Luke writes his serene narrative of the birth of the Savior of the world. He describes angelical visitations, indignations, resignations of sweet humility and strange, angelical messengers. There is there Zacharias who is incredulous, believes, obeys; and the result is a greater diffusion of the message because of his dumbness, a little writing tablet and the power of God. Then Zacharias in his last days is made a prophet.
How can you muster all your poetry to this event, how penetrate into the hidden channels along which the fountains have been running all along to well up and water Luke’s literary garden, how enter the darkness where unbreathing angels wait for silent centuries to play their little part?
I think you do it patiently, like Ana and like Simeon, waiting in the temple. Nun Dimittis, goes the song of Simeon. Now I have lived . . . though the irony is that it also means: and I am finished.
There is a poignancy to life I got from another gifted man who has not wisely spent his gift. Dying in Cartagena, the doctor in Love in Times of Cholera reflects at that last juncture how he has loved life. It opened a consideration to me, a thinking on my last days: their sunlight, the wind moving those last trees and shrubs, what curtains and what rain would fall, the last faces of the last people before an undiscovered country. What it did was to add a dimension of joy and tragedy both to the sunlight of my present days, to the gentle sound of the rain, to the shadows under the trees, to the feel of a cool wind; a dimension which has made my world more marine, both stranger and deeper and with more of the small wave’s endless poignancy.
It comes from Garcia Marquez, but it is something that you find in Luke as well. Writers writing with different purposes, two different, separate men, but both with gifts from God that lend to their writing the translucency of all great works, a translucency through which shines the only real glory saturating sight. One is with purpose and the other one is not entirely incidental—don’t stumble on my comparison—but both to me are unambiguous.
And in this reflected and compounded and refracted light, as it enters through the windows of my soul to where I sit and write, on this soil and in these mountains, under these present skies so full of autumn, it makes me long with the potential of tragedy and the light of joy that I were somehow more adequate to express that light shining through, to unfold it as it is unfolded in my consciousness like a rose of light by means of Spanish words.
I do not have such powers yet. I wonder if I will, and yet I have a feeling that if the time should come when I could speak in beams of unmitigated understanding I would no longer be in the world of sunlight, rain, the wind, and the astonishing green of the green grass, but in a place where these keen realities have become transcended and seem shadows, and entirely new powers of expression have to be developed all again.
Unknowing 