"THE CHILDREN'S SUBLIME." My piece on Maurice Sendak. The New York Times obituary was also quite good. RIP.

O TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE: I find that a lot of people, both gay and not, ask me questions which boil down to, "How should I understand gay relationships which are obviously loving?" This can be phrased as, "How do you feel, as a Catholic, about my relationship with my boyfriend?" (although I don't know why my personal feelings should really matter!) or "How should I view my brother's partner?" or, something I addressed in that Commonweal piece, "How should I understand the love which was a part of the gay relationships I had before becoming Catholic?"

The first thing I think of with this question is the quotation I posted last week, in which Jesus, looking at the rich young man, loved him. If we approach our own gay (meaning, here, sexually-active) relationships or those of others with this look of love, a love which is both personal and challenging, what do we find?

What we find will be different for different relationships. But here are some thoughts from my Commonweal piece:

Loving one another can be an echo of the love we receive from God; it can be the child of that love; it can be preparation for our own awestruck love of God. (I would argue that my erotic and romantic love of women has been all three of those things, at different times.)

I went on to say, "But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for the divine revelation preserved by the church. We must be careful not to let it become a counternarrative or a counter-Scripture." A chaste love relationship founded on love of Christ, perhaps even adorned with promises like the ones described here and here, is even more beautiful and sublime than the best sexually-active gay relationship. Perhaps you're being called to this other person because he or she is a part of your life's vocation, in which case chastity will exalt your relationship, not diminish it. Perhaps not--perhaps you're being called to hospitality, service, searing devotion to God, a radical vulnerability and availability made possible precisely by your lack of obligations to partner or children. Note that neither of these alternatives is easy! "Exalted" doesn't exactly imply "easier," and sublimity is almost the opposite of satisfaction--accepting one of these alternatives will probably increase most people's sense of difficulty, their sense of struggle or need for surrender to God. But we don't get to choose how God calls us; we only choose how we respond to that call.

It was getting late
with the warm fuzz
of the wine
well worked into our minds
when the first sign
of the Kingdom of Heaven
occurred
in a back room
with only the paid help
as witnesses
and the quality
of the gift
passing unnoticed
because of our
intoxication.
--"The Jesus Poems: Cana," by this guy

HONEY, IT'S LATE, TIME TO PUT THE CLOUD OUTSIDE. Via Jesse Walker. I think actually the windows are my favorite part, but the indoor cloud is great too.

TALLIS SCHOLARS, "MISERERE."

On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835
the carriage of Marie Taglioni was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature was commanded to dance for this audience of one
upon a panther's skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that, to keep alive the memory
of this adventure so precious to her, Taglioni formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table
melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.
--From Joseph Cornell's box construction Homage to the Romantic Ballet

cited in Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance, ed. Mindy Aloff

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
--Antonio Machado; whole thing is here

THIS IS BEAUTIFUL. Soulful, well-choreographed, heart-wrenching. I could watch this every day.

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE STYLE OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE PAINTING. Via the Rattus.

If a composition has no strangeness, there is no virtue in its stability. Stability without strangeness is the work of a commonplace hand; strangeness without stability, of an immature hand.
--Gong Xian

(from the wall caption to a really haunting ink painting in this terrific exhibit--there's a hut in the foreground, all soft brushstrokes for the thatch roof and the surrounding trees and wooden bridge, but in the distance there are dark mountains--and behind the tall dark mountains, an even taller one, pale, elusive.)

THERE'S A SERIES ON PRAYING THE ROSARY THROUGH ART at Crisis. The Joyful Mysteries are here; I especially liked the choices for the Sorrowful Mysteries.

VIDEO OF MY PANEL AT THE FORDHAM "MORE THAN A MONOLOGUE: SEXUAL DIVERSITY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH" CONFERENCE. I'm sorry for how scatty I am here. This turned out to be the unofficial test-run of a newer and better version of my standard Gay Catholic Whatnot talk, and I kept adding and subtracting things almost right up to the moment I got up to speak, which did not serve the overall organization or coherence well. That said, I did say some things which I think were worthwhile, and the next iteration of this talk was much sharper.

