Literary Boxer Briefs

But the dog-faced young man smiles.

I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness…

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

What ‘is not of this world’ is not elsewhere: it is the opening in the world, the separation, the parting and the raising.

Do not touch me, do not detain me, seek not to hold or retain, renounce all adhesion, think not of a familiarity or a security. Don’t believe that there is an assurance of the kind Thomas wanted. Don’t believe, in any manner. But remain firm in this nonbelief. Remain true to that alone which remains in my departure: your name, which I utter. In your name, there is nothing to grasp and nothing for you to appropriate, but there is this: that it has been addressed to you, from the immemorial and up to the unachievable, from the ground without ground that is always in the process of leaving.

Revelation—this revelation of which the resurrection must be the summit and the last word—reveals that there is nothing to show, nothing to make appear out of the tomb, no apparition, and no theophany or epiphany of a celestial glory. Thus there is no longer a last word.

The resurrection is not a resuscitation: it is the infinite extension of death that displaces and dismantles all the values of presence and absence, of animate and inanimate, of body and soul.

This would be a parable. The arisen would be like the gardener of the garden at the tomb. He knows the emptiness well, the emptiness of this tomb, and he does not fear it. He maintains the garden and tends the borders of death without, for all that, presuming to have access to it. He knows that the dead do not return. He looks after the appearance of what surrounds their absence. He cultivates not their memory but what is immemorial in parting and in provenance, the one mingling with the other.

The glorious body is the one that leaves and at the same time the one that speaks, that speaks only in leaving, that withdraws, withdrawing as much into the darkness of the tomb as into the ordinary appearance of the gardener. Its glory radiates only for eyes that know how to see, and those eyes see nothing but the gardener. But the gardener speaks, and he says the name of she who mourns the departed. To say the name is to say that which both dies and does not die.

My English teacher says we shouldn't refer to authors by their first names because they aren't our friends. Will you confirm our friendship and let me call you Neil on my American Gods book report?