Category Archives: quotes

It gets worse and worse.

poetry, quotes, , , , ,

Malcolm Guite answers a question about writing poetry.

“You bring up depression. Many of your poems are helpful companions during dark times. When your poems touch on difficulty, they do so as one who has experienced it and yet you’re such a jolly man. How is that?” 

“Ah, yes, well, a couple of things about that.” He laughs. “As you know, these are things we all share in common. One of the things I consciously resist and rebel against is the idea of poetry as just personal self-expression. The idea of the lonely, romantic genius in his weird, peculiar place, who everyone has to make allowances for leads to this kind of confessional poetry which gets worse and worse and more and more obscure. What does it amount to? Another strange adventure in the little world of me. I don’t buy that at all. No, I want to be the bard of a tribe, to tell the great, collective stories that bind us together, but, of course, I tell them as they’ve happened to me. Whatever is personal of mine, is most emphatically not in the poems as purely self-expression.

“Confessional poetry becomes very tedious after a while. The poetry I want to write and that I enjoy reading articulates the joys and sorrows of life. As to the jollity, I suppose I would say that anyone with lighter emotions who hasn’t experienced any pain is in danger of sentiment. I trust them about as much as I trust a Thomas Kincaid painting. You know, there’s a term Tolkien coined, eucatastrophe. Eu, meaning good, so a good catastrophe, but it still has the word catastrophe in it. In some sense, the eucatastrophe at the end of the Lord of the Rings is trustworthy because we’ve been with these characters to the very edge of the crack of doom. That’s why I trust the resurrection because the church doesn’t backpedal on Good Friday.”

From the Rabbit Room

The Great Other answers all.

quotes, reality, ,

“Propaganda is not primarily the art of lying; it is the art of psychological manipulation. It is primarily the art of directing attention. Propaganda ensures that you notice certain aspects of reality and not others. And what is more suited to that than a search engine? Google is nowadays the Great Other that answers all your questions.”

-Mattias Desmet

Beachy Head, England, 2005

 

St. Hilary of Poitiers

poetry, quotes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A SONG OF DAWN

From  heaven has fled the starry night,
And startled sleep has taken flight;
The rosy morn, uprising, spills
Her crystal light o’er vales and hills.

Soon as the earliest ray we see,
Our souls are lifted, Lord, to thee;
Dear God, to thee, our prayers we bring;
To thee rejoicing hymns we sing.

Lord, be our hearts and hopes renewed
In light and love and gratitude,
So may our deeds, illumed by thee,
Worthy thy love and glory be.

We praise thee, Lord, forevermore;
Thee, with the Son our souls adore,
And with the Spirit, three in one,
Reigning while endless ages run.

-St. Hilary of Poitiers (310 – c. 367)
Translated by Daniel Joseph Donahoe

St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers in France, is known by some as the Athanasius of the West, for his defense of Nicene theology. This was before St. Ambrose became Bishop of Milan and rose to similar prominence and more fame. He wrote on many topics, including theosis, as below:

We shall be promoted to a glory conformable to that of Him Who became Man for us, being renewed unto the knowledge of God, and created again in the image of the Creator, as the Apostle says, Having put off the old man with his doings, and put on the new man, which is being renewed unto the knowledge of God, after the image of Him that created him. (Col. 3:9-10) Thus is man made the perfect image of God. For, being conformed to the glory of the body of God, he is exalted to the image of the Creator, after the pattern assigned to the first man. Leaving sin and the old man behind, he is made a new man unto the knowledge of God, and arrives at the perfection of his constitution, since through the knowledge of his God he becomes the perfect image of God. Through godliness he is promoted to immortality, through immortality he shall live forever as the image of his Creator. (On the Trinity 11.49)

You can read more about St. Hilary here.
He is remembered in the East and in the West on January 13.

White is a Cloud Dancer.

art, beauty, quotes, , , ,

I ran across the news that Pantone’s choice for Color of the Year 2026 is WHITE! No, not just white, of course, but “Cloud Dancer” white. This is the first time they have chosen a shade of white as the color of the year. I’ve never heard about this practice before, in the 25 years that the company has done it, but that’s because the colors I am interested in are in my garden or my clothes closet, not in a lab.

I personally wouldn’t want to take too much time thinking about one shade of one color, because God has generously given us so many, all day every day, unless we are living in the Arctic. White is a color many of you are seeing a lot of already right now, and not on your walls. Have you thought about giving names to the different shades of snow you are shoveling, or watching fall outside your window?

It’s not because of my lack of snow that I take the trouble to post about this, but because of G.K. Chesterton. He probably wouldn’t think much of someone choosing a Color of the Year, but he did himself write about one color in particular, without regard to style or global trends. For him, it was not merely about things seen, but things unseen, the Cosmos and the Kingdom of God:

“White is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars.

“And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

“In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

-G.K. Chesterton, “A Piece of Chalk,” in Tremendous Trifles