Set Out into Deep Waters
Daring to Seek Meaning & Magnificence
The scene is a hospital room. Four men in business suits are there to examine the patient, while his neurosurgeon looks on. The patient has a growth in the brain that must be removed immediately. Even the delay of a few days, a delay he has insisted on, puts his life at greater risk. His father, himself a physician but estranged from his son, nervously paces the ward outside the closed door, while the patient’s young fiancée sits and waits for the examination to be over. It will take three hours.
“You say Wordsworth was a champion of human reason,” says one of the examiners, “but now you say there is mysticism at the heart of his work. Do not reason and mysticism contradict one another? How can you maintain both at once?”
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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