is given: we must find our law.
Great buildings jostle in the sun for domination;
Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation
The low recessive houses of the poor.

We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man.

—W.H. Auden, from "In Time of War," XXV (1938)

'the common world of the uninjured'

For who when healthy can become a foot?
Even a scratch we can't recall when cured,
But are boisterous in a moment and believe

In the common world of the uninjured, and cannot
Imagine isolation. Only happiness is shared,
And anger, and the idea of love.

—W.H Auden, from "In Time of War," XVII (1938)