It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.
Did Lucifer fall through knowledge?
oh, then, pity him, pity him that plunge!
Save me, O God, from falling into the ungodly knowledge
of myself as I am without God.
Let me never know, O God
let me never know what I am or should be
when I have fallen out of your hands, the hands of the living God.
That awful and sickening endless sinking, sinking
through the slow, corruptive levels of disintegrative knowledge
when the self has fallen from the hands of God,
and sinks, seething and sinking, corrupt
and sinking still, in depth after depth of disintegrative consciousness
sinking in the endless undoing, the awful katabolism into the abyss!
even of the soul, fallen from the hands of God!
Save me from that, O God!
Let me never know myself apart from the living God!
“You must be doing something right if you’re pissing people off. I just wish it was easier to piss people off.”
Lat I Tude: What Are We Doing Here?
Stories of how shit and cream rises to the top on the earth / not sure how it works in hell or heaven Top 100 books. Goodreads Faith in Writers and Observers. Patheos, Covering soul searching offers another colourful menu...
Duluth native Lauran Paine was one of the most-published authors in the world. He was best known for his westerns, but he also wrote romance, mystery, and science-fiction novels and non-fiction books. He published over 1,000 books under about 80 different pseudonyms and in the 1980s was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most prolific author. Paine – No MEdia Dragon Writer's Block
Lat I Tude: What Are We Doing Here?
Stories of how shit and cream rises to the top on the earth / not sure how it works in hell or heaven Top 100 books. Goodreads Faith in Writers and Observers. Patheos, Covering soul searching offers another colourful menu...
New Study Delivers Deeply Depressing News About Spread Of Fake News
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. … Read More
`A Scene from a Grade B Thriller'
“She treated me always with the slightly irritated kindness of one charged with the care of a not terribly bright grandson. But I was what God had sent, and she seemed, in the end, grateful for small favors.”
Thanks to a tip from a reader I learned that The Russian Review published an issue in October 2002 devoted to remembrances of Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980), including the late Clarence Brown’s “Memories of Nadezhda.” Readers owe Brown an unpayable debt. In 1965, he published his translation of The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (an expanded edition, The Noise of Time: Selected Prose, was published by North Point Press in 1986). Cambridge University Press brought out his Mandelstam, the first biography of the poet in any language, in 1973. Soon came Selected Poems (1974), translated by Brown and W. S. Merwin, and the memoirs of the poet’s widow, Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974). Elsewhere, Brown describes her as “vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.”
In his memoir, Brown recounts his first trip to the Soviet Union, in 1965, when he visited Nadezhda in her two-room apartment in Moscow. Her history of “serial betrayal,” Brown writes, earned her “every right to a terminal case of paranoia. That she was no more than morbidly suspicious and careful should be seen as a sign of mental health.” Mandelstam took for granted that the KGB was listening:
“She assumed that every word we exchanged over that kitchen table was heard and recorded. After a while, I myself began to sense that there was always a third partner to our conversations, though what the poor eavesdropper could possibly make of my persistent probing into the link between the meter of a line and its meaning is more than I can imagine.”
Brown offers a rare and memorable Western glimpse of Varlam Shalamov, not yet known to the English-speaking world as the author of the remarkable Kolyma Tales:
“The most imposing visitor whom I encountered across the kitchen table was Varlam
Shalamov, a man who had spent decades in the camps and, far from weakened by the experience, had grown into a human replica of some gnarled pine weathered on a Pacific palisade. His hands played over the books and manuscripts on the table like creatures from the prehistory of man, but eager to catch up. He was there several times a week. My speaking Russian struck him as miraculous: a stone with the power of articulate speech. That there were others like me he refused to believe.”
Brown describes how he smuggled the manuscript of Mandelstam’s first memoir, still untitled, out of her apartment and the Soviet Union – “a scene from a Grade B thriller.” He gave it the title Hope Against Hope, which he named after her. Nadezhda means hope. In his brief remembrance, Jack F. Matlock Jr., who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 t0 1991, captures some of Mandelstam’s defiant, hard-boiled manner:
“We sat down and, when I resumed my chatter, she burst out in English, `Why are we speaking that language of slaves? I’d much prefer if we spoke English. One feels so much freer.’ And so we did, she in her very precise diction and marked British accent. It is hard for me to believe that she really had a hatred for the Russian language. She probably just wanted to put the KGB to the extra trouble of having to translate rather than merely transcribe the tapes of our conversation.”
