Par Lagerkvist: "The Sibyl"

"In a little house on the mountain slopes above Delphi lived an old women and her witless son. The house consisted of a single room; one wall was the mountainside itself, and always dripped with moisture. It was not really a house at all but a ramshackle hut which the herdsmen had built for themselves. It stood alone away up in the wild mountain, high above the the buildings of the city and the sacred precincts of the temple. The woman seldom left the house, her son never. He sat within, in the half light, smiling to himself as he had always done; he was now well into middle age and his lank hair had begun to turn gray. But his face was untouched; it was as it had always been, without any real features in its beardless, downy childishness, only that queer perpetual smile. The old women's face was furrowed and austere, and swarthy, as if it had been touched by fire, her eyes had the look of eyes that have seen god."

'The Sibyl' Par Lagerkvist 1956 trans. Naomi Walford

"Radical Hope: Ethics in a Time of Cultural Devestation": Jonathan Lear

"Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. "I have not told you half of what happened while I was young" he said when urged to go on. "I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides," he added sorrowfully, " you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us after the buffalo went away. "

- from 'Radical Hope.' here Lear quotes Plenty Coups as recounted in "Plenty Coups: Chief of the Crows" by Frank B. Linderman, University of Nebraska Press 1962

Process and Reality

" The wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system - its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy - woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self regarding, are dismissed into the triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow,in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image- and it is but an image- under which this operative growth of God's nature is best conceived is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgement of tenderness which loses nothing which can be saved. It is the judgement of a wisdom which uses that what in the temporal world is mere wreckage"

From "Process and Reality" pg. 407-408

Published 1929