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In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. —Aeschylus
He wondered why love had waited for this distance, waited for the moment when he need not touch, when the limits of contact and human surrender had dwindled to the size of a printed Mass card tucked in his wallet: In Memoriam … He knew. This grief was old.
Dyer stood up, undid the laces of Karras’s shoes and slipped them off. “Gonna steal my shoes now?” Karras muttered thickly. “No, I tell fortunes by reading the creases. Now shut up and go to sleep.” “You’re a Jesuit cat burglar.”
There’s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by a devil.”
Once Karras met God in this sight. Long ago. Like a lover forsaken, he still kept the rendezvous.
“Feeling icy hands? Oh, incidentally, your mother is in here with us, Karras. Would you like to leave a message? I will see that she gets it.”
“Incidentally, what an excellent day for an exorcism.”
The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops—which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our
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No, I tend to see possession most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites and misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives. Enough of these and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves … for ourselves.”
