#huizinga

'‘His [Christ’s] hunger is great without measure. He consumes us thoroughly, for he is a voracious glutton and has bulimy. He consumes the marrow out of our bones. Yet we grant it him willingly. And the more we grant it him, the better we taste to him. And no matter how much he consumes of us, he cannot be satisfied, for he has bulimy and his hunger is without measure. And even though we are poor, he heeds that not, for he does not want to leave anything for us. First he prepares his food and burns up in love all our sins and our failings. And then, when we have been purified and roasted in love, he gapes like the vulture who wants to devour it all… If we could see the voracious lust Christ has for our blessedness, we would not be able to restrain ourselves from flying into his throat. Even though Jesus consumes us altogether in him, he gives us himself for this, and he gives us spiritual hunger and thirst to savour him with eternal relish. He gives us his body as food for our spiritual hunger and our heartfelt love. And if, within us, we eat and consume it with inner devotion, then his glorious hot blood flows from his body into our nature and into all our veins… Behold, thus shall we always eat and be eaten, and by loving, rise up and come down, and this is our life in eternity''.

The suggestiveness of black, worn not only by the court, but also by magistrates, members of the guilds, and ordinary people on the occasion of a princely death, must have been made much stronger by the contrast to the vivid colors of medieval city life. The funeral pomp displayed over the murdered John the Fearless was tailored with the most deliberate of intentions for maximum (and partially political) effect. The retinue of warriors with whom Philip marches to greet the Kings of England and France displays two thousand black pennons with like-colored standards and banners seven yards long, the fringes of black lace, all embroidered or painted with golden escutcheons. The duke's golden throne and coach of state have been painted black for the occasion. At a splendid meeting at Troyes, Philip accompanies the Queens of France and England in a velvet mourning garb that trails across the back of his horse and down to the ground. He and his entourage continued to wear black for a considerable period after that.

La esfera del juego sagrado es aquella donde el niño, el poeta y el primitivo se encuentran como si estuvieran en su elemento.

'When Antoine de la Sale, in Le reconfort (The consolation),41 seeks to comfort a noblewoman on the loss of her little son, he can give her nothing better than the story of a boy who lost his young life in an even crueller way, murdered as a hostage. To help her conquer her sorrow, he has nothing to offer her but a lesson: not to become attached to anything earthly. But then he follows with what we know as the folk tale of the shroud: the dead child who comes to ask his mother to weep no longer, so that his shroud can dry. And suddenly it is a much more intimate sound than the memento mori sung in every possible key. Wouldn’t the folk tales and folk songs of those centuries have preserved all kinds of sentiments that literature scarcely knows?'

Symbolism was a poor means of expressing those connections that we know to be essential, such as when, at times, they rise to consciousness as we listen to music — “Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate.¹” There was an awareness of looking at an enigma, yet here were attempts to distinguish the images in the mirror, to explain images through images, and to hold up a mirror before a mirror. The whole world was encapsulated in independent figures; it was a time of overripeness and the falling of blossoms. Thought had become too dependent on figures; the tendency towards the visual, so very characteristic of the waning Middle Ages, was now overpowering. Everything that could be thought had become plastic and pictorial. The conception of the world had reached the quietude of a cathedral in the moonlight in which thought was allowed to rest.