ONE LAST THING--FROM MY NOTES FROM FORDHAM: You have to make loyalty and obedience beautiful before you can evoke sorrow for disobedience.

The best-ever death metal band out of Blogwatch...

Real review of, seriously, maybe seven or eight Mountain Goats cds once I've finished listening to them. For now you get a blogwatch.

"How to Become an Author, In Five Incredibly Difficult Steps." The usual Cracked.com disclaimer, but I loved #2 a lot, and the point about needing a huge amount of research in order to write fiction is also really good. #1 should be skipped unless you really, really want to feel bad about your bank balance.

Guest posters at Megan McArdle's site:

On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro made an important contribution to the social sciences. His unexpected declaration that the port of Mariel would be temporarily open to any Cubans seeking to flee the island served as a natural experiment that has helped labor economists understand the impact of immigration. In his now classic paper, economist David Card convincingly showed that the massive influx of 120,000 Cubans increased the labor force of Miami by 7% yet had almost no impact on the employment or wages of natives.

This result is probably shocking to many, and certainly runs contrary to the popular but unfortunate myth that immigrants "steal our jobs". But while this study is an important result in the literature, it is not an isolated one. Most research on immigration shows small or zero impacts on unemployment and wages. This, however, does present something of a puzzle: if immigration increases labor supply, then why didn't wages fall and unemployment rise? How was it that the labor market in Miami was able to absord so many new workers?

more; mostly interesting to me because I care about Mariel, but that of course raises the question: Does US growth depend on immigrants a) fleeing sufficiently-fleeable-hell and b) not assimilating to our awful demographics once they gain some economic success?

Sublimity Now:

While she was doing this, she went on for a while about how lucky she is, given that some people get shingles all over their bodies, and she only has to deal with an useless right arm, and apologized profusely for not being able to prepare a duck dinner for my brother before he ships out to Quantico.

Please remember her in your prayers.

it is okay she eats so slow--at least she eats!

and even moreso:

Point is, my father thought I was literally plowing a field instead of being vaguely emo. He is the best. May we all strive to think so well of our loved ones!

context, but why?

The Groom's Family:

This sentiment, i suspect, is due no less to the sheer fact of my being a Jew than to my personal biography. Any Jew, with the questionable exception of the generations born in Israel, is always an immigrant, caught in a complex relationship between a home from which he is distanced by both space and historical time, and a current residence from which he is separated by a paper-thin but surprisingly resistant mental wall. He has no choice but to be a cosmopolitan, and there are three general ways in which this cosmopolitanism may manifest. ...

The religious Jew, as the monk, is a cosmopolitan in that he makes do everywhere and belongs nowhere.

The progressive secular Jew is a cosmopolitan in a very different way. Like his religious brother, he never has the pleasure of belonging to a place; as the Nazi episode among others illustrates, his decision to treat a place as his home means very little to others and to history. Unlike his religious brother, however, he does not see his loneliness in the midst of the nations as a prelude to salvation; it is rather a source of confusion and often pain that he must learn to mitigate.

more; emphasis added because I genuinely believe that sabra Jews often carry the marks of displacement without the humility forced by the humiliation of needing to understand others' perspectives in order to survive--or, to put it more bluntly, I sometimes think that growing up in Israel is bad for Jewish children. Jews must raise their children in a Jew-hating world; ideologies of Jewish superiority are one obvious path. (And, for contingent 20th-century reasons, often an atheist path which leads to dissolution of Jewish identity in the later generations.)

The Rat:

It reminded me of some of the things we were taught in hospice training; and also of a line from Paul Claudel that MFB quoted to me in a letter well over a decade ago, but that's stuck with me ever since (even though I'm not Christian): "Jesus did not come to remove suffering, but to fill it with His presence." The principle holds whatever your religious affiliation (or lack thereof), and also seems to me one that might be particularly useful in this country, where even the most well-meaning people—Christians included—can often have trouble negotiating secondhand tragedy. We're a nation of fixers, and also of Pelagians—plus there's so little guidance out there about this kind of thing.

