Simon Jacobson on “honouring thy father and thy mother”
The commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” is one that, one would like to hope, is usually relatively straightforward. Many of us (most of us?) can fairly easily…
Category: commonplace book
“My feeling was, the soul is startled by the telephone and never at ease in its presence” – From “Indecision”, Benjamin Kunkel
In the months before Ecuador I was all about The Uses of Freedom–or Der Gebrauch der Freiheit if you’re German. Late at night I would look at the words of…
Pentecost: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air
From Little Gidding, TS Eliot: The dove descending breaks the air With flames of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only…
In July my father went to take the waters
In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days. Just…
Denise Levertov, “Conversion of Brother Lawrence”
I particularly love the lines “your way was not to exalt nor avoid the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant” – which neatly summarises Brother Lawrence’s way of deceptive…
“A closed mind and know-it-allness are fundamentally forms of resistance to the truth of real things” – Josef Pieper on prudence
From “The Four Cardinal Virtues“: No man is altogether self-sufficient in matters of prudence’; without docilitas there is no perfect prudence. Docilitas, however, is of course not the ‘docility’ and…
“The Best Lack All Conviction, while the Worst / Are Full Of Passionate Intensity”
According to this article from August 2016, lines from Yeats’ The Second Coming were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in any of the prior…
“salvation would be easier for the clever and leisured than for the dull and busy”
From “Confessions of a Convert”. R H Benson: It had been put to me by my Superior that I was surely incurring the guilt of pride in venturing to set…
Séamus Sweeney 