Good Fortune

Michel de Montaigne

Here is a saying found in a Chinese fortune cookie: “Your heavy desire, only allow you to see what you are looking for.” Will the anonymous writer of this brilliant spiritual admonition please make his or her identity known? But what is the import? Is it what the recovery people are talking about when they ask “you know what you want, but do you know what you need?" Is it the concept of “limited objectives” that don’t let us see the possible munificence and magnanimity of the world? Is it the idea that lies behind another saying, “when one door closes, another opens?” You are full of urges and they compel you to fulfill immediate desires instead of taking a longer view. Sometimes you can hold the urge at bay, but once you have crossed the Maginot Line, all hell breaks loose and there's no turning back. It’s also the notion of Answered Prayers. “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones,” said Saint Teresa of Avila. “Watch out what you want for you may get it,” is another homily that conveys a similar idea. Of   course all these could easily qualify to be fortunes too, although to be effective your normal cookie cutter fortune has to have a D.I.Y. feeling—something which in the case of the fortune above is conveyed by a grammatical error, “Your heavy desire, only allows” is how it should read and the writer should have lost that initial comma, but when you make it read like one of the aphorisms of Montaigne, who also addresses these issues, you lose the charm. The problem is that once you get a fortune like this one, you rush to crack open the cookie in the next restaurant, only to be disappointed. The message coming to you was like one of those bottles that floats up to shore on the beach, carrying greetings from the denizens of another time. It’s by definition impossible to recreate the feeling of serendipity. In your drive to satisfy the desire, you become as narrow casted as the person the fortune teller was addressing, in his or her initial missive.

Rome Journal X: St Teresa, on Ecstasy

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

One of the great Bernini sculptures “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa" appears in S. Maria Della Vittoria on the Via XX Septembre. The sculpture depicts an angel shooting and arrow into Teresa. The sculpture itself, set in an aedicule, epitomizes the high drama of the    baroque sensibility. Maderno  sculpted another writhing saint, Cecilia, which lies in the church named after her in Trastevere. But here is what Saint Teresa herself said about the experience which Bernini attempted to render: “The pain thereof was so intense that it forced deep groans from me; just as the sweetness which this extreme pain caused me was so excessive, that there was no desiring to be free from it; now is the soul then content with anything less than God.” Here is a quote from Balzac’s The Girl With the Golden Eyes which expresses a similar sentiment about pleasure. “Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances; in order to obtain constantly the same effects the doses must be doubled, and death or degradation is contained in this last.” Can we say that the endorphins that had kicked in when Saint Teresa got shot by the arrow were beginning to wear off when she wrote her Life of Saint Teresa, Chapter XXIX from which the above passage emanates? Was the arrow a kind of spiritual syringe and was she a junkie who simply need another dose of God? But no matter. Here is the famed art historian Ernst Gombrich on the statue: “Even the treatment of the drapery by Bernini is entirely new. Instead of letting it fall with dignified folds after the classical manner, he lets it twist and swirl to accentuate; the dramatic and dynamic effects.”