There are so few things we can ever really do for another person, however much we like to think we can, and however many fairy tales/Hollywood scripts/etc. are themed around rescue. If you know a survivor (esp. a recent survivor) of trauma, do have a look at this list, and others like it

.
more

PLAYING TO THE GODS: Last week I saw Venus in Fur, at the Studio Theater through July 10. Basic story: Pompous playwright/director who thinks nobody really feels passion anymore is auditioning actresses for the role of Wanda in his adaptation of Sacher-Masoch's novel (i.e. the one masochism is named for). A blowsy New Yorkeress stumbles across his transom in hooker heels, too late for her audition (which isn't on the schedule anyway), but insists on reading for him. She is more than she appears! An erotic game of cat-and-other-cat ensues as power shifts from director to actress and each one struggles for the upper hand--or are they really fighting to be the one who submits?

So far so cliched, really. The whole "topping from the bottom" power-shift dynamic seems really played to me at this point. It's so often presented as sexy and edgy and challenging when it's really a rejection of the idea of genuine submission, suffering, or unwanted self-knowledge. Four things raise Venus in Fur--by the same guy who wrote that Spinoza play I loved so much--above the old joke about the masochist who says "Beat me!" and the sadist who says "No!"

1. It's very funny! And it doesn't rely on faux shock or spray-on sexiness. The laughs allow the audience to relax enough that the genuine danger can sneak up on us.

2. Studio found two superb actors. Christian Conn is convincing as the playwright, whose shallowness hides hidden depths of his own, and Erica Sullivan is just terrific as the actress. She gnaws the scenery with aplomb! I loved watching her.

3. The power dynamics do come to a resolution, and it's not one which simply affirms the usual American preference for individuality, self-control, and self-acceptance.

4. This play made me think about the gods in a slightly new light. It suggests, or at least it suggested to me!, that genuine submission can only be submission to divinity, for two reasons. First, with any human-all-too-human beloved or master, there's a moment when it becomes obvious that their judgment is no more intrinsically or universally reliable than mine. There's a sort of "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" moment--when O ditches Rene for Sir Stephen, for example, giving the lie to the personae all three are pretending to embody. No merely human woman is going to know this playwright thoroughly enough to devote herself completely to his education. Actual humans make mistakes, say dumb things, miss their cues, fail to suss us out when we wish they would, and have their own agendas which are often pettier than the agendas we project onto them.

And then, too, any mortal beloved will be conquered by death. Death can in turn be conquered to some extent by art--this is one of the subtler themes of the play, surfacing now and then like a gilt thread in a big dark tapestry--but for real mastery you would need a real immortal.

Anyway I do recommend the play if it sounds at all interesting to you; it's very well done and I feel validated in my decision to make David Ives a playwright I watch for.

ARS LONGA, UNIVERSITAS BREVIS: Uh, sorry for the probably-mangled Latin. Anyway, I don't really have much to say about my Gay Catholic Whatnot talk for Carnegie Mellon U's Newman Center. The audience seemed intrigued. I could intrigue audiences on your campus! Why not invite me? If you're not on the DC Metro I'd need you to pay for my transportation plus a nominal speaking fee, and feed and shelter me if I'm expected to stay overnight, but I would be very happy to have dinner w/students, do an extended Q&A, stay after the talk to speak with people privately, or whatever else I can do to reach out to students with questions on all things romoerotic.

The one thing I did want to mention is that one student (not from CMU, I think) described the atmosphere on her campus in a way which made it sound, to me, pretty vulgar. A lot of campus Catholic groups seem to do Bible study, prayer groups, and corporal works of mercy for those already within Mother Church, and focus their evangelization efforts on discussions of controversial issues. I wondered whether they'd do better to give students opportunities to encounter beauty. Why not show Therese (this one), or do posters with poetry from St John of the Cross or Thomas a Kempis's reworking of the Song of Songs as a hymn to Christ crucified?

There's more than one way to be countercultural; and contemporary college culture is so often banal (not only at secular colleges, either) that offering an encounter with sublimity might be the most oppositional thing campus Christians could do.

