Ten minute wait for a not-out-of-commission shower at the inexpensive gym, so about ten minutes late to the Pontifical. Which, as it turns out, was all about Poland and JP2 on the occasion of Divine Mercy Sunday. White over red furled at the corner of the quasi-transept seating.
JP2 and I had very different experiences of the world of theatre, but share a liking for walking in the mountains. Understandable in both cases, perhaps, given the goings-on below. Levavi oculous meos ad montes... A great saint of the age.
In the world of appearances, this continues a remarkable string of incidental graces. Idyllic weather for the octave, skies clear and blue (one or two slightly chilly nights). Quite the change from some weeks ago, or a month or two ago. Still not quite sure how I made it, and if these incidental graces in the world of appearances continue, I might start to wonder if I did. There was a peculiar sea-change after the second blizzard that, and I'm confident that the changes were in the empirical world and not in my perception, seemed to re-order the word considerably.
Gadamer has the notion of θεατρον as angle on the action. Where we sit in the Lycurgan (of Athens, not of Sparta) stone theatre during the festival has much to do with the direction and distance from which we have come. For example, in the Triduum liturgies, I was uncharacteristically in the south quasi-transept, since I was coming from the research libraries for the daytime service, rather than the gym for the morning service. The angle on the action is uniquely a function of the σκενε of the Greek theatre; once the Romans double the theatre (amphi=two natures), there is no longer a directional sense to the action, and so there's no real corresponding angle from the audience. Literally, the word means "looking place," and so the phenomenological context is what the stage looks like from that seat. We have a relation to the event which isn't neutral or anodyne, but meaningful, and the beginning of the meaning of the event.
One of the interesting discoveries in looking through the (apparently paltry) published correspondence of Andric is his fondness for Krakow, and the Polish kingdom generally. A great interest in the centuries-old kingdom, perhaps a bit like my own interest in the Yugoslavian lands. Before the second peregrination, I was actually looking at Gdansk, but prices in the north put the ancestral homeland out of reach.
It has occurred to me that these stretches of difficulty, and less obviously, but still in a logically valid sense, the wanderings in the Balkans on a wing and a prayer (occasionally sans wing) might have been thought to be durations that would have a destructive effect. Thankfully, and due to strength not entirely my own, I have at least the appearance of having survived, with my discipline and spirit still intact.
So these graces in the world of appearances are welcome. Nonetheless, the world of experience, existing underneath the world of appearances, is what conducts us to the appearances and determines our condition within them. Any number of Cartesian demons might have put together the idyllic weather and amiable liturgies of the last fortnight; the reality of it is that things are still within the time of trial, and I still focus my mind and my actions on getting to a neutral country to read, think, write, and work.
Macedonian Pirin is the gate; I went there at the end purely on instinct, and it has proven to be the right call. The mountains, the trails, the foods and the waters have given memories of the place that are with me constantly as reminders that it is possible to live deliberately and get back to a basic sufficiency, outside the madness of greed, deceit, and corruption that has been my experience of my own country in recent years. It is the gate, and I now have some acquaintance with the lands beyond it.
But the point is the work, and I can accomplish a shadow of that here, as the gulag panopticon has excellent libraries. There is a stack of books in front of me that would be the stack of books I would hope to find had I access to all the libraries in the world, for the coming task. (Really, the collections here are excellent, though there are reasons for that. Robber barons used to think books worthwhile.)
To it.