Fiction That Does Not Acknowledge

I Think The Connection Between Poetry And Theology, Which Is Profound In Western Tradition - There Is A Great Deal Of Wonderful Religious Poetry - Both Poetry And Theology Push Conventional Definitions And Explore Perceptions That Might Be Ignored Or Passed Off As Conventional, But When They Are Pressed Yield Much Larger Meanings, Seem To Be Part Of A Much Larger System Of Reality.

Fiction May Be, Whatever Else, An Exercise In The Capacity For Imaginative Love, Or Sympathy, Or Identification.

Isaac Watts, Of Course, Is A Hymn Writer In The Tradition Of Congregationalism Who Lived In The Seventeenth And Early Eighteenth Century. He Is Very Interesting And Important Because He Was Also A Metaphysician. He Knew A Great Deal About What Was, For Him, Contemporary Science. He Was Very Much Influenced By Isaac Newton, For Example. There Are Planets And Meteors And So On Showing Up In His Hymns Very Often. But, Again, The Scale Of His Religious Imagination Corresponds To A Very Generously Scaled Scientific Imagination.

I Hated Waiting. If I Had One Particular Complaint, It Was That My Life Seemed Composed Entirely Of Expectation. I Expected — An Arrival, An Explanation, An Apology. There Had Never Been One, A Fact I Could Have Accepted, Were It Not True That, Just When I Had Got Used To The Limits And Dimensions Of One Moment, I Was Expelled Into The Next And Made To Wonder Again If Any Shapes Hid In Its Shadows.

That Odd Capacity For Destitution, As If By Nature We Ought To Have So Much More Than Nature Gives Us. As If We Are Shockingly Unclothed When We Lack The Complacencies Of Ordinary Life. In Destitution, Even Of Feeling Or Purpose, A Human Being Is More Hauntingly Human And Vulnerable To Kindnesses Because There Is The Sense That Things Should Be Otherwise, And Then The Thought Of What Is Wanting And What Alleviation Would Be, And How The Soul Could Be Put At Ease, Restored. At Home. But The Soul Finds Its Own Home If It Ever Has A Home At All.