I

~~~

I found a poem for _

[you]

Fox. 

Because the past is long right now. And we're always disappearing. Do you remember?
It's in a book, trapped, planning its escape. This isn't it. When I have the time. 

~

I said to D: Your mind is all over the place; if you could just concentrate on one thing you could achieve greatness. D said: There's no time for that, it's over. The moment was there, then it was gone.

So, I said, Your mind has been all over the place; if you just could have concentrated on one thing you could have achieved greatness. The moment was there, then it was gone.

~~

I found Paradiso to be a short but profound book. People often recommend a book by saying "check this out" but, sometimes, a book can check you out! Whereas Fermor, with all his sublimely beautiful prose, writes of religious experience as an outsider looking in, Gillian's book is quite the opposite. 

Her other work you couldn't make head or tail of. But here there's a kind of simplicity, one borne, you suspect, of the pressing need to avoid the dross and get to the heart of matters. This is a short book but in truth it is a long one. Not something that one can honestly say one has 'finished'. There are words and passages that you have to let sink in. I suppose you'll either be instinctively drawn to it or you won't.

For example:

Thou has covered me in my mother's womb.

This Hebrew news holds me and lets me go free, whereas the Greek aspiration to return the soul to its divine source fetters me for aeons in a body cursed and to be abandoned. 

Here there is a deep sense of trust, an acceptance of mystery. I found that line from Psalm 139 moving.

Elsewhere in the book there is reference to the biblical:

All souls are mine.

I don't know what the traditional way of reading this is.In one sense I'd like to believe it is an affirmation of divine unity. What, then, are our souls but distant, faded, November morning mirages? But I'd also like to read it from a radical perspective: basic equality and the lack of distinctions, as if to say: why do we continue to think in terms of privilege, hierarchy, the rich and the poor, the blessed and the damned, Muslim and non-Muslim?

There is a remarkable serenity to the writing (especially when she discusses her cancer) but also a sense of joy, new beginnings (when she describes a Jewish wedding).

On Augustine: to lead a whole life of integrity and brokenness. That was a stunning thought..what would it be like to live a life of brokenness?