(in memory of George Latshaw,
who died on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006)
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Brightness Doubled Seven is Heaven “Love is the shadow Witness the man who — Roger Waters, quoted in |
“At Home in Landscape:
Mannheim’s Chiliastic Mentality
in ‘Tintern Abbey’“
Garrett comments on Wordsworth’s approach to landscape, citing Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (page numbers below refer to the 1998 Routledge edition):
“… ‘the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward, bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it’ [p. 193]. This breaking through into ecstasy can only be brought about through ‘Kairos‘ or ‘fulfilled time'”….
See translators’ note, p. 198: “In Greek mythology Kairos is the God of Opportunity– the genius of the decisive moment. The Christianized notion of this is given thus in Paul Tillich‘s The Religious Situation [1925, translation by H. Richard Niebuhr, New York, Holt, 1932, pp. 138-139]: ‘Kairos is fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded by eternity. But Kairos is not perfection or completion in time.'”
Garrett quotes Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue … (12.208-210)
“And in book 14 Wordsworth…. symbolizes how man can find transcendent unity with the universe through the image of himself leading his group to the peak of Mt. Snowdon. Climbing at night in thick fog, he almost steps off a cliff, but at the last instant, he steps out of the mist, the moon appears, and his location on the brink is revealed. Walking in the darkness of reason, his imagination illumed the night, revealed the invisible world, and spared him his life.”
See also Charles Frazier on the edge of eternity:
“They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness…. Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back….”
From Log24 on 7/15, 2005:
Christopher Fry’s obituary
in The New York Times—
“His plays radiated
an optimistic faith in God
and humanity, evoking,
in his words, ‘a world
in which we are poised
on the edge of eternity,
a world which has
deeps and shadows
of mystery,
and God is anything but
a sleeping partner.'”
Accompanying illustration:
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain