MALAGARNASSUS: Your territory is broadened. I have come to you with a divine scroll. One of those divine scrolls you've always wanted, which you used to weep for when you stood on the shores of Lake Sicily, counting the strength of the tide with a formula you had derived from the ancient formulas of Pythagoras. And the size and the swell, but more so the speed of the wave would tell you how close the moon was, and how much its body caused tide on earth, if Einstein is to be believed as to gravity. People say, "And what if there were no moon? What then? The Man in the Moon has been disproven, doesn't exist." To which you'd say, "The water in the world would be flat." ...And so I have brought you these three divine scrolls. The ones which elaborate beauty, and which you stood on the Aegean shores for. Which you watched the captains ride high for, from Tripoli coast on to Tyrol. "The scrolls, the scrolls," you said. And I never knew what they wrote. But here are the scrolls. Do not eat them in one breath. That is what Delphi proposed. In a long-elided language, lost among the babble, rife with mistranslation: "Do not eat them in one breath." Good night, my Lord. (bowing) Goonight. (bowing) Banquo. (bowing) Banquo. (bowing) Banquo. (Looking slightly around. Then:) Nevermore.

And in the margins on the Christian problem of the imminently expected second-coming:

Jesus & the Significance of Immanence [sic]: Jesus as a conduit for a full-throated Readiness. A positive (possible) state of emergency (emergence). What seemed to be one of the great flaws/embarrassments, rationally or scientifically speaking.... Does this broaden the poetic sense of Christianity, which is a necessary feature of a functional...[illegible].... A constant state of emergency. A catastrophic love, an a-temporal love. A suspended state—with all its glory but lack of progress. All its meaning-in-itself. Scholastic fidgeting.

And then this on a note card attached to the papers by a paperclip:

And at that hour when my body becomes all about feeling I lack all discretion and become holy. At that hour I am Jesus with the lepers. It is not an act of kindness, to rub up amongst the lepers. Rather, those men and women suffer so from the lack of touch that they will give you, in your hour of total feeling, attention beyond attention, new categories of attention. They will enclose you in a sphere of being...O, Love, you've always held the torch that close to death.

And nothing else.

Please advise, reading T.E. Hulme deep into the cancerous night:

Nature has her revenge.
You don't believe in God, so you begin to believe that man is a god.
The instincts that find their...outlet in religion must come out...some other way.
In other words, you get romanticism.

"If Judt had no difficulty establishing the 'absolute clarity on the Communist question' of his trio, he systematically downplayed their complicity with imperialism. Yet Blum's