More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I have understood, I think, Piero’s message, though its tidings are not of joy. It is at once more rational than joy and more beautiful. It is that you must seek a truth that lies beyond human concerns. I keep this with me as the days pass. The white birds on the water; the light slanting through the window. The man rising from his tomb, full of a terrible knowledge.
To live in a land that is so beautiful and so diseased is a form of torture.
The mania for the tangible is the predictable consequence of the intangibility of religious belief, though it has always bewildered me that it should be among the relics of the actual that the missing link between faith and reality is sought.
Once, our class was taken to see the hand of Margaret Clitheroe, which the Order kept preserved in fluid at their convent in York, and those girls who screamed were immediately given detention.
The modest spirit of St. Francis alone could not fill its barn-like spaces: it required the seasoning of art to flavor the bland atmosphere of pilgrimage.
Of what, precisely, are we meant to feel ashamed? Is their faith so fragile, so impacted, that the whole world must be silent while it is teased out?
ragù has given the Italian diet its manpower, its successful exports like spaghetti alla bolognese, the famous feat of engineering that is the lasagne.
How pleasant, to look at Raphael’s fond Madonnas and playful Christs and see only happy recollection there, not doomed foreknowledge!
Bramante got hold of the keys. He and Raphael went in to look. And what they saw, of course, was the preeminent artistic achievement of the Renaissance and perhaps of the whole history of art, past, present, and future.
The real wound has been uncovered. They become tearful. Why did we leave the house in England? Why?
What does she know of loss? What does she know of the skin that must be shed, the pound of flesh exacted in order to do and dare in this world?
Concerning a nun.
