Enlightenment

But it’s only a Tuesday in September, it’s hardly half past ten – aren’t we strong in will, Thomas Hart, don’t the valves of our hearts open and close in good order – don’t we keep the lenses of our telescopes preserved at all times from fingerprints and dust? Come now, Thomas. What is there to do but to strive, and seek, and find, and not to yield

So I told her this: that it’s true that I’ve only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I’ve been faithless, devout, indifferent, ardent, diligent and careless; full of hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or comforted by providence – and al

What should I do now, James? I’ve seen Foulis Street on the London map, I know the look of the houses – I could go there now and look through each letter box, and see if comet-light comes out. But after all this time I have no name and no house number, and what would I be but an old fool limping back to Liverpool Street empty-handed and alone, on s

less than a month to perihelion, and no hope of seeing the comet properly named by then – but it never leaves without beginning its return, and isn’t there always time, after time?

But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand we are made in the image of God – because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. Go on loving when your love is unreturned, I sa

Go out. Look up. Experience with me this act of grace which is common to us all. You cannot earn or command it: it is a gift, and it will be wonderful because of your wonder. Look up, with me, won’t you? Look up – and at the moment of our looking there’ll be this one marvellous thing, shining in time, under common grace: the comet-in-us.

I wonder in that case if the world and everything in it – you, me, the moon and the water – consists not of solitary beings, but rather out of how each thing relates to another, so that in the end it is only out of connection that the whole world is made.

Perhaps it’s better I lay down my arms and leave the field of battle where I only ever lost – perhaps it’s better to live with hope than disappointment:

Towards the end of September, the sun crossed the celestial equator, and briefly the opposed forces of night and day were more or less equal in Essex.

Then dancers came by, and for a time obscured the view: old men and young ones, half-drunk or drunk entirely; girls clasped together and turning in stately circles; old lovers quick-stepping in practised concourse. Dazed by beer and music, Thomas saw all the threads that bound them in varieties of human bondage – knots made of habit, blood, resentm