Autumn 2012: Reading Teilhard Again

Thanks to my friend, Fr. Coveney, some books on and by Teilhard have come into my hands again.

The first: Letters from a Traveller is a beautiful revelation of poetry and beauty. I will share an excerpt here---

15 April, 1913 

All day long we have been gliding through the Gulf of Suez 
between two fantastically picturesque and desolate lands : Sinai, 
a great massif of granite and slashed red sandstone, and the 
Egyptian coast, at first regular and tabular and then bristling with all sorts of extraordinary peaks, all equally sharp and bare. Above them, dreamlike colours, strangely soft for a climate of such extremes. To the east, the sea seemed dark blue. Its line on the horizon was as sharp as a knife blade. And then, above this dark band, without a break, the pale pink of the mountains rose up into a misty green sky. 
At sunset, it was the western coast which drew 
to itself all the beauty of the evening. As the sun disappeared in a 
little flutter of burning clouds, so the mountains of Egypt, until 
then covered in mist, began to pass through every possible shade 
of violet, from the very deepest to the most transparent mauve. 
Last to be seen was a whole line of sharp points, like the teeth of 
a saw, silhouetted in the golden sky. But all this magic was 
nothing compared with what the mind was uncovering in these 
almost unknown lands, which hardly anyone visits and to which, 
perhaps for that very reason, the most mysterious phases of our 
religious history are linked. I would have liked to land on those 
rocky slopes, not only to test them with my hammer, but also to 
learn whether I too could hear the voice of the Burning Bush. 
But has not the moment passed when God speaks in the desert, 
and must we not now understand that * He who is ' is not to be 
heard in this place or that, for the heights where He dwells are 
not inaccessible mountains but a more profound sphere of things?  The secret of the world lies wherever we can discern the transparency of the universe. 

The entire text can be found here:http://archive.org/details/LettersFromATraveller

The thing that strikes me in this early letter of Teilhard is an amazing ability to describe the landscape poetically. One is reminded of Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo.

Poetry---the forgotten art in the age of digital communication. (How ugly the phrase 'digital information' sounds to the poet!). Poetry rejected by theologians, who forget that Jesus is a poet as reported in his parables, and especially The Sermon on the Mount! Poetry rejected by scientists, who speak in vulgar language concerning the natural world, and pride themselves on terrrible prose as their peer-reviewed articles miss entirely the beauty and wonder of natural phenomena. Poetry, yet again rejected by philosophers, who cannot see that Plato's prose is essentially poetic. And poetry rejected most of all by contemporary poets whose "'poetry" is nothing but prose, or sentimentalism, devoid of the majesty and wonder from which poetry must always be borne, if it is to be real and true.