Richard Whincop - Finest Hour (Oil on Panel)
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 existence 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 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
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