Ex Libris Kirkland

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First Written 2022
Genre Biography
Origin UK
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
My Copy library copy
First Read February 21, 2023

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne



You cannot claim a man is an alchemist and fail to lay out the gold.

Quoted on March 7, 2023

This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism.

Quoted on March 7, 2023

[From the poem ‘The Storm’]
Some coffined in their cabins lie, equally
Grieved that they are not dead and yet must die.

Quoted on February 21, 2023

But if the conversion was real, there was probably no single burst of light or dark that caused it; like almost everything in our rusty-hinged, slow-moving world, it happened in pieces. There was the power of his ambition, and his understanding that promotion and success would not be compatible with open Catholicism, but there would also have been new books and new conversations, drinking with Protestants, flirtations with Protestants. There would have been the pull of other allegiances over denominational ones - to the monarch and to the idea of nationhood, which slowly took on the shape of national loyalism and led him towards the Church of England. His priorities shifted, realigned, took on new shapes. You, too, have experienced time.

Quoted on February 21, 2023


Ex Libris Kirkland is a super-self-absorbed reading journal made by Matt Kirkland. Copyright © 2001 - .
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