Page 330 "Father Revenant, do you realize what you're saying?"

[...that man was surrounded by a fearful void, he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meanings. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, "Why do I suffer?"]    -Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Friedich Nietzsche

 

From page 330 of the book:  You may ask, "Father Revenant, do you realize what you're saying?" ...Suffering is, my friends. I've been suffering most of my adult life. Up here," he pointed to his temple. He faced our half of the nave. "So I know what I'm talking about. Friedrich Nietzsche said that the crying question with us all is, 'why do I suffer?' Well, Friedrich, you suffer because you know the possibility of joy without Christ, of salvation without Christ. It's an option if we could only be better than what we have been. I'm a priest and I'm telling you it's possible."

Revenant continued, "look at Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Look at Crime & Punishment.  Why suffer?  Why suffer?!  Because suffering is the only cause of consciousness, my friends.  And as the Russian said, when we are going 'through the terrible furnace of doubt,'" and he looked directly, gothically at Owen, "'we are capable of anything.'  I think that’s pretty good.

Heroes of mine: Fyodor Dostoyesky & Marcel Proust

[An additional comment from Proust, if you don't mind--
"...brief though our life may be, it is only while we are suffering that we see certain things which at other times are hidden from us; we are, as it were, posted at a window, badly placed but looking out over an expanse of sea; and only during a storm, when our thoughts are agitated by perpetually changing movements, do they elevate to a level at which we can see if the whole law-governed immensity which normally--when the calm weather of happiness leaves it smooth--lies beneath our line of vision..."]

Page 327 "...brought to mind Andy's telling me about Kingsley versus Newman."

Charles Kingsley

Cardinal John Newman

From page 327 of the book:  They brought to mind Andy McLean's telling me once about Kingsley versus Newman; Andy, even while intoxicated and deep inside the west Village, still couldn't get away from being Irish and being Catholic; even while drunk. The interesting facet to Andy's report was that he had taken the Anglican Kingsley's side against the Cardinal. He said he'd been doing that all his life, unable to leave his faith behind him and move onto better things. He would invariably, without fail, take sides against his faith while refusing to give it up.



The following is excerpted from Controversies: High Level Catholic
Apologetics by Karl Keating. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001:

"The January 1864 issue of Macmillan's Magazine included a review of the 7th and 8th volume of J.A. Froude's History of England. The review was signed only with the initials "C.K."  The identity of the reviewer might have remained unknown to the general public if the writer had not included two sentences that were to ensure his lasting fame.  Were it not for 30 words, Charles Kingsley, professor of history at Cambridge, popular novelist, and anti-Catholic, would be known today only by specialists in Victorian studies.  He had the personal misfortune of penning a charge that was to induce the greatest work of its kind since Augustine's Confessions.  He imprudently wrote: 'Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it
need not, and on the whole ought not to be.'
 
"Kingsley's review in Macmillan's Magazine precipitated a lengthy correspondence: Newman writing first to the publisher; Kingsley answering and identifying himself as the reviewer; Newman telling Kingsley that he was amazed that a man of his reputation should make such a charge against the Catholic clergy; Kingsley replying that he appreciated the tone of Newman's letter, which
'makes me feel to my very deep pleasure that my opinion of the meaning of your words was a mistaken one,' and back-handedly apologizing in a proposed letter to the editor in which he expressed his 'hearty pleasure at finding Newman on the side of Truth, in this, or any other, matter.' So it continued, with Kingsley conspicuously failing to substantiate his charge."

Both men published pamphlets outlining what their
arguments were.  Kingsley wrapped up his pamphlet by
stating:

"I am henceforth in doubt and fear, as much as an honest man can be, concerning every word Dr. Newman may write.  Yes, I am afraid that I must say it once more--Truth is not honoured among these men [Catholic priests] for its own sake."

Newman put forth: "A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem,
of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a particular answer is the true one."

