Episode 273 - The Treasure

A little bit of surgery can compose the mind, right? In any event, in my recovery I went back to Nevil Shute's novel The Rainbow and the Rose. It concerns the twilight of a man's life as he lies dying in an overturned airplane in remotest Australia, and the insights he has -- and someone else has -- about himself. These insights concern the inward man, not the outward man; and the reader learns to look at himself in the broadest possible and yet the truest possible strokes. I've tried to say it before, but only one or two relationships that you have had will be on your mind at the end. It may be a child, possibly a lost child. It may be someone you've loved -- and who may be there still, by the grace of God. It may be one of your parents, or a father-figure or someone like that. But it will be a person, not a thing; an intimate connection, not an idea or "narrative". This podcast invites the listener to review his or her own life in these terms. They are the terms that last, or last until we are "swallowed up in death", or better, in the Light and New Jerusalem of God. Oh, and read Rupert Brooke's sonnet "The Treasure", from which the cast takes its title. Shute begins his novel under the rubric of that profound poem. You can find it anywhere. LUV U!