Gift

I gave myself The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which I found in the Retreat House Library at the New Camadoli Hermitage in Big Sur last week.

There are many world-class sentences and paragraphs in the book, a book made up of lectures--The Terry Lectures--Tillich delivered at Yale in 1952.

The book took me back to the time when I thought of good writing as clear thinking, which was long ago but not so long that I don't remember it.

"The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question." Spinoza (Ethics iii, prop.7)

"The Latin word for endeavour is conatus, the striving toward something. This striving is not a contingent aspect of a thing, nor is it an element in its being along with other elements; it is its essentia actualis. (Tillich on Spinoza, p. 20).

When I write it's always striving, when it's writing.

And thank you, Brooks.