(That is, Catholics need not abandon their faith on realizing they cannot explain all of it to their opponents' or their own satisfaction.)

Page 324 "I'm on my way to Biarritz... and came across this book by Count Adolphe de Chambrun."

 Biarritz, in southwestern France, near the Spanish border.

the English version of the book Father Banier gives to Walter: "Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War" by Marquis Adolphe de Chambrun (a descendant of Lafayette)

From page 324 of the book: I'm on my way to Biarritz. And I came across this fascinating book by Count Adolphe de Chambrun." He handed me a sealed manila envelope stuffed with the weight of a hardcover book. "It's a first edition copy of his diary when he was in America, during your Civil War. He traveled with Abraham Lincoln and wrote all about it. It's all in there," he tapped the envelope.

From page 326 of the book: Stopping, I read a few lines and translated, wondering what Owen would say when I told him about de Chambrun observing Lincoln on April 8, 1865, standing on the deck of a boat, looking at the Virginia hills along the Potomac, his face dark and silent, six days before he was murdered. What must de Chambrun have thought of us?! 

 

An excerpt from de Chambrun's recollections:

Tuesday, April 11, 1865.  "When the President saw us enter, he rose impulsively, came forward and took my hand, which he held in his own a long time as though better to show his pleasure and affection at seeing me again. ...He spoke at length of the many struggles he foresaw in the future and declared his firm resolution to stand for clemency against all opposition. ...I did not stay too long, in order to let him rest, and escorted Mrs. Lincoln down to the parlor where she habitually receives. Mrs. Lincoln...spoke with quiet confidence of the future and showed great satisfaction and pride in her husband's success."

"Our party [aboard the Silver Queen, a 536-ton steamer] dispersed on arriving at the Potomac wharf. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln and I drove home in the same carriage. As we drew near Washington, Mrs. Lincoln...said: 'That city is full of enemies.' The President on hearing this, retorted with an impatient gesture: 'Enemies, never again must we repeat that word.'"

Page 319 "I watched his father, seeing him as Anchises, and then looked at Owen, seeing him as Aeneas."

Raphael's "Aeneas Carrying Anchises Out of Troy" (1514)

Two sides of a Roman coin, 2nd century A.D., depicting Aeneas (on the right) carrying his father out of Troy.

Pierre il le Pautre, "Aeneas Carrying His Father," 1716, marble, height 264 cm, Tuileries Gardens, Paris

From page 319 of the book: Owen turned to me, and then toward his father, watching as the man, hunched over because of the strain on his legs and heart, made his way to where we stood. As we stood by the shores of Troy, I watched his father, seeing him as Anchises, and then looked at Owen, seeing him as Aeneas. I heard the low rumblings, like thunder, of the gods who waited around us in the ground, in the bushes, and in the clouds. I heard them complain about us. I knew we had nothing to do with the way the world worked, but the subterranean noise was a constant storm of disagreeable, roaring sounds. I was feeling guilty for the fall of man. When Owen's father stood in front of him, a smile on his face, he held up his arms.

Page 316 "...bringing up a passage from Simone de Beauvoir, whose writings I recently consumed."

Simone de Beauvoir's very famous, controversial, and widely acclaimed book.

de Beauvoir with American novelist Nelson Algren.  I love these two people.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir  (yes, she's one of my heroes)

From page 316 of the book:  My reactions to his calm were contradictory and confusing.  What was he going to do?  While I resumed my pacing along the top of the unstable wall, I originally took the sophisticated track, bringing up a passage from Simone de Beauvoir, whose writings I recently consumed.  She felt fidelity was reserved for those who needed to bestow mutilation upon themselves.  She explained, during the 1950s, how men and women were beginning to conclude much the same as she and Sartre did; that is, maintaining some degree of fidelity while embarking on individual deviations. 

Page 313 "The mukhannath were a caste of professional homosexuals in Moslem court culture."



