#this passage

thinking about this

I expect the winter will be hard in spite of the country snow like white fox fur wrapped about the house, filling the rooms with light. The snow will melt and it will be cold and wet and I shall be ill, as I always am, with the vile asthma and bronchitis, and I shall fall into a black depression, and perhaps desperation too, but it will pass and the spring will come with celandines and white violets in the lanes, and then the late spring with bluebells and campion and the wistaria coming out. And I shall learn the spring by heart, and then the summer, and I'll learn the bells and birdsong by heart, and the way the moonlight moves on the wall and the sun lies on the floor. I'll grow older and lose my beauty but the spring will not grow old nor the moon nor the snow.

“I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”

“Thus says the Lord GOD: Lo, I am sending my messenger             to prepare the way before me; And suddenly there will come to the temple             the Lord whom you seek, And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.             Yes, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who will endure the day of his coming?             And who can stand when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire,             or like the fuller’s lye. He will sit refining and purifying silver,             and he will purify the sons of Levi, Refining them like gold or like silver             that they may offer due sacrifice to the Lord. Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem             will please the Lord,             as in the days of old, as in years gone by.”

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill...It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.