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Sero et sero

Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam, et in ista formosa quae fecisti deformis inruebam. mecum eras, et tecum non eram. ea me tenebant longe a te, quae si in te non essent, non essent. vocasti et clamasti et rupisti surditatem meam; coruscasti, splenduisti et fugasti caecitatem meam; fragrasti, et duxi spiritum et anhelo tibi; gustavi et esurio et sitio; tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam.  Confessiones x.27.38. For the curious Beauty is, for Augustine, one of our names for the divine, and all the beauty we see comes from Beauty. Our error is to fail to see and hear and smell and feel and taste the source of all the beauty around us. For more on this, the commentary of O'Donnell is a good place to look. Just click the link to the passage at the end of the frustulum. Imagine writing a work and losing it. This is what happened to Augustine's earliest work, of which he speaks in the  Confes

Ephata

  Ephata by Evan Smith My grandmother died and the world slowly fell empty, not of people, but of a song. Her song. She did not sing to me; it wasn’t her singing that drifted away, but a song I didn’t know I’d been hearing all my life, and when she left, I heard it as it died. I was thinking a lot about song when she died. I had just learned of the Mambai of Indonesia and their two forms of ritual song: keo and beha. In keo, they make a lot of noise; in beha, there is none. Keo is their gift to the world, which in their accounting, is silent: birds do not make music, nor does the wind in the trees. The Mambai impress the silent world with voice through keo, and the world gives them life in return. Their rituals, their places of song, show them as part of the working of nature, the spontaneous processes that require no human guidance. Without keo, they have no life, and with it, their place in the world becomes natural. The Mambai have remembered something that mechanized modernity is m