I have been reading about Gerard Manely Hopkins - here is a beautiful description of him and his struggle to understand what makes life worth living, written by Paul Mariani:
"But what of those for whom the titanic struggle is all within, as with this lowly porter on the island of Majorca [the largest island in Spain]?
What of those who are bedridden, crippled, house- or prison-bound, who suffer with silent courage from depression or migraines, or who have been given the task of reading thousands on thousands of examination papers and whose salary they never see?
Does not the God who over millennia and with infinite patience has hewn the very continents, melting mountains along with glaciers, or each spring for untold ages past has veined violets cell by cell and watches over the slow growth of cedars and oaks and maples, can not this God 'crowd career with conquest' when nothing seemed to happen, as a man, who merely did his duty day in day out in a world without event, was molded cell by cell into a saint?"
-Paul Mariani, Hopkins' Late Poetics: The Christ-saturated Thing Itself, p. 111
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