The Deadly Sins/Despair;The One Unforgivable Sin

Yet there remains a persistent counterimpulse, an irresistible tug toward stasis and toward those truths that, in Melville's words, will not be comforted. At the antipode of American exuberance and optimism there is the poet's small, still, private voice, the voice of individual conscience; the voice, for instance, of Dickinson, who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, mined the ideal vocabulary for investigating those shifting, penumbral states of consciousness that do, in the long run, constitute our lives. Whatever our public identities may be, whatever our official titles, our heralded or derided achievements and the statistics that accrue to us like cobwebs, this is the voice we trust. For, if despair's temptations can be resisted, surely we become more human and compassionate, more like one another in our common predicament.

Joyce Carol Oates/NYTimes 25.Jul.93
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There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows +substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - Across - upon it -
As One within A Swoon -
Goes +safely - where an Open Eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone

Emily Dickinson
Dickinson Electronic Archives

...and yellow flesh
And hinge of beak still beckoning...

Michael Waters/VerseDaily

You (actress)
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The most comfortable music on earth.
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Nobody Knows (誰も知らない; Dare mo shiranai)
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IFC

There is at least one gratifying juxtaposition:

But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the world remains fuzzy around the edges. If we were told that our computer worked because there was an angel inside, some of us couldn’t disprove it. The cultures were undivided in Leonardo’s day, but now those of us who deal in metaphors don’t know how to make machines. If we wanted to move a mountain, we would have to rely on faith.

Hilary Mantel/LRB
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The author Hilary Mantel is very well-respected around here.
Stones/Scorcese response any minute now.