“it can come in happiness and in exaltation and it can come upon the poet in the form of [?] which forces him to fight again and again against his own deficiencies.”
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"Even just saying the name Jesus out loud makes me cringe. So many self-righteous, mean-spirited, and even truly evil people have cracked the name of Jesus like a whip that I'm ready to duck every time I hear it." --Kristin Ohlson, Stalking the Divine
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&.
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Oh, and N? The book's not bad. The narratives are sometimes too slow, lackluster, especially in light of what feels ought to be at the center of the book's poignancy but avoids itself: the depth of the search, which remains persistently too literal, too surface, all beauty of wimples and habits and poverty and mortification, all naivete about anything mystical or theological. She has no mind for mystery. Even her prose: rather lucid than lyric. But she often voices--wittingly and throughout--and this is something--what I've thought or felt most of my life in my worst moments, in my most skeptical, ungenerous, simple-minded, ignorant, apathetic, and self-congratulatory meanness. As when reading de Man with conviction.
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