Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti
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Excerpt from Le Hussard. Poem by Alvaro Mutis
[…] The hundred-year-old must of wine, which is sprinkled with water in the cellars. The power of his arm and his bronze shadow. The stained-glass window that recounts his loves and recalls his last battle darkens a little more each day under the smoke of lamps fed with bad oil. Like the howl of a siren Continue reading
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Night. Poem by Alvaro Mutis
Fever attracts the song of an androgynous bird, opening the way to the insatiable pleasure that branches out and crosses the body of the earth. Oh! the fruitless navigation around the islands Where women offer the traveler the fresh balance of their breasts And the terrifying sound in the hollow of their hips! The tender skin Continue reading
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Christian testimony – 2
When I started this blog, the idea of writing about the liturgy quickly came to me. Not to claim expert status, but to share my experience of what represents the heart of a Christian's life. So there were two paths that had to merge: I had to tell the Mass (and Continue reading
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On the stale air of our societies
"We are told that the air of the world is unbreathable. I agree. But the first Christians found every morning at their door an atmosphere saturated with vices, idols, and incense offered to the deities. For more than two hundred years they were relegated, slandered, and marginalized by the current of the social river that carried them away. Continue reading
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On totalitarian states
"Totalitarian states, which alternately use lies and violence (lies to cover up violence and violence to silence those who discover the lies), owe the greater part of their success to having paralyzed the forces of reaction against imposture and lies. This is on the moral level. Continue reading
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Speech by Donoso Cortes (1850)
"Regular armies are today the only thing that prevents civilization from being lost in barbarism. Today a new spectacle is presented to our eyes in history, new in the world: when, gentlemen, has the world seen, except in our own days, that we are moving towards civilization by arms and towards Continue reading
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Hannah Arendt on human life
Modern theories whose raison d'être is to confuse the nature of man and thus give him an overabundant belief in his person discuss this permanent confusion. This permanent confusion uses Simone de Beauvoir's thinking on human life. The permanent confusion, the uprooting, the infantilization... We must tell man that he Continue reading
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Unamuno on human life
"I don't want to die, no I don't want to, nor do I want to want to; I want to live forever, forever; and to live me, this poor me, that I am and that I feel myself to be today and here, and that is why the problem of the duration of my Continue reading
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Yeats on human life
“When I think of all the books I have read,” said Yeats, “of all the wise words I have heard, of all the anxieties I have given to my parents… of all the hopes I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for some Continue reading
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Simone de Beauvoir on human life
"To declare that life is absurd is to say that it will never have meaning. To say that it is ambiguous is to decide that its meaning is never fixed, that it must always be earned."* A formidable declaration of powerlessness draped in an expression of the will to power, or how envy must rule, govern life. This sentence is Continue reading
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Pascal on human life
And this extract from Pascal, admitted and forced intimacy: "When I consider the small duration of my life, absorbed in the preceding and following eternity, the small space that I fill and even that I see, lost in the infinite immensity of the spaces that I ignore and that ignore me, I am frightened and astonished to see myself Continue reading
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Tolstoy on human life
This morning, I came across* — literally — this passage from Tolstoy's Confession which is a pure marvel and which so well announces The Death of Ivan Ilyich, written seven years later: "At first it seemed to me that these were gratuitous, misplaced requests. I believed that all this was already known, that if Continue reading
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The abandonment of Benedict XVI
"Eli, Eli lama sabachthani?" 1 When Benedict XVI signifies, in a few simple words, that he is renouncing the office of Pope, it is an earthquake that shakes the world and strikes Catholics. The most outlandish rumors are circulating and everyone is wondering about the causes of this decision which, even if it Continue reading
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The death of intimacy
Everywhere, on the Internet, in newspapers, or on television, personal experience is displayed, exhibited, and intended as a reference. This indecency is based on an inversion of values. It is founded above all and everywhere on the idea of the same. The idea of the same thinks: "I lived this, my experience reflects a universal feeling. I want to say what Continue reading