'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)

'absolute dependence upon the spirit of the times'

No one perhaps has said it better than Karl Barth who observed with pointed irony that the more a theologian wishes to be considered a pure biblicist, disdaining the Church, her dogma and tradition, the more surely he ends "in absolute dependence upon the spirit of the times."

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

'Music demands risk'

. . . she practiced unstintingly each day, the Beethoven, the Liszt, her beloved Chopin, and the Fantasy over which her fingers were gradually gaining control. Pianists will tell you that they practice in order to reduce the risk of catastrophe, but they know that to play with complete safety is an insult to their art. Music demands risk, a condition that Anna seems to have embraced with near-manic devotion, as if by engaging the demons inherent in her art she might destroy all claims they might have on her.

—Ben Fountain, "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers," Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006)

Act and Intent

Every legal act is a combination of some type of act and some type of intent. For example, a "signature" is a combination of some writing or marking of one's name, nickname or initials or other symbol (the act) combined with a peculiar type of intent called the intention to sign (animus signandi). The intention to sign is a mental intention that the act be a "signature," i.e., that the formality and finality which accompany a signature be present.

—Robert L. Mennell, Wills and Trusts in a Nutshell (1994)

A Man of Noble Breeding

Now against both these dangers there is one safeguard: not to exercise the soul without the body, nor yet the body without the soul, in order that both may hold their own and prove equally balanced and sound. So the mathematician or one who is intensely occupied with any other intellectual discipline must give his body its due meed by taking part in athletic training; while he who is industrious in molding his body must compensate his soul with her proper exercise in the cultivation of the mind and all higher education; so one may deserve to be called in the true sense a man of noble breeding.

—Plato, Timaeus (360 BC)

'unpublished virtues of the earth'

CORDELIA

What can man's wisdom
In the restoring his bereaved sense?
He that helps him take all my outward worth.

DOCTOR

There is means, madam:
Our foster-nurse of nature is repose,
The which he lacks; that to provoke in him,
Are many simples operative, whose power
Will close the eye of anguish.

CORDELIA

All blest secrets,
All you unpublished virtues of the earth,
Spring with my tears! be aidant and remediate
In the good man's distress! Seek, seek for him;
Lest his ungovern'd rage dissolve the life
That wants the means to lead it.

—William Shakespeare, King Lear (IV.v) (1606)

'Bright sunshine is boring'

All beings are swathed in veils of mysterious vapours. The pleasure of intimacy lies in the lifting of such veils, and seeing behind them the real contour of the mind. Love demands that the mystery be dispelled, yet it wants it to remain too. Bright sunshine is boring and puts one to sleep.

—André Maurois, Conversation (trans. Yvonne Dufour 1930)