I have just watched ‘Nomadland’ with the wonderful Frances McDormand. A deeply moving road movie about freedom, loss, grief, the inability to ever enter into a relationship again, about community spirit, about being old and about having to accept any job that comes along.

I wouldn't even be a religious person were it not for poetry, which has not only repeatedly brought me into contact with an other, but has seemed to demand something of me in its wake—very like Teresa's visions. But poetry remains perpetually open. God moves through art but doesn't get stuck there. I sometimes think he gets stuck in theology—fixed, frozen, and therefore inevitably falsified.

I stared at all the types, and a terrible feeling of loneliness swept over me; this in spite of my special wish to be alone that night. I felt that everyone was cut off from me, that it would always be so, and that nothing I could do would ever make any difference. I turned away from the people hating them passionately, yet longing to be taken into their bosoms.