Status: Completed (326 pages)

Recommend: Yes

Review:

Good Quotes In all my years as a student and later as a university teacher I have observed that university terms tend to begin on a fine day. (pg 12)

"And so I did. Oh, yes indeed, I was a meteor in the world of the intellect when I still knew nothing about mankind, and nothing whatever about myself."
"That was the knowledge that brought you down?"
"It was my failure to combine those two kinds of knowledge that brought me down." (pg 31)

What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you - that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, 'Doesn't he look peaceful?' It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old. (pg 32)

Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi, simul leger libros dulciloquos, simul nugari et simul honestari
Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.
It's Saint Augustine's Confessions (pg 36-37)

It is not that I wanted to know a great deal, in order to acquire what is now called expertise, and which enables one to become an expert-tease to people who don't know as much as you do about the tiny corner you have made your own. (pg 38)

McVarish, on the other hand, possessed rather too much humour. People tend to talk as if a sense of humour were a wonderful adjunct to a personality - almost a substitute for common sense, not to speak of wisdom. But in the case of McVarish it was a sense of irresponsibility, a sense of the unimportance of anybody else's needs or wishes if they interfered with his convenience; it was a cheerful disguise for the contempt he felt for everybody but himself. In conversation and in the affairs of life he greatly valued what he called 'the light touch'; nothing must ever be taken seriously, and the kind of seriousness Hollier displayed was, so McVarish hinted pretty broadly, ill-bred. I like a light touch myself, but in McVarish's case it was too plainly another name for selfishness. (pg 42)

Gradually it came to me that the Imitation of Christ might not be a road-company performance of Christ's Passion, with me as a pitifully badly cast actor in the principal role. Perhaps what was imitable about Christ was his firm acceptance of his destiny, and his adherence to it even when it led to shameful death. It was the wholeness of Christ that had illuminated so many millions of lives, and it was my job to seek and make manifest the wholeness of Simon Darcourt [narrator]. (pg 56)

The priest and professor would function suitably if Simon Darcourt, the whole of him, lived in serious awareness of what he was and spoke to the rest of the world from that awareness, as a priest and professor and always as a man who was humble before God but not necessarily humble before his fellows. (pg 56)

What did Yeats say? 'How else but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?' (pg 57)

Didn't eat enough, which is not necessarily a path to holiness. How many visions of Eternity have been born of low blood-sugar? (pg 57)

Was this charitable thinking? Paul tells us that Charity is many things, but nowhere does he tell us that it is blind. (pg 58)

...the Rule said plainly: Everybody is clever enough for what God wants of him, and strong enough for what he is set to do, if not for what he would like to be. (pg 72-73)

They could quote the Rule as well as I: You cannot seek God's will and your own too, unless your own is perfectly confirmed to it. If it be so, there will be no need to consider it, though if it not be, there will be much need to mortify it. (pg 73)

As for energy, only those who have never tried it for a week or two can suppose that the pursuit of knowledge does not demand a strength and determination, a resolve not to be beaten, that is a special kind of energy, and those who lack it or have it only in small store will never be scholars or teachers, because real teaching demands energy as well. (pg 87)

It's the saving of us all who live by the mind. We make a deal between what we can comprehend intellectually and what we are in the world as encounter it. Only the geniuses and people with a kink try to escape, and even the geniuses often live by a thoroughly bourgeois morality. Why? Because it simplifies all the unessential things. One can't always be improvising and seeing every triviality afresh. (pg 100)