The corner where eternity clips time must be the point at which life has any meaning at all, and if she has touched it, then hasn't she somehow touched God?
The sailor who helped her draw a key to the islands spoke with authority like Christ. Yet she comes upon a new thing, a new island whose name she does not know. She labels it "Waiting for Sailor," as (for some reason) a name is necessary to a thing. Why? Again, it was Walker Percy who brought up this question in his essay Metaphor as Mistake. He spoke of the charm he found in some inadvertent misnomers of his childhood. Whenever he found some new spectacle, he had to know what it was called--something about not being able to truly appreciate the innerness of the thing without knowing its name. I don't know about all that; I think you could more or less still appreciate a thing without having a name for it. But, something still compels you to pin it down. I think it might be the fact that names are containers that allow you to hold (and express) all that you do know and feel about a thing. It aids communication. I admire those Ents in The Lord of the Rings whose "words" were as long as the entire history of the thing to which they referred.
In our text, the significance of the word itself is in the way it concretizes idea, as though it had been a word--the same word for which she awaits the sailor--that had called forth her islands from the sea.
Yet we suspect the idea must be realer than these diversions: stones, trees, sky. So she, as I, suspects fraud in all this material--"the world, a dream forced into my ear and sent round my body on ropes of hot blood." She tries looking past the sky to see the real, as we all must in some way and at some point. Because we know there's something behind the facade, and it galls that the illusion forces itself so convincingly upon the senses and disguises the real when we try to see it. The mind betrays; it's in on the fraud, and pretends that the sky really is the blue canopy that it appears to be. But, avoiding our inquisitive eyes, the real peeps out behind our backs. Like wave-particles, they resist the probe.
The earth, she writes, "fizzes up in trees." Yes, trees are a visible frenzy. Yet Julie Norwich's father must have overlooked the one that felled their plane. This god--let's call him November 19--was a cruel day. How can we wish for God when he stands back and watches us suffer--or worse, has a hand in our suffering? Who would want to have anything to do with a god like that? She calls him as she sees him: a "hounding and terrorist" god.
But God is good. We have to take it on faith, don't we?
Time itself can trick us into thinking all is well here. Even our bodies join the illusion and betray; for some days are fun days governed by "heyday" gods. But when we hurt, the body mutinies by translating all the pain to us and taking for itself none of the agony. It is we who bear all. So it turns out we are periodically disillusioned--we who are "connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone." And it is then that we are reminded that we don't really belong here.
The sailor who helped her draw a key to the islands spoke with authority like Christ. Yet she comes upon a new thing, a new island whose name she does not know. She labels it "Waiting for Sailor," as (for some reason) a name is necessary to a thing. Why? Again, it was Walker Percy who brought up this question in his essay Metaphor as Mistake. He spoke of the charm he found in some inadvertent misnomers of his childhood. Whenever he found some new spectacle, he had to know what it was called--something about not being able to truly appreciate the innerness of the thing without knowing its name. I don't know about all that; I think you could more or less still appreciate a thing without having a name for it. But, something still compels you to pin it down. I think it might be the fact that names are containers that allow you to hold (and express) all that you do know and feel about a thing. It aids communication. I admire those Ents in The Lord of the Rings whose "words" were as long as the entire history of the thing to which they referred.In our text, the significance of the word itself is in the way it concretizes idea, as though it had been a word--the same word for which she awaits the sailor--that had called forth her islands from the sea.
Yet we suspect the idea must be realer than these diversions: stones, trees, sky. So she, as I, suspects fraud in all this material--"the world, a dream forced into my ear and sent round my body on ropes of hot blood." She tries looking past the sky to see the real, as we all must in some way and at some point. Because we know there's something behind the facade, and it galls that the illusion forces itself so convincingly upon the senses and disguises the real when we try to see it. The mind betrays; it's in on the fraud, and pretends that the sky really is the blue canopy that it appears to be. But, avoiding our inquisitive eyes, the real peeps out behind our backs. Like wave-particles, they resist the probe.
The earth, she writes, "fizzes up in trees." Yes, trees are a visible frenzy. Yet Julie Norwich's father must have overlooked the one that felled their plane. This god--let's call him November 19--was a cruel day. How can we wish for God when he stands back and watches us suffer--or worse, has a hand in our suffering? Who would want to have anything to do with a god like that? She calls him as she sees him: a "hounding and terrorist" god.
But God is good. We have to take it on faith, don't we?
Time itself can trick us into thinking all is well here. Even our bodies join the illusion and betray; for some days are fun days governed by "heyday" gods. But when we hurt, the body mutinies by translating all the pain to us and taking for itself none of the agony. It is we who bear all. So it turns out we are periodically disillusioned--we who are "connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone." And it is then that we are reminded that we don't really belong here.
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