Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Tearing open the abyss

David Foster at Chicago Boyz was reminded of a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) relevant to this regarding 9/11:
I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.
Bonhoeffer:
Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearance they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

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