Five-thirty and the sun is nearly up and the morning is loud. Birds and trains come streaming through the open windows. My sleep is off. For the first time in months I wake again at one or two believing it's time to be up. I panic, realize the room is warm, the couch is warm, that the soreness in my back has pulled me out of sleep. I moved to the floor this morning and eventually fell asleep with the alarm clock in my palm after grudging the last of the work weighing on me before the term officially ends. I thought of last night when I hugged a tired friend. "Ten years from now you're still going to hear the Brothers talking about friendship," he said later when he asked if I followed the talk. "It's central."
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"The end of artistic contemplation is the idea. But reducing the other to an idea? We all have the experience of people who want to love us ideally."
Fr. Didier Marie, "How experience can lead me to adore and to contemplate the first good i.e. God”
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"But Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting; they are the institutors of laws & the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical or susceptible of allegory, and like Janus have a double face of false and true."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"
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