Further Up and Further In

Having read through all seven volumes of Narnia again the final paragraph still brings me to tears, after all the adventures and all the friends along the way...

"And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

Campus wandering

The bicyclist

The Depth

"A descent into the depth will be indicated when the light of the truth has dimmed and its symbols are losing their credibility; when the night is sinking on the symbols that have had their day, one must return to the night of the depth that is luminous with truth to the man who is willing to seek for it.  The depth is fascinating as a threat and a charm- as the abyss into which man falls when the truth of the depth has drained from the symbols by which he orients his life, and as the source from which a new life of the truth and a new orientation can be drawn.  The return from the depth with a truth newly experienced, then, is symbolized as renovatio in the double sense of a renewal of truth and a renewal of man; the new man can experience the renewal of reality and truth with such intenseness that only the symbols of death and resurrection will adequately express it; the depth will become a dead point of consciousness beyond consciousness, so that the transition through the depth will have to be symbolized as a state of ecstasy or mania; when the new truth effectively constitutes a new social field, the event of its emergence will be considered to mark an epoch and to articulate the process of history by a Before and After..."

Eric Voegelin, Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History

The Bacchic Art

"If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds."

Socrates, in Phaedrus, 245a.

A'Falling