The celestial traitress play,
And all mankind to bliss betray;
With sacrosanct cajoleries,
And starry treachery of your eyes,
Tempt us back to Paradise.
— Francis Thompson
A beautiful weekend at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA. It was a stint of solitude / quietude my soul had been craving since Las Vegas in September / October. In addition to being the First Sunday of Advent, Saturday was the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I carried in my rucksack two books— Tolkien: A Celebration edited by Joseph Pearce and The Accidental Garden by Richard Mabey.
A long quote from “Over the Chasm of Fire: Christian Heroism in The Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings” by Stratford Caldecott:
“Quest, of course, is one of the three or four ‘deep structures’ used by storytellers the world over. A Quest is any journey in which some difficult goal is to be achieved, some challenge must be met, some initiation has to be undergone, some place or object or person is to be discovered or won. The reason for its perennial popularity is obvious enough. It is just such a Quest that gives meaning to our own existence. We are not where (or whom) we wish to be: to get there it is necessary to travel – even if, as G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot knew so well, we travel only to arrive back at our beginning, ‘And know the place for the first time’ (Little Gidding). We read or listen to the storyteller, then, in order to orient ourselves for this journey within. We want to learn how to behave, in order to get where we want to go. Each of us knows, deep down inside, that our life is not merely a mechanical progress from cradle to grave; it is a search for something, for some elusive treasure. The same ultimate goal motivates us in both work and play. What the storyteller depends upon is a fact of human nature: that our imagination is always reaching out beyond the limits of the known and the evident, towards the infinity of what is desired. The Quest activates our nostalgia for paradise lost, our yearning for the restoration or fulfilment to come.”
A related quote from The Accidental Garden by Richard Mabey:
“The draw of home, which is the central theme of White’s writings, and especially of his The Natural History of Selborne, affected all manner of beings.”
Related
In Praise Of Limestone by W. H. Auden