Status Updates From Dove Descending: A Journey ...

"What might be glimpsed in serious astrology...or even LSD might well be a glimpse of something that is true at the center of things. The error lies not so much in the glimpse as in my fixing upon the glimpse as in some way salvific. The point is, hints and guesses are only hints and guesses. Flags. But to get there is the occupation for the saint. I cannot suddenly land there by popping a pill."

"Four Quartets takes Joy as seriously as did The Divine Comedy, and Saint John's Apocalypse. Joy is the very property of Reality, and it is really, truly there in the sense expressed in the carol In Dulci Jublio, whose lines culminate with 'O, that we were there, O, that we were there.'"

"The 'Dark, dark, dark'...is transfigured from being the fathomless black abyss of vacuity to being the ascetical Way to the Beatific Vision. Either of these two 'darks' is wholly calamitous to my distracted self: but the one is perdition, and the other is salvation."

"It is all about death, and the overwhelming chances of our missing our cues by distraction, and about the beatitude that is in the cards if we will gird up our loins and attend to the 'hints and guesses' that adumbrate that beatitude, and also about the dark interstellar spaces into which we may tumble through mere inattention."