ECSTASY AS SOLACE: I really liked this quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, found via Wesley Hill:

Secularism is a religion because it has a faith, it has its own eschatology and its own ethics. And it “works” and it “helps.” Quite frankly, if “help” were the criterion, one would have to admit that life-centered secularism helps actually more than religion. To compete with it, religion has to present itself as “adjustment to life,” “counselling,” “enrichment,” it has to be publicized on subways and buses as a valuable addition to “your friendly bank” and all other “friendly dealers”: try it, it helps! And the religious success of secularism is so great that it leads some Christian theologians to “give up” the very category of “transcendence,” or in much simpler words, the very idea of “God.” This is the price we must pay if we want to be “understood” and “accepted” by modern man, proclaim the Gnostics of the twentieth century.

For it is here that we reach the heart of the matter. For Christianity, help is not the criterion. Truth is the criterion. The purpose of Christianity is not to help poeple by reconciling them with death, but to reveal the Truth about life and death i order that people may be saved by this Truth. Salvation, however, is not only not identical with help, but is, in fact, opposed to it. Christianity quarrels with religion and secularism not because they offer “insufficient help,” but precisely because they “suffice,” because the “satisfy” the needs of men. If the purpose of Christianity were to take away from man the fear of death, to reconcile him with death, there would be no need for Christianity, for other religions have done this, indeed, better than Christianity. And secularism is about to produce men who will gladly and corporately die — and not just live — for the triumph of the Cause, whatever it may be.

Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely an enemy to be destroyed, and not a “mystery” to be explained.

more

So here are some random thoughts prompted by this quotation. Take home what resonates with you and discard the rest as the styrofoam peanuts of my stupidity!

One thing I like about this quote--I like a lot of things about it, but this is one--is that it may seem to contradict Augustine's famous line about how "our hearts are restless 'til we rest in Thee," and yet I really don't think it does. Just as the Desert Fathers often seem to contradict themselves (let alone one another!) because they're addressing very different seekers with radically divergent needs, weaknesses, and longings, so I think Schmemann is simply not addressing the same kind of person Augustine is. I suspect each of us is a Schmemann-addressee some of the time and an Augustine-addressee some of the time, although we'll sway more toward one end or the other (I'm much more an A-a, I think), so here are some scattered thoughts about Christ as comforter and as troubler of the waters.

First, Christ always stands against contentment. If you're satisfied you aren't a philosopher, let alone a Christian. Christ, like the James Bond franchise, tells us that The World Is Not Enough.

Sometimes we really need to hear that! Sometimes we are content to cultivate our gardens, to love the people we want to love and turn away from the shadow of death. An immense amount of basic, boring, necessary good gets done in the world by people who are contented... and yet that should never be enough for us.

Then there are those of us for whom the inadequacy of immanent beauty and everyday love is all too obvious. We're like the people in the AA slogan, for whom "one drink is too many and a hundred isn't enough." We're like the people in Chesterton's punchline, which was instrumental in my conversion: "The man who enters the whorehouse is seeking God." We're like the Bagthorpes, in Helen Cresswell's terrifically sardonic children's series, whose family motto might be Too Much Is Never Enough.

It's easy for those who can suffice themselves on the incredible loveliness of this life to look down on those of us who can't. They can accuse us of ingratitude and of pretension; who promised us a life in capital letters? And so they can remain where they are.

And it's easy for those of us who do feel that both ourselves and the world are radically insufficient to make do with "cheap grace," in the form of politics or alcohol or art or psychoanalysis, all of which are well enough in their own right and legitimate sources of insight and/or ekstasis but none of which are as big as the need. All of these possibilities are erotic in some sense, but none are as erotic as religious devotion. (But then, what is?) And so we, too, find a million ways to remain where we are.

Or to summarize this entire post in two sentences: A life without unconditional surrender is banal. Only in devotion to God can the ecstasy of surrender marry the solace of ethical love.

I SWAN TO MAN: Some thoughts on the Matthew Bourne Swan Lake, as viewed via Netflix.

