The Spire

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

There ought to be some mode of life where all love is good, where one love can't compete with another but adds to it.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.

It's simpler to believe in a miracle.

His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.

But for all the feet that had trodden it, it remained ordinary dust, which seemed to make everything much sadder.

And dying is more natural than living, because what could be more unnatural than that panicstricken thing leaping and falling like a last flame beneath the ribs?

The folly isn’t mine. It’s God’s folly. Even in the old days he never asked men to do what was reasonable.

Father Adam!” But the little man said nothing, did nothing. He stood still holding the letter, and there was not even a change of expression in his face; and this might be, thought Jocelin, because he has no face at all. He is the same all round like the top of a clothespeg. He spoke, laughing down at the baldness with its fringe of nondescript hair. “I ask your pardon, Father Adam. One forgets you are there so easily!” And then, laughing aloud in joy and love— “I shall call you Father Anonymous!

He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.

The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, to hit the bottom yard of the pillars on the north side of the nave. Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how the individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral. Where the south transept lighted the crossways from a hundred and fifty foot of grisaille, the honey thickened in a pillar that lifted straight as Abel’s from the men working with crows at the pavement.

He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again.

Now to be precise. I had seen the whole building as an image of living, praying man. But inside it was a richly written book to instruct that man.