Close Calls With Nonsense

If you are a teacher of literature, and if you teach at an institution with a graduate program in literature, and if that graduate program has oral qualifying exams (a.k.a. generals), and if you have anything to do with those exams, and if those exams cover many fields and periods for all comers (rather than just the field in which a given student expects to specialize), then you will find yourself at some point reading or rereading works at least two centuries and one genre away from what you normally read or read, and you might remember with some small distress how long, or how difficult, some of those works can seem, but you might also discover, or rediscover, such wonderful passages as this one, from Julian of Norwich: it’s chapter V from “A Revelation of Love,” in which she has a vision of “our good lord”:

“And in this he shewed a little thing the quantity of an haselnot, lying in the palme of my hand as me semide, and it was as rounde as any balle. I looked theran with the eye of my understanding and thought: ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvayled how it might last, for methouight it might sodenly have fallen to nought for littlenes. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lastesth and ever shall, for God loveth. And so hath all thing being by the love of God.”

And then, also from the medieval list, Hugh of St. Victor, with sobering advice: “There are those who wish to read everything. Don’t vie with them. Leave well enough alone. It is nothing to you whether you read all the books there are or not. The number of books is infinite: don’t pursue infinity! Where no end is in sight, there can be no rest. Where there is no reast, there is no peace. Where there is no peace, God cannnot dwell. ‘His place,’ says the Prophet, ‘is in peace, and his abode in Sion.’” (Translated from the Latin by Jerome Taylor)