the evidence of things not seen

Here's the ending of one of my favourite Catholic guilt novels - Brideshead Revisited (the other is Graham Greene's The End of the Affair). Call it whimsy, but both novels have always been placed side by side on my bookshelf - they both tell essentially the same story, but one ends in doubt and despair, the other in faith and hope. No prizes for guessing which I like better.

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There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-noveau paint was as fresh and bright as ever; the art-noveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cook-house bugle sounded ahead of me, I thought:

'The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year, the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

'And yet,' I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding 'Pick-em-up, pick-em-up, hot potatoes', 'and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

'Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame - a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.'

I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our ante-room.

'You're looking unusually cheerful today,' said the second-in-command.



(from Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh)
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