The second excerpt of the book "Ascetics"
Zenon's mother
Simon praised her for her continued progress on the way to God. His respect for this partner was not worn away by the trivialities of everyday life. This old man deliberately ignores the blemishes, shadows, and flaws evident on the surface of their minds in those chosen, and he may see only the purest parts of themselves, or what they themselves wish to be. Beneath the pitiful appearance of the prophets he had taken in, he recognized the saints. Ever since he first met Hirzonde, he had been moved by her pure gaze, and he had not seen the almost gloomy wrinkles on her sad lips. In his eyes, this thin and tired woman was always an archangel. ((Zenon was an illegitimate child))
disaster
The plague entered Germany via Bohemia. It came with the sound of the bell all the way unhurriedly, as if it were a queen. It leaned over the drinker's cup, it blew out the candle of the scholar sitting in the middle of the pile of books, it served the priest's Mass, it hid like a bedbug in the shirt of the firework woman; the plague brought a certain arbitrary equality, a certain stimulating and dangerous desire for adventure, into the lives of all. Berdycht is dead, the Book of God and the Virgin Book guarantee the salvation of her soul, Marta does not have the same confidence in her fate, she is cowardly in the face of calamity, she once thought she loved her cousin, but failed to be faithful to this innocent girl in the face of the plague.
The world's sufferings overwhelmed the San Comian's workhouse, and it was difficult for some, except for the frequent sick, to see them a second time; these countrymen with the mess they had hastily packed before fleeing, or what they had rescued from the house on fire, and the women carrying children wrapped in dirty cloth. The army routinely ransacked the rebellious farms, and almost all of the expelled countrymen were beaten and endured wounds, but their main affliction was hunger. Still others sighed less, but appeared more anxious, usually alone or in pairs, recognizing them as craftsmen from inland cities, most likely hunted by the Bloody Council.
Zenon's conversation with the captain
"It's just a war strategy, Captain!" Zenon said. "We live in it, just like you are hiding in bunkers and trenches. We end up smug about the implications. Stupid people believe in us, and some stupid people think we are stupider than they are, so they leave us, and the rest of them find their way out in the maze, learning to jump over or bypass the barrier of lies. ”
"You exaggerate people's hypocrisy, most people think very little, where else can they think of any unspoken meaning." The captain shrugged and said. "I know death, and there's a black hole between the musket bullet that Chelisole knocked me over, and later resurrecting me to a full glass of shochu. If it weren't for the sergeant's kettle, I might still be in that hole. ”
"I agree with you, though there is as much to say to endorse the concept of immortality, as much as there is to say against it. What disappears in death is the movement and appearance of the soul, not its essence? The alchemist said.
Zenon's dialogue with the abbot of the sick
"I can't hold on any longer, friend. Almost sixteen hundred years have passed since Christ came, and it seems that salvation has been completed once and for all, and we only need to live and get by in this world, or at most complete our own salvation. Indeed, we are preaching the faith, we are flaunting it with us, we are gleefully greeting hope, and we often sell it only at a high price to devout believers. But who cares about mercy, except for a few saints, and we tremble at the thought that their way of doing good is so narrow, yet at my age, as a monk, too soft compassion often makes me feel like a flaw in my own nature and should be fought against. ”
"Everything has a part of it, it can perceive, it is more or less conscious, everything has a part of it, I myself dreamed of the silent contemplation of the stone... The rhizome grows toward the sun, which is its supreme good, which decays due to lack of water, shrinks from the cold, and sometimes resists the unfair trampling of other plants with all its might. The rest of the world, I would say, is the mineral world and the spiritual world, if they exist, perhaps unconscious and quiet, outside of our joy and suffering, or within them. The ordeal we have endured, Mr. Dean, may be only a trivial exception in all things in the universe, and this may explain the indifference of the constant and unchanging substance which we reverently call God. ”
The Dean restrained a tremor.
He blew out the lights. The snow stopped, and a cold, dead white filled the room; the sloping roof of the monastery shone like glass. Only a yellow star gleamed dimly in the south of Taurus, not far from the brilliant Bildauro. Zenon had long since given up sketching astrological charts, arguing that our relationship with these distant stars was too vague to make an exact calculus. He was not unaware that, according to the celestial palace map of his and the dean's birthdays, Saturn's current position was intimidating.
Book Introduction:
In Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Zenon was born into a wealthy merchant family in Bruges, and for an illegitimate son, Zenon grew up for the church. However, at the age of twenty, he decided to run away from home and go to the world to explore knowledge. He traveled most of the world for more than thirty years, then returned to Bruges in anonymity to see the poor in workhouses. A nearly unrelated incident of monastic depravity exposed his true identity, and Zenon was sentenced to be burned at the stake after a joint trial between secular judicial authorities and the church. In February 1569, as the winter drew to a close, Zenon ended his life on the eve of his execution, dying in the city where he was born. The title of the book is taken from a term in medieval European alchemy, which refers to the process of calcining and separating matter in a crucible to extract pure ingredients, which is the first and most arduous step in the whole of alchemy. The protagonist Zenon, who is also a doctor, a philosopher, and an alchemist, is not willing to accept any ready-made concepts, whether he knows the world or man himself, but risks his life and strives to acquire knowledge close to the truth with his lifelong observation, practice and thinking. Zenon's lifelong quest up and down condensed the quest for knowledge and humanity by generations of humanists from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. In this sense, Zenon's death is also an elegy to the end of the Renaissance.
About the Author:
Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), born in Brussels, Belgium, grew up in France and traveled extensively in Europe. He settled on the northeast coast of the United States in 1939 and died in 1987 on Barren Mountain Island, Maine. In 1980 Eusenal was elected a member of the Académie française, becoming the first female member in the institution's 350-year history. Eusenaar was a typical scholar-type writer steeped in the European humanist tradition since ancient Greece and Rome; at the same time, she was aware of the limitations of Eurocentrism early on and had always had a keen interest in Eastern philosophy and literature. Her works are known for their profound knowledge, broad vision and profound philosophical thinking, including poetry, drama, essays, etc., especially in the creation of novels. His major works include the novels "Hadrian's Memoirs", "Hard Work", "The Unknown Man", etc., and the memoir "Labyrinth of the World" trilogy is also well-known. "The Bitter Refining" lasted more than forty years from conception to writing, and Yusenaar's long creative process can also be called an alchemy of life.