Why We Can Love The Saint

 I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human, God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 64

I'm trying to put the finishing touches on the paper for the upcoming conference in Lisbon, which has me inundated in various works by and about Fernando Pessoa. Of course, this also is distracting me from the epics book, which makes perfect sense because I chose Pessoa as the subject for a couple presentations simply to try and kickstart my writing; as the old saying goes, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." Nevertheless "forcing" yourself to reread The Book of Disquiet is never a bad thing, and this passage, already heavily noted from previous reading, jumped out at me again. Now, I'll never achieve perfection in my writing, although at this point I'd settle for something akin to gross competence. This weekend we drove down to see Janet's mom for Mother's Day, and that can always be a challenge. In the end, it, with a couple bumps along the way, went pretty well. On the way home, as part of the inevitable debrief, I proposed that we had all done the best we could, and thinking about it seemed to make Janet very happy. "The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent."