Steering a Space-Plane

Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:

“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins.  Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,’ he asserts that ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.’ A comfort.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162

Yesterday’s note, “Time and Eternity,” supplies the “immortal diamond” part of this meditation.  For the “matchwood” part, see the cover of The New York Times Book Review of February 2 (Candlemas), 2003:


Cover illustration
by Stephen Savage

N.Y. Times Feb. 2, 2003



‘A Box of Matches’:
A Miniaturist’s
Novel of Details
In Nicholson Baker’s novel,
things not worth noticing
eventually become
all there is to notice.

See also the Times’s excerpt from Baker‘s first chapter,
about “steering a space-plane.”

For the relationship of Hopkins to Eastern religions,
see “Out of Inscape,” by Robert Morris.