More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame, they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; till they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey’s dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.
Seven Wise Men, he tells Gregory: here are their sayings. Moderation in all things, nothing to excess (those two are the same, wisdom can be repetitious). Know yourself. Know your opportunity. Look ahead. Don’t try for the impossible. And Bias of Priene: pleistoi anthropoi kakoi, most men are bad.
‘“Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgement difficult.” I think I have the sense of it.’
‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’
but the air as damp as if the afternoon had been rubbed with snails.
Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.’
He thinks of adding, our monarch wore white. Head to toe he shone. Like a mirror. Like a light.
If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone. When I was in Italy, he thinks, I saw
There is an indulgence granted to those who attend a Mass here, which all of us will need one day: it is called the Stairway to Heaven. St Bernard in a vision saw souls ascending, rung by rung into eternity; angels give them a hand to balance, as they hop off the last rung into bliss.
In stories, when you are in the forest you meet a lady, veiled and shrouded, and she asks you a riddle. If you get it right her clothes fall off at a glance. Her body glides into your arms, and her light merges with yours. But if you get it wrong she withers into a hag. She puts her hand on your member and it shrinks to the size of a bean.
But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.
