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Message |
| Posted By: |
firebird |
| Date: |
14-Mar-2004-04:25:58 |
| Subject: |
What is a saint? |
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human
possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think
it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this
energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of
existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world
would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the
chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in
the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of
balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.
His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the
snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock.
Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws
of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with
the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody
landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the
world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted
shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such
balancing monsters of love.
- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966) |
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