Vanessa Johnson’s Reviews > Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets > Status Update
Vanessa Johnson
is on page 121 of 148
"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."
— Feb 15, 2025 07:15AM
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Vanessa’s Previous Updates
Vanessa Johnson
is on page 105 of 148
"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.'"
— Feb 13, 2025 07:19AM
Vanessa Johnson
is on page 78 of 148
"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."
— Jan 10, 2025 08:12PM
Vanessa Johnson
is on page 72 of 148
"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."
— Jan 05, 2025 06:16AM
