iosephvs bibliothecarivs > Recent Status Updates

'No one could build an abbey overnight. [The Cistercians] who laid the foundations needed a loving belief in a brighter future and a patient sense of self-sacrifice, since they knew they would never see the end product of their labours. Their keen sense of the endless, fluctuating passage of time gave them immortal longings, and made them unusually industrious.'

'The Challenge Episode appears to us as a series of humiliations and discomfitures for the court which we feel as more comic than tragic. Despite the fact that the challenge is successfully met, the Green Knight departs from the scene as the victor in a kind of psychological warfare.'

'Nature moves in mysterious ways, not all of them natural.'

2/2 'But there are some keen ironies here. We think of Bede as one of the first great English authors, yet he wrote in Latin. He is notably fussy about facts, yet believed fervently in miracles. And though we think of him as a literary pioneer, he was preoccupied with the past and took history as his theme.'

'The cultural impact of [Bede's] work is hard to overstate. For instance, it is chiefly thanks to him that England is so called, as a different monk might have seen things from a Jutish or Saxon perspective, rather than the Anglian angle. And it was Bede's use of 'anno domini' to describe the years after the birth of Christ that established this as the accepted notation.' 1/2

2/2 'This is well known to everyone, everyone who allows himself/herself to be open to and so touched by a work.... There is the whispered, rather worrying but unmistakable feeling that this is specifically for you and about you - even if it by no means fits into your life with all neatness. In a vague but nonetheless palpable sense, the thing sings your song.'

'By some curious alchemy, [The Seventh Seal] seemed not only to speak to my condition with a precision that was almost hallucinatory, it said what I would have said could I have articulated and organised it by myself.' 1/2

'Generally the screen was for entertainment: for the real stuff of thought you opened a book. Bergman upended all that in the one film.'

'Bergman has a deep seriousness about intense emotional relationships which I find sympathetic and with which I find it easy to identify.'

'We must take him at his word and see The Seventh Seal from the outset as Bergman's attempt to keep... the link between creation and worship and the link between the mid-twentieth century, the Middle Ages, the New Testament and much deeper into the past.'

2/2 'Now that God is gone, I feel that all this is mine; piety toward life, humility before my meaningless fate, and love for the other children who are afraid, who are ill, who are cruel.'

'My parents spoke of piety, of love, and of humility. I have really tried hard. But as long as there was a God in my world, I couldn't even get close to my goals. My humility was not humble enough. My love remained nonetheless far less than the love of Christ or of the saints or even my own mother's love. And my piety was forever poisoned by grave doubts.' 1/2

'The grounds we offer for our behavior poorly reflect actual motives. In Pascal's elegant phrasing, "The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing."'

'The curry arrived and I focused my attention on it. Mother had grown tired of the lecture, and asked Dad to talk about something else. "But the world is about to end!" he said. He was shouting now. "Of course it is," Mother said. "But let's not discuss it over dinner."'

'I would rather have sat in the organ loft, but the pastor's wife was in the advanced stages of pregnancy and I couldn't possibly squeeze past her.'

2/2 'I asked questions, he answered, taking his time, occasionally 'phoning to say he could not attend some morning meeting, then sitting down and having yet another cup of coffee. That singularly modulated voice spoke from a lifetime with Shakespeare, about discoveries, adversities, insights and experiences.'

I didn't know my favourite director and favourite actor crossed paths!

1/2 'Practically every morning, I met Lord Olivier at breakfast. For me, it was instructive. [He] held seminars over our cups of coffee and lectured me on the subject of Shakespeare. My enthusiasm knew no bounds.

'Life has precisely the value one puts on it.'

2/2 'So punishments were something self-evident, never questioned. They could be swift and simple, a slap over the face or a smack on the bottom, but they could could also be extremely sophisticated, refined through generations.'

'Most of our upbringing was based on such concepts as sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness and grace, concrete factors in relationships between children and parents and God. There was an innate logic in all this which we accepted and thought we understood.' 1/2

'My father had the rare ability to make others feel as though they were the *one and only*. That they were seen, heard, chosen. He would take you by the hand and say, *Come with me*, and for a brief or a long moment you might think you were the first person he has ever said this to. That it was you and him against the world.'

'An old windmill... has been turned into a small apartment with... an enormous bed on the top floor. When my siblings and I were younger, bringing our girl- and boyfriends to Fårö for the summer, [it] was reserved for the newly-in-love.

"With some determined fucking," my father said, pointing to the four windmill blades that had remained motionless for the last hundred years, "the blades will start spinning again."'

'My father stares at the pope's coffin, a simple wooden box amidst all the pomp and circumstance. *I want one just like that*, he says to himself.'

'I will exercise caution in describing her. She will want to do that herself. Every once in a while she baffles me with a look so infinitely her, an *other* altogether, right in the midst of her childhood, relentless in its grip, and even though she will soon abandon it, or it will abandon her, it will follow her for the rest of her life.'