Images above depict transgender males, either eunuchs or transvestites, in ancient near east civilizations.



From page 313 of the book: "The mukhannath," began Ebert, "were a caste of professional homosexuals in Moslem court culture. Around the 10-century, they wrote poetry, sang, performed dances, painted. Such perfumed, ear-ringed, coiffed effeminate men kept culture alive, at the sultan's court, in spite of all the killing and destruction that the empire was famous for. Thanks to them, Islamic culture was improved upon at a time when it might have fallen, like the Dark Ages of Europe. It was brought to new heights by the very people whose existence the Moslems would eventually outlaw.

Pages 311-12: "...in the graveyard Ebert came upon him reading Goethe's "Elective Affinities"



Still from the Taviani brothers' 1996 film of "Elective Affinities"




Movie poster for the film



1811 illustration of characters from the novel

Recent book cover for Elective Affinities

Portrait of Goethe, 1828, by Stieler

From pages 311-312 of the book:  "Seeing Sarah and Mme. Cendre together, and the tear-falling exuberance that Sarah felt for the old woman, gave me pause to reflect on how changed Sarah was, on how lovely both these women, at opposite ends of the age spectrum, looked and felt and talked. I thought of the book Owen was reading at the time of our arrival here in the Vaucluse, when in the graveyard Ebert came upon him reading Goethe's Elective Affinities, and I thought of the young ward, Ottilie, who falls in love with the lord of the manor, and I remembered trying to identify her emotion, which was head-over-heels in love times ten, and knowing the emotion was so strong that it overcame her ability to express it, to eat, to sleep, to function normally.  And I remembered how she began to shake, she cried, she was besotted by the terror of her love."


(From Michael Dirda, Barnes & Noble Review.com--  "Elective Affinities" refers to the chemical attraction of elements.  [It] is, above all, an elegant book, with something of the stylized formality of a baroque opera by Gluck or one of Watteau's paintings.... The modern reader will need to slow down to appreciate its somewhat austere beauty. The narration is unemotional, heavily descriptive, and by contemporary bestseller standards, even somewhat colorless and flat. ...Goethe keeps his overall tone serenely august.)

Page 310 "It was a song made popular by Frederic Mistral..."

Young Frederic Mistral

Mistral in later life

Alphonse Daudet & Frederic Mistral, 1900

The award-winning Frederic Mistral Rose.
Also known as The Children's Rose

From page 310 of the book:  Marie Cendre, a changed woman since her friendship with Sarah, clapped rhythmically to our entrance, and sang in a throaty, old woman's voice:

Nous sommes des amis, des frères,
Étant les chanteurs du pays!
Tous des amis, joyeux et libres,
De la Provence tous épris...

It was a song made popular by Frederic Mistral and his friends, celebrating the life of the Provençals. She held Ebert’s hand affectionately, as he sat down beside her. He accepted a glass of wine from Sarah.

(Translation: "We are friends, brothers/Being country crooners/All happy and free/In Provence all are in love.")

Page 304 "...Robert the Pious was talked about..."

Tomb of Robert the Pious

Painting depicting the excommunication of Robert the Pious

From page 304 of the book:  I wondered if on these very steps Robert the Pious was talked about; how he had been forced by the pope to give up the woman he loved and return to the woman he was forced into marrying in order to keep the crown and himself from continued excommunication.  He had died broken-hearted and everyone all over France had grieved for the love of their king.  Marriage and love haven't changed much over a thousand years.  Perhaps Ebert or his characters would say it has become worse.

Page 303 "...it was widely believed...that Mary Magdalene...had come to the Mediterranean coast..."

Cave of Mary Magdalene, in Languedoc-Rousillion, France

Inside the Cave of Mary Magdalene

From page 303 of the book:  Father Revenant once told me it was widely believed in Southern France that Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, had come to the Mediterranean coast of France to bring Christianity to the Gauls. He found it stretched one's faith when the country folk of the 10th century added Lazarus to the story, and said it would take more than a couple of old God-enshrouded Galilean women to bring the effort any tangible success.