First, I loved this. It had a lot of images I want to stow away in my mental Mombi gallery of heads. The look of this production is iconic for a reason! The opening dream sequence replaces the "bright boy called Death" with a mature swan/man, in a little boy's dreams--a really stunning, disturbing, enthralling image. Adulthood, aggression, masculinity, otherworldliness and the sublime are all offered as possible candidates for "the monster at the end of this book," all shifting and iridescently fluid, identified with one another and yet distinguishable.

The intense longing conveyed in the park/lake scenes was especially fine and poignant, and I loved the eye-patched woman in the final "society" scene. I've never seen a traditional Swan Lake, so I don't know to what extent matching the most iconic music to moments in which the lovers are parted or are yearning for one another is typical, but it was really amazing. The plangent, familiar music becomes eldritch when it expresses nightmare rather than dream, liminality rather than immersion.

I was strongly reminded of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Derek Jarman's Edward II. The "looks" of the two productions are similar. The faint hint of misogyny is common to both--though much more prominent in the Bourne show because he has so few roles for women. Both Jarman and Bourne don't present a madonna/whore dichotomy... more of a dictatrix/flapper dichotomy. (Did Margaret Thatcher really do so much psychological damage?) The roles for women in Bourne's Swan Lake are as follows: 1) Maria Motherissueskaya, 2) Ditzie Doritos, 3) Butterfly Ballerinas whose art is cheap and obvious (unlike the subtle work we're watching now!) and 4) Eyepatch of Awesome.

And the sense of thwarted erotic hunger is of course preeminent in both productions. Jarman's work is much better because he chooses to express anger rather than self-pity, and politics rather than pop-psychology. Nonetheless if you are glad you saw his EII you should probably see this show too.

Speaking of pop-psychology, this production was really swilling the cliché. The swans are coming from beneath the bed! He looks at his reflection and drinks from a flask to demonstrate his pain! I'm really conflicted about this, since a) ballet, like opera (like horror, like genre in general), is already stylized and so cliche is always imminent, and
b) I'm pretty sure I fell in love with figure skating in large part because it married actual artistry so completely with vaudeville tawdriness, sawdust and stardust. (Oh, why not, here's more Christopher Bowman.)

So if we're simply mining pop-psych for immediately compelling, intelligible hieroglyphics of melodrama, then I support that 106%. (Not just 100%, because I am beyond reason.) But the Bourne production seemed to me to swing occasionally into self-seriousness, an attempt at actually representing the inner consciousness of a conflicted gay prince, and this I found a bit Oprah-ish or insistent.

And so we return to our sheep (or our feathers)--there are so many sequences of this production which I found amazing. I loved the drunken staggering outside the bar. I loved the pursuing-retreating-captured dynamic after the ball.

But let me end by comparing this disc, unfairly, to two live performances.

First: I don't think I could have really understood this production before I became a fan of the Synetic Theater. Their provocative, intermittently tawdry, undeniably brilliant and idiosyncratic interpretations of classic works through dance helped me develop a modern-dance vocabulary. They were able to show me, as if teaching me sign language, how there is no one-to-one correspondence between dance and Shakespeare and yet a dance troupe can convey all the complexities and ornaments of Antony and Cleopatra. (This month their King Lear opens and I am LITERALLY JOE BIDEN bursting at the seams to see it!) Gestures aren't words, and yet a dance sequence can be a paragraph.

And second... a few days after I saw the Bourne Swan Lake via Netflix, I saw the Mariinsky Ballet (if you remember Reagan then you, like me, may know them best by their Soviet-era name, the Kirov Ballet) perform "Giselle."

Look, I know it's not fair to compare the Mariinsky to anyone. And yet the shocking precision of their movements--despite a radically silly storyline, despite sequences in which the ballerinas had to hop across the stage--the grace and the illusion of effortless gliding were simply unparalleled. They took us into another dimension, another kind of consciousness (I KNOW how foo-foo I sound! I can't think of any other way to put it!), simply through their razor-sharp control. Their technical prowess made them so alien that they didn't have to rely on their interpretation of the story for sublimity.

