THE WAR LORD

"The pious," she went on meditatively, "after all know most about this.  That is why they set up the saints and what they call the communion of the saints.  The saints, these are the true men, the younger brothers of the Saviour.  We are with them all our lives long in every good deed, in every brave thought, in every love.  The communion of the saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else but what I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity.  It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances.  It is there we belong.  There is our home.  It is that which our heart strives for.  And for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death.  There you will find your Goethe again and Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, Christopher, Philip of Neri and all.  There are many saints who at first were sinners.  Even sin can be a way to saintliness, sin and vice.  You will laugh at me, but I often think that even my friend Pablo might be a saint in hiding.  Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home.  And we have no one to guide us.  Our only guide is our homesickness"--Steppenwolf

Yesterday John P. took me on a tour of the Art Gallery of Ontario.  I've been there before, but not with someone who had so much to say about the art there. He has more artistic opinions than I do!  He even treated me to dinner at the AGO restaurant afterward. (I had a cornish hen and churro funnel cake.)

That evening I saw Franklin J. Schaffner's The War Lord (for the second time), screening the video for the History Meetup.  It's one of the more intelligent movies about feudalism, with Charlton Heston well cast as the antihero lead.

Last week at the History Meetup, where we discussed Thailand, Bohdan gave me a fancy coffee-table book about the architectural marvels of the world!