Little Flower

   Today -- well, yesterday now -- is the traditional date of the celebration of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Carmelite nun born Thérèse Martin & who died unknown outside her community at the age 24, but knew before she died that she was going to be known across the globe.

    She embodies what's invisible, ungraspable outside the gambit of faith or the willingness to accept the gambit: that the real relations in the world are not at all what we can begin to calculate, even with the aid of all the nanocircuits across the globe and over it. A saint is someone who takes the Church & the world equally by surprise, as Sister Thérèse Martin did following her death. No clerics or prelates were asking for or pushing her as a saint; if anything, the theological & canonical experts could, at first, found what she wrote mundane and even a bit sentimental, put off by initial appearances.

All that is gold does not glitter
   Not all those who wander are lost,
The old that is strong does not wither,
   Deep roots are not reached from the frost --

  

a la recherche du temps perdu

   The value of time is unrealized until you realize that you've lost too much of it.

   What useless objects I spent so much of my time thinking about, the phantoms of history, both history to come & history adumbrated in our texts & pages. Power is squandered by seeking to influence the powerful, who are alien to my heart & to the things that I've loved. The one insight buried in the banality of George Lucas' 'Revenge of the Sith' is the transformation of Anakin from the idealist who so painfully wants to protect what he loves that he regards all who love him as a threat & becomes a destroyer.

    It's to be hoped one wakes up before losing three limbs & most of one's skin.