'none of the modern fear of inaccuracy'

Much as we admire his progressive spirit and the catholicity of his taste, what gives the Lives their immortality is the quality of great passion that can be felt in every line, the fact that, apart from its value as a source of information, it is, above all, a true work of literature. Perhaps it was a good thing that in Vasari's time there was none of the modern fear of inaccuracy. If this always busy, always impatient, man had been required to spend much time on the verification of facts, he might have told us only one-tenth of what we now have . . .

—Alfred Werner, introduction to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1957)

I think He lives in the wretched homes of these Indians

"Do you actually believe in that man called Jesus?"

"Yes, I do. I told you that before. But the Jesus that I believe in is not the one preached by the Church or the padres. I cannot ally myself with the padres who invoke the name of the Lord when they burn the altars of the Indians, and drive them from their villages, claiming that they do it in order to spread the Lord's word."

"How can you revere such a miserable, wretched fellow? How can you worship someone so ugly and emaciated? I can't understand it..." 

For the first time the samurai asked the question in earnest. Nishi gazed up at the renegade monk from a crouched position, waiting to hear his reply. From the swamp they could hear the strange voices of women doing their washing. 

"In the old days," the man nodded, "I had the same doubts. But I can believe in Him now because the life He lived in this world was more wretched than any other man's. Because He was ugly and emaciated. He knew all there was to know about the sorrows of this world. He could not close His eyes to the grief and agony of mankind. That is what made Him emaciated and ugly. Had He lived an exalted, powerful life beyond our grasp, I would not feel like this about Him." 

The samurai could not understand what the renegade monk was saying. 

"He understands the hearts of the wretched, because His entire life was wretched. He knows the agonies of those who die a miserable death, because He died in misery. He was not in the least powerful. He was not beautiful." 

"But look at the Church. Look at the city of Rome," Nishi countered. "The cathedrals we saw were all like golden palaces, and not even the people of Mexico City could imagine the grandeur of the mansion where the Pope lives." 

"Do you think that is what He would have wished?" the man shook his head angrily. "Do you think He is to be found within those garish cathedrals? He does not dwell there. He lives...not within such buildings. I think He lives in the wretched homes of these Indians." 

"Why?" 

"That is how He spent His life," replied the renegade monk in a voice filled with assurance, then he lowered his eyes to the ground and repeated the same words to himself. "That is how he lived His life. He never visited the houses of those who were puffed up or contented. He sought out only the ugly, the wretched, the miserable and the sorrowful. But now even the bishops and priests here are complacent and swollen with pride. They are no longer the sort of people He sought after."

--Shusaku Endo, The Samurai (1980; trans. Van C. Gessel, 1982)

 

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. A stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air.... Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

This his always been the instinct of Christendom.... [P]ride cannot rise to levity and levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One 'settles down' into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man 'falls' into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue.... It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

'Slight errors are magnified over time'

Mr. Wingo has now persuaded NASA to use the Deep Space Network to pinpoint ISEE-3's trajectory, to calculate the rocket burn required to put it on a path to Earth orbit. Dr. Farquhar's 1986 calculations were close, but not exact. Slight errors are magnified over time, and now the uncertainty is 20,000 miles, which means the spacecraft could be on course to splat into the moon.

—"Calling Back a Zombie Ship From the Graveyard of Space," by Kenneth Chang, The New York Times, A21, Sunday, June 15, 2014

People Took Refuge in the Banal

Once, long ago, she'd allowed herself to think seriously about what human beings would do, confronted directly with a sign of God's presence in their lives. The Bible, that repository of Western wisdom, was instructive either as myth or as history, she'd decided. God was at Sinai and within weeks, people were dancing in front of a golden calf. God walked in Jerusalem and days later, folks nailed Him up and then went back to work. Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.

--Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996)

'all approximations are rational'

...it is obvious that irrationals are uninteresting to an engineer, since he is concerned only with approximations, and all approximations are rational.

—G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940)

"Good work is not done by 'humble' men."

Some egotism of this sort is inevitable, and I do not feel that it really needs justification. Good work is not done by 'humble' men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking "Is what I do worth while?" and "Am I the right person to do it?" will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. This is not too difficult: it is harder not to make his subject and himself ridiculous by shutting his eyes too tightly.

—G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940)

Nothing is simpler than love.

Nothing is simpler for man than the act of love, which in this case can indeed dispense with every precaution and care since the self-surrender to the person one adores is at the same time self-surrender to the promise of eternal bliss and, as such, is an act which could never be surpassed by a greater or a better. When one's beloved is none other than God, the ego's experience of losing the ground under its feet as a result of genuine love is none other than the beatific shudder of self-surrender which every believer is basically disposed to experience and which the mystic actually experiences already here on earth.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (1961) 

'the flaming liquor'

Since then Bartley had always thought of the British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, where all the dead things in the world were assembled to make one's hour of youth the more precious. One trembled lest before he got out it might somehow escape him, lest he might drop the glass from over-eagerness and see it shivered on the stone floor at his feet. How one hid his youth under his coat and hugged it! And how good it was to turn one's back upon all that vaulted cold, to take Hilda's arm and hurry out of the great door and down the steps into the sunlight among the pigeons—to know that the warm and vital thing within him was still there and had not been snatched away to flush Caesar's lean cheek or to feed the veins of some bearded Assyrian king. They in their day had carried the flaming liquor, but to-day was his!

—Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge (1912)

Life Could be Capable of Small Beauties

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.  

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence. 

"Someday the meek might actually want it," he said.

--Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (2009)