http://ndapak.com/category/projects/region/pakistan/page/9/ I found this in Burton’s commentary to his Kasidah. The exclamation point I am sure is Burton’s. From Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua:
http://iowacomicbookclub.com/defau11.php To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of longstanding facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world” – all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely without human solution.
Burton says, “I cannot refrain from quoting all this fine passage, if it be only for the sake of its lame and shallow deduction.” (Newman uses this passage to prove the existence of Original Sin.)
One of those days. It’s extraordinarily beautiful here, but I cannot avoid the feeling today that all my hopes must miscarry. I see here also the flip side of the beauty: it’s great hiking weather, sunny and dry. But it’s been so dry for so long – the past forty days – that the seedlings are dead, the herbs are wilting, and even the trees have stopped growing. My raspberries have all aborted their fruits – the little fleshless cells hanging crisped up and down the stems.
Post a Comment