A Bit of This and a Bit of That
Thursday, February 9, 2006
Wednesday night, Lucia and Annamaria came over to watch movies over juice and cookies. Lucia seemed to be in quite a pleasant mood as usual, over school and work, and general living, (i.e. meeting Queen at McDonald’s) and was looking at school over the summer and fall, and then transferring to another school, perhaps the University of Chicago.
“Hey, Lucia,” Carrie called to her, “I found a great school for us to go to. In New York!”
“Y-ay!” Lucia exclaimed, ‘Let’s go!”
Friday morning, Collette found herself very tired. She couldn’t quite say why, but she felt as though the past several years had gained on her a little bit too much. She didn’t know if it would help a great deal, but she decided to try to fall asleep earlier that night.
“Vinitius no longer thought that there was nothing new in the teachings of the old man. He asked himself with amazement, ‘What sort of God is this? What sort of religion, what sort of people?’ All that he had just heard could not find lodgment at once in his mind. It was a jumble of new ideas. He felt that should he wish, for example, to embrace such doctrine he would have to sacrifice on a burning pile all his former thoughts, habits, character, and his very nature itself; that they would have to be burned to ashes, so that he might then fill himself with a new life and soul… He thought that the doctrine, in spite of its madness, yet there was impracticable, but because impracticable, it was divine. In his heart he rejected it and felt as if he were emerging from a meadow full of flowers breathing a perfume which intoxicated, which, when a man once inhaled he must, as in the land of the lotus, forget all else and yearn for it alone. It seemed to him that in the religion there was nothing real, but that at the same time reality compared to it seemed insignificant and undeserving of thought.”
– Quo Vadis, 2nd paragraph p. 160, 1897 (Collette’s and Rose’s book collection)