Spurious

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

Tsvetayeva, in a letter

Well, there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free—which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust—the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack.

Ionesco, interviewed

All the Way to Hell

The Fathers went to the desert in the spirit of repentance and surrender to the Lord. The Kingdom of God was their ultimate aim, purity of heart their proximate one. All the way to heaven is heaven, said Catherine of Siena, much later. All the way - and so they read scripture constantly. They sang the praises of God in liturgy. And they celebrated the new covenant with bread and wine.

And what of W., who was expelled into my desert, the desert of my stupidity? Did he ask to repent? Did he want to surrender? He reads - if not scripture, then books nearly as worthy, the great works of theology, of the philosophy of religion. He writes in his own way to celebrate the idea of the Messiah. But all the way to hell is hell, and a desert without a promised land is just that: hell.

Solitude: he knows that. Fasting: in his own way, he has fasted (since I ate all the manna). Self-denial: what has he done except deny himself? The renunciation of  ambition: it was taken from him, his ambition. I killed his ambition ... Ah, W. has all the virtues the Fathers admired ...

40 Years

40 years, W. says. It's that how long it'll be? 40 years of my idiocy ... 40 years of stupidity ... When will he be finally delivered from bondage? 

But he knows Moses died before he reached the promised land. Moses saw it, it is true, from the plateau of Mount Pisgah. The patriarch saw the fertile plains of Canaan, to which he was leading his people.

And W., who's leading no one? He sees only more desert, only the endlessness of my stupidity.

The Years of Tribulation

The desert of my stupidity. Will God become a pilgrim with W., just as He became a pilgrim with the children of Israel? Will God walk with W. to comfort him in the dark years of tribulation?

It was in the desert that God spoke to humankind. It was there where the comfort of man is absent, that God addressed the faithful.

But W. hears only the winds of idiocy and the wolf-howls of desolation. 

The Desert of My Stupidity

Where are we? Is this the desert? Is it the great and terrible wilderness that the Bible calls Sinai? Is it the sparkling sand of the Egyptian desert, with no grass for pasture?

This is the place where you come to be nothing but yourself. This is the place to know yourself as a creature solitary and poor, a creature utterly dependent upon God. This is the place of madness, the devil's refuge, where thirst and hunger will drive you mad ...

My stupidity: that's our desert, W. says. That's where we're stranded, W. says: in the desert of my stupidity.

The Pelican

The mythical pelican fed its young with its own blood. And with what has W. fed me but his own blood, his hopes and dreams? With what has he sustained me but his sense of what has been thought and what has to be thought?

Now the chick is big and must leave the nest. - 'Fly, fat boy, fly' ...

Engels

Of the two of them, they decided it was Marx who had the superior analytic mind, W. says. And so Engels worked to support Marx, who laboured in the British Library.

'There's a lesson in that', W. says. When we lose our jobs, I'll go out and dance for a living, and W. will stay at home, writing. There must be some money in my naked Shiva dancing.

In the Corner

I tell W. about my troubles with management. Perhaps I should make a stand. - 'Where did that get you last time?', W. says. 'Squatting in the corner with your trousers round your ankles'.

Lepers

'No one wants to talk to us, have you noticed that?', W. says. We're like lepers in the middle ages. Someone might as well be walking in front of us, ringing a bell.