The existence of the badstofa seemed mythical, floating in a frozen abyss of silence. The flames of the candles licked the winter air, and the shadows seemed to dance along the walls with the howls of the wind. Toti’s head pounded and his thoughts crashed against him, like the way ocean waves crashed against the coast and the wind stitched itself into the valley. Agnes floated in and out of consciousness and Toti found himself asking himself too many questions that he believed only God could answer. Why? Why did God decide that the events she faced throughout her life would cause her to sin against Him and man, with such a strong intellect about Christianity? “I have failed her,” Toti unconsciously mumbled to no one in particular but himself, the shadows against the wall seeming to grow bigger and higher than him, as if God was mocking him. …show more content…
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Toti pondered the passage he heard his father reciting after they became aware of Agnes’s request for his spiritual guidance. Was God punishing Agnes? Had the man who she had fallen for, the one who said to have been named after Satan the Devil, angered God? His thumb rubbed against the wooden cross he kept in his pocket, and the pounding in his head and the ringing in his ears seemed to change. He shook it off and his attention snapped back to the badstofa. He could just make out Margret and the others breathing, restless and disjointed like his own. He turned to Agnes, her eyes hollow and lost as her lips and hands trembled with the creaking of wood. Did he love her? The question seemed to strike him in the side, his breath sharp as he looked up from his lap and he clutched at his chest, shocked by the thought as if it wasn’t his own. The thought and the feeling seemed so unnatural to him, women had never crossed his mind and
I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand… Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. (170)
to Agnes if she could switch into the priestly role of Damien so quickly. Agnes herself describes
law, or God's law if you will. Ultimately she felt that His law was right,
‘Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying strait to the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment, streams of human beