Samara’s Reviews > Death Comes for the Archbishop > Status Update

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.

The old countries were worn to the shape of human life, made into an investiture, a sort of second body, for man.

He wished now that long ago he had had the leisure to write them down, that he could have arrested their flight by throwing about them the light and elastic mesh of the French tongue.

He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests...Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry 'Today, today', like a child's.

The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall
die of having lived.

Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.

He knelt, and Father Vaillant, having blessed him, knelt and was blessed in turn. They embraced each other for the past - for the future.

We have done the things we used to plan to do, long ago, when we were Seminarians - at least some of them. To fulfil the dreams of one's youth - that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.