WOOD WITHIN THIS WOOD: Last night I watched a recent adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, set (with some condescension and religious illiteracy, but some bicycling fun) in late 19th-c Italy. Here are a few scattered thoughts. Overall I'm glad I saw this, but I'm especially glad it wasn't my first Dream. At this point I can easily cherish the good parts and dunk the stupidities in Lethe; that would be harder if I didn't have a few earlier, differently-flawed productions under my belt.

So, let's go: First, the cast is ridiculous. Kevin Kline is superb as Bottom. Dominic "Jimmy McNulty" West is entirely serviceable as Lysander. Calista Flockhart is surprisingly good as Helena, and Stanley Tucci is as fun as you'd expect as Puck. You've also got Rupert Everett, Sam Rockwell, and other people I'm forgetting.

This production is oddly cavalier about the horribleness of the protagonists. They're just all so awful before they enter the wood! I can understand that as an interpretive choice, but it's not a lot of fun to watch--and made all the harder because

this production ups the humiliation for Bottom significantly. His whole character arc is so complex--for the play to work best, he needs to be better than his reputation and surroundings from the beginning, and then taken into a fairy world which is finally big enough and sublime enough for him; and yet even in that world, where he should belong, in fact he's an enchanted ass. There's a huge amount of humiliation built into this amazing character. No need to ratchet it up by having local yokels pour wine on him as he (brilliantly!) overacts. It just made everyone else seem more horrible. Adding a Disappointed Wife similarly made Bottom way too much of a pitiable victim rather than a comedic-yet-sublime visionary--and I would caution against any directorial choices which shifts the Dream further toward misogyny. Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers of women ever, and I agree with Herr Doktor Professor Harold Bloom that his women are typically more intelligent and stronger than his men; but this isn't his subtlest work on that score, you know?

Speaking of Bottom and of Bloom, not even Kevin Kline could come close to the ecstatic experience of hearing Harold Bloom recite Bottom's "dream speech." I saw this in, I think, spring? of 1998, and it was like King Haggard's first sight of the unicorns: "The first time I saw them, I thought I wanted to die." I'm going to try to talk about what it was like, now, but my description is necessarily reductive and inadequate.

What Bloom did, when he recited for us, was to take us completely into the experience of someone who has finally entered into the world for which we long. Our whole lives, we have portrayed a Wall--a wall broken through by a monster. And at last, Bottom follows, through the hole, and finds the monster... and she is just as beautiful as he could ever have hoped. She is the key for his lock. She is the reality of which our entire lives are merely the shadow. She is the quiet hour, the sudden moment when we can be truly present to the crocus and the snow.

(One thing the movie got right: She gives the Nietzschean wedding ring of eternity.)

He was helpless and baffled and sorry, sorry and he didn't know why.

I can't blame Kevin Kline for being insufficiently mind-blowing! I mean listening to Harold Bloom recite the speech... there's a song, some whiny pop song, where the guy whines something which I consistently mishear as, "Being with you, girl,/Is like feeling sorrow." Very few people can carry us--especially through a screen, rather than in person--into that place where a comedic, endearing speech is like feeling sorrow.

That said, there are a lot of dumb choices in this movie. There's mud-wrestling, which I'm sure sounded better in theory than it played in practice. There's Tasteful Nudity which ditto. There's a sequence of a kind I'm usually primed to adore, in which an actor finds his confidence and his true self halfway through a disastrous performance and thereby rescues it (Slings and Arrows s1 had an especially fine example of this), which is robbed of emotional heft because it centers on the guy who plays Thisbe, about whom I didn't care enough, and because the music is horrible and insistent and easy. The music is horrible and insistent and easy throughout, actually.

Again: This is worth seeing! There are some very fun comic-timing moments, and if I were to rewatch I'd look for what I think are real parallels between the barely-named fairies and the lower-class humans. It's pretty and frothy and if you can get past the really painful treatment of the difference between Bottom's dreams and his reality, it's sometimes charming.

Man, I hope they put that on my tombstone.

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?' Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame.'
--Sayings of the Desert Fathers; via For Keats' Sake, who notes an alternate and even more awesome translation/gloss