Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? – our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.
— Annie Dillard (1999, 30)
The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me.
— Scholem 1946, 350
Tomorrow? Why not today?
… and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning.
— John 15:27 (RSV)
In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
— John 1.1
Can you bear witness to that? Why not? You’ve been here from the beginning.
And certainly you’ve heard this one before:
We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.— T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’
The scroll is rolled up, and rolled out again: e-volution. The seed unfolds itself: de-velopment. These are time-lapse views of dis-covery, re-creation of original nature that was, and is, and will be, revealed and concealed in its implicit intricacy.
Good and timely post. So many of my friends and relatives and colleagues are depressed by what’s happening politically-economically-socio-culturally-ecologically in the world today.
So I put a link to Turning Signs on my Facebook page today, adding the Annie Dillard quotation above in my comment section.
Reading TS is, as I once wrote off-list, for me therapeutic.