Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

“the blinding, swollen present…”

“…he wished, as young men of decent birth should wish, to present the proper emotion on its right occasion.”

“Then he took the girl who awaited him there in both his arms, and kissed her twice—first her hands and then her lips, for respect should come first and ardour second.”

“all of you recognize the features of the Last Man. We’ve seen more of this type as the years have progressed. Men with dead eyes, passive mannerisms, and docility to life itself.”

Contrasted with the new man, who lusts after all the pleasures of the modern world.

“All my time living inside of my own head made me blind to the world, and then I acted surprised when I could not make sense of anything.”

“I had no ability to lie to myself. I would have slept with her sober, and I knee that this would be a regular occurrence now. On the bed was my Liturgy of the Hours, unused for the night.”

“Will you say nothing? Where is your spirit, Last Man? You can command and fly the skies, yet did you lose the will to do so? You could afford to feed a dozen children, and yet prolonging your line has become a negotiation.”

“How are you going to navigate life when you don’t even know who you are? You don’t understand your own people, and therefore don’t understand yourself…”

Of all the products that modernity produced, the most prevalent remained the weakling.

“…now, in truth, I pity far more the man who takes joy in his wickedness, than the man who can hardly bear it when some pernicious pleasure is scraped away, and he loses a felicity that is miserable.”

“I sought for something to love, loving to be in love…”

“And so I polluted the springs of friendship with the filthy things I craved…I hurled myself into love, longing to be taken captive.”

Nothing is ever truly grave for those incapable of loving

“he gazed with respect on this woman who carried within her body the future sole master of innumerable pines.”

A letter expresses not so much our real feelings as those that we have to feel so that it will be read with pleasure.

“…those with “hearts on their sleeves” don’t have a story.”

Long ago he had acknowledged the truth of Bishop Torfinn‘s words: the man who is bent upon doing his own will shall surely see the day when he finds he has done that which he never willed.

Olav encounters Christ Crucified

“Suddenly he bent over his wife and cautiously touched with his lips the moist, open sores on her thin shoulder blades; he had recalled something he had heard–of holy men who kissed the sores before they bound up the lepers whom they tended…He accused her of nothing now.”

The man was not thinking so much of his child. He wept chiefly over himself–it was as though he saw the last remnant of his honour and his pride lying crushed beneath his feet.

“I know this slaying was a small matter in the beginning–had I declared it at once. But I took the wrong road at the start–and now the guilt has grown, and I see that it will go on and breed new guilt. And now I must turn about…else I shall become the worst of inhuman wretches.”

“I go to mass as often as I have the means to come thither, and two or three times a day when I am in the town. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind and all thy heart, we are told–methinks God must know I do so–I knew not that such love was within the power of man until I myself abandoned his covenant and lost Him!”

“He searched in their leather bags, did not find what he wanted, and opened another bag. There he came upon some little garments–they might have fitted a child of four years. Unconsciously his eyes fell upon his wife–Ingunn’s head was bent and her face was red as fire. Olav said nothing, packed the bag again, and went out.”

Olav’s affairs seem less significant when at war, surrounded by death and vice. Can be good and bad.

(After Benedikt describes Limbo)
Olav interrupted,”Then meseems, Sira Benedikt, that many a man might be tempted to desire he had died an infant and unbaptized.”
The priest replied:”It is so ordained, Olav, that in our baptism we are called to a great inheritance. And we must pay the price of being men.”

… For the sake of the woman who had been given into his hands while both were yet little children. And he would protect her and love her, as he had protected her when a boy and loved her since first he knew he was a man–and if he got no happiness with her, since she could never be aught but a sick and useless wife, that made no difference, he now realized–he would love her and protect her to her last hour.

Ingunn came in and stood at her table. She made a cross with her knife on the loaf before cutting it up.

White horses and too fair wives are not for country folk, for they have no time to watch them.

The Christian faith had been to him a power like the king and the law of the land – he knew that it was to govern his life, and he bowed to it, without reluctance, with reverence and with the recognition that a man must be loyal to all these things if he was to be able to meet his equals, and look them freely in the face without shame.

God sees my heart, and he knows it. But he knows, too, I ween, that the hardest thing you can require of a man is that he shall not avenge his kinswoman’s honour with the sword… I tell you, Olav, the man who can forgive such a thing from his heart, him I would call a Holy man.