From Ishmael's
Bloch, Breviary Albert
10NCE knew an astronomer—not very well, but well enough to discover very soon that, although he was a learned man and knew something about nearly everything, he knew nothing about stars. He did...
...We have traveled far since then...
...As he plucks a rose to drink its fragrance, it withers and its stench rises upon the hopeless air and poisons the breath of the twilight...
...He gazes about him into the landscape, and the landscape disintegrates...
...the eagle falls dead in his flight, and a carrion, thing wheels up from earth and beats its wings heavily into the setting sun...
...It spread out in all directions, covering a vast area thinly...
...but the people of the renaissance must have been even faster travelers, for they had nearly caught upi with us long before ever we began our journey...
...He told me so himself...
...Perhaps this is the key both to the renaissance and our own age...
...So I paid nd heed to what he said on the subject, but let him talk on and on, the while my mind played curiously about the phenomenon of this astronomer who had never seen a star...
...The psychologist—I look upon his face and I see the soul of him writhing in hell from that day when fell the rebel angels...
...He stands listening, and the birds in the trees cease their evensong and I hear the croak of ravens...
...Whether he had ever discovered a new planet, I cannot say, but he had never had the good fortune to discover an old star...
...I had merely made some reference to the stars and he had informed me that there were no such things, and he began offering me a substitute for stars, which I remember thinking rather silly, since he didn't even know what they are...
...It is a significant sign of the obtuseness of the present age, which is largely an expression of the belief that faith in God is merely a superstitious survival, that we should now accept this nonsense of our faith in science as a matter of course and with no awakening of any suspicion that there are superstitions less excusable and certainly far more stupid than belief in supernatural forces...
...He walks across green fields, and beneath his tread I know the grass turns black...
...He did not even know that they exist...
...And through the world's night rides the Rider upon a pale horse...
...Where do they get that "ex...
...They've turned Him into one...
...He smiles, and the blue of heaven grows sick and livid...
...I had not^ asked him...
...It trickled over the surface of the universe...
...And the evening star, but now become visible, seeing itself beheld of such eyes, bursts into rotten phosphorescence...
...Bernhard Berenson, in the preface to his essay on Venetian painting, speaks of "our faith in science," and says that because of it (and of our faith in the power of work) "we are instinctively in sympathy with the renaissance...
...For it has made the strange discovery, that the solution of all our modern perplexities depends upon our undertanding of just such weird phenomena as this...
...He had a broad and elastic mind...
...at any rate, my mind is still playing curiously about the phenomenon, and it wouldn't surprise me if it continued doing so until the end of my days...
...Perhaps he is still talking—I shouldn't wonder...
...Deus ex machina...
...In the ages preceding the renaissance, faith in God was not only the important thing, i% was the thing upon which all life and its expression depended...
...the trees' foliage is blasted and falls, their trunks stand naked and frozen...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 6