[Photos are courtesy of Lee Howard.  (c) 2099. Used by permission.  You can visit the photostream at Flickr by clicking here.]

Page 296: "the still, sad music of humanity."

From page 296 of the book:  "Yes, you've made me very sad," Revenant repeated. "You know, I see the tears of Christ each time that I look into the soul of a desperate man. When I hear confessions I don't just tally the sins and hand out penance like Meroux distributes the meat across the counter, 'hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity,'" the priest replied, chanting a quote from Wordsworth.

[Following is an excerpt from...
COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798.  (William Wordsworth)]

If this
      Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft--                       
      In darkness and amid the many shapes
      Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
      Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
      Have hung upon the beatings of my heart--
      How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
      O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
      How often has my spirit turned to thee!
        And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
      With many recognitions dim and faint,
      And somewhat of a sad perplexity,                              
      The picture of the mind revives again:
      While here I stand, not only with the sense
      Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
      That in this moment there is life and food
      For future years. And so I dare to hope,
      Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
      I came among these hills; when like a roe
      I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
      Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
      Wherever nature led: more like a man                           
      Flying from something that he dreads, than one
      Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
      (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
      And their glad animal movements all gone by)
      To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
      What then I was. The sounding cataract
      Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
      The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
      Their colours and their forms, were then to me
      An appetite; a feeling and a love,                             
      That had no need of a remoter charm,
      By thought supplied, nor any interest
      Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
      And all its aching joys are now no more,
      And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
      Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
      Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
      Abundant recompence. For I have learned
      To look on nature, not as in the hour
      Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes                   
      The still, sad music of humanity,      Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
      To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
      A presence that disturbs me with the joy
      Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
      Of something far more deeply interfused,
      Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
      And the round ocean and the living air,
      And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
      A motion and a spirit, that impels                            
      All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
      And rolls through all things.

Page 348 "Revenant brought us to a large boulder about the size of a small chair."

From page 348 of the book:  In one lane of trees, Revenant brought us to a large boulder about the size of a small chair.
 "We have to move this," he said.
 "What?" Ebert exclaimed, coming up along side of him.
 "We have to move it; exactly one foot."
 "Are you crazy?" said Ebert.
 "No, I'm not crazy.  We're five men.  We can do it.”
 I looked at Ebert, Revenant, and Shanzenbach, old and intoxicated.  If we tried to move that rock they'd suffer hernias and collapse.  We'd have three dead men on our hands.
 "Let Owen and me do it," I said.
 "It's a heavy one," the priest said.  "Faites attention!"
 Because the rock was merely resting on the top soil and dried grass, Owen and I, hands and shoulders to the hard, settled mass, had little difficulty sliding it over a foot or more.  Moving the rock revealed an 18-inch diameter hole that penetrated down deep into the earth.

[From Mark 16:3  "They were saying to one another, "Who will roll this stone away for us from the door of the tomb?"]

 

 Furthermore, below is a YouTube connection to the Leon Russell song, "Roll Away the Stone"

 

Page 232 "My comrades and I destroyed a little place outside of Biskra."

A market in Biskra

Roman ruins outside Biskra

From page 232 of the book:  "...My comrades and I destroyed a little place outside of Biskra. It was supposed to be a French army intelligence post. It wasn't. They were all civilians. We killed most of them. They had nothing to do with the war, the poor saps. Whole families were burned alive in their houses. Just shot up and burned out. It was a mess. Your country thought My Lai was a disaster." He shook his head and at last lit his half-cigar. "Americans were such innocents. We left and drove south to Tozeur and Touggourt. When I came back to that town, assigned to a reconnaissance unit, I realized what had been done. These were French people. They were Algerians. They were my brothers, Owen, I murdered my brothers."

Mountains just north of Biskra