"Have you ever noticed that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point? ... I mean this ... If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. ... But it's not only in questions of moral choice. Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another. Minds getting more and more spiritual, matter more and more material. Even in literature, poetry and prose draw further and further apart."
Written circa 1943. Is he on to something?
Is one more likely to feel like that if one is getting advanced in life?
Please, no long addresses on Evolution.
5 comments:
Only since the Enlightenment.
Dear Father The great Dom Prosper Gueranger writing in The Liturgical Year for Monday within the Octave of the Ascension observes:
Add to this joy these heavenly spirits must have experienced at seeing the immense multitude that accompanied Jesus from earth to heaven. These, according to their respective merits, were divided among the various choirs, and placed on thrones left vacant by the fallen angels. Their bodies are not yet united to their souls, but is not their flesh already glorified in that of Jesus?
When the time fixed for the general resurrection comes, the trumpet of the great archangel will be heard and then these happy souls will again put on their ancient vesture, the mortal made immortal.
Then will the holy angels, with fraternal enthusiasm, recognise in Adam's features a likeness of Jesus, and in Eve a likeness of Mary, and the the resemblance will even be greater than it was when our first parents were innocent and happy in the garden of Eden.
Dear Father I am writing a Primer on Creation. Here is what I have so far:
Some believe their progenitors were Gorillas in the mist
Some believe in life from nothing; we call them atheists.
Others trust the Bible; they believe Genesis is not a myth,
While boxers with broken teeth threaten others with their fyths
I certainly wouldn't agree that poetry and prose are drawing further apart. From Eliot through cummings and Ginsberg to contemporary poets, from Joyce through Woolf to writers of fiction today (particularly in German and French) I'd suggest the demarcation lines are more blurred than ever.
In music, the genres are completely cross-wired - a mixture of pop, avant-garde serialism, electronic music, tango often making it impossible to know how much (if anything) is intended as irony.
Yes, in the US "polarization" has been a common theme, particularly since the Obama Administration. Choices in certain matters are becoming increasingly binary, and it's increasingly easier to tell which side someone has chosen. However, I think this something mostly occurring in the West. There will ultimately be a final separation of the sheep and goats, in the global apocalypse. I think there are also localized prefigurements of this, which is what Westerners are experiencing. Satan is becoming bolder and more open -- ἀποκαλύπτειν means "to uncover or disclose."
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