Poet and Priest

All Things Considered

Leave a Comment / By Paul Hughes / April 25, 2016

This could go a couple different ways.

An image likes could be Veteran’s Day, it’s not, or Memorial Day which, though closer, it’s not. Could be about a song (actually a poem) I found only a few months ago or an automatically somber meditation on mortality that’s begun before you’ve even begun to read … such is the power of an image like this.

It is none of those.

Let us say it is fates worse or fate’s worst.

Three things —

“To live you must die.”
“(Have) contempt for death.”
“Life lies in resolve for death.”

The first is Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, in The Way. Second is Steven Pressfield in War of Art. Third is from a Japanese language film, Love and Honor.

Quite a collection—and of course it’s elsewhere and everywhere if one knows where to look.

Escrivá also says “No ideal becomes real without sacrifice. Deny yourself.” Probably Pressfield has it in various versions in his books, which I’m working through now.

But Love and Honor is what got me thinking on it years back. The fuller idea from it goes like this —

“There is one way you can win. That is if you are resolved to die, and the other man wants badly to live. That’s the only way. I told you something [once] — do you remember? Be resolved you will both die. In that lies victory. Life lies in resolve for death.”

These three.

That’s all.

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