Excerpt from a NYT column:

"Franz Rosenzweig's "Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God." The sickness in question is paralysis, what we would today probably call clinical depression. It is the patient's metaphysical prowess that paralyzes him. It has replaced the common sense that once allowed him to accept ordinary things. He can no longer go to the store for butter because, after all, "the butter remembered, the butter desired, and the butter finally bought, are not the same. They may even be quite different." And yet he is able to make the purchase — or would be able to, if he would just move on.

Rosenzweig writes: "The continuity of life blunts the edge of marveling. Wonder is finally enveloped in the stream of time.""

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There's the rub; to remember that time is an arbitrary, a false cover, a flim-flam and a bamboozle, so that you can stay on the cresting edge of wonder and new sight. This belief that change is slow, that newness only comes on the installment plan, that things are as they were instead of as they scintillatingly are, is a morose and terrible pit to lie in. This is something, I believe, that Mom understands instinctively.


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