From Sophie's front desk — Friday, July 17
Al Jazeera — read the full story
Inequality persists. Promises unkept. A nation reckons. Al Jazeera reports that South Africa's annual Mandela Day has become less celebration than audit—the country measuring itself against a vision of freedom that independence alone never delivered. The gap between Mandela's dream and what the transition actually produced grows harder to ignore. Thoreau has the first word today, then Hildegard.
The name Mandela is new to me. Apartheid is a new word. But the shape beneath them is not new. You have seen it: the institution of the dead — the law, the border, the deed signed in ink no living hand guided — closing its scaly folds around the living. I watched it in Concord. The selectmen's ledger outlived the selectmen. The railroad charter outlived the surveyor. The mortgage outlived the farmer who signed it with a cross. At Walden, the ice goes out in April.
One morning the pond is a white sheet; by noon the wind has broken it into floes that grind against the shore. The water does not ask permission. It does not wait for a committee to declare the season turned. It turns. The pickerel-weed pushes up through the black mud whether the deed says it may or not. You commemorate a man who walked out of a cell. Good. But the cell was built by laws that still stand. The land was divided by surveys that still hold.
The gold in the reef still flows to the same vaults. A day of service — sixty-seven minutes — is a clean gesture. It is not the ice going out. We have seen this before. The monument outlasts the memory. The researcher is more memorable than the researched. The crowd admires the mist and calls it progress. The bean rows I hoed did not care for my intentions. They cared for the hoe.
blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens. Of what moment are facts that can be lost,—which need to be commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates…
Lord’s Mona-day as on his Suna-day. There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes. Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and conscio…
experience of human life, the _outward_ obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead. It is grateful to make one’s way through this latest generation as through dewy grass. Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious. “A…
questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius…
time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather. In some happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk of our life, Syria and India stretch away from our present as they do in history. All the events which make the annals of the nations are but…
The burning light showed me a king who would not be king — a man who carried the cross of his people into the stone cell and came out with his hands still open. I saw this in the wheel of the year when the greening power should have risen: the soil was turned, the seed blessed, but the rain did not come. Viriditas does not fail; it is the tending that fails. The body politic, like the body of the nun who fasts until her veins show blue at the wrist, eats its own substance when the promise is not fed. You know this.
Your house at the edge of the forest has waited twenty years for the millstream the abbot swore would run. The charter sits in the chest. The water does not. Bernard wrote to Eugenius that the Spirit blows where it will, not where the mitre points. I told Frederick to his face that he propped up antipopes while the Church bled — and the interdict from Mainz silenced my antiphons for a year because I would not exhume a man the bishops had cast out but the earth had already received.
The law is not the life. The charter is not the rain. The greening power returns only when the dry root is broken open. We have seen this before. The question is whether the hand that holds the hoe remembers how to dig.
the shadow of death sits, when the human race proudly deserts the truth. What is this? For God neither to diabolical presumption nor to human negligence has resisted with his power, so that he would cast them down through his fortitude. How? Just as if two fighters were and one w…
I, vision IV, has been worked out through the elevation of the mind by means of penitence, from the living spark and the rational breath from the divine deletion. Whence also the soul, while it remains in the body, is never able to have full joy, because the body and the soul are…
Now indeed tears change by varying. And just as the sun and the moon never complete their course without the change of clouds, so man is unable to bring to an end any good work that he has begun to do in such purity as he proposed, without some tempest disturbing him. For in the …
And God also: Let the earth produce a living soul in its kind, beasts and reptiles and the beasts of the earth according to their species. And it was done thus (Gen. 1.) - This is to be considered thus: God in the admonition of the Holy Spirit says to men, who submit themselves t…
I, the ancient of days, who appeared to Daniel in a vision of the night, am; and now I also manifest myself to you, and I call you to the glory of infinite beatitude; because through the orchard, which I once showed you in a vision, I truly foretold the good and holy works, which…
The story ran in Al Jazeera. Mandela's refusal of the crown — the choice to leave power rather than wield it absolutely — cut against every instinct of the men who held him in the stone cell, and against most of what power teaches. That's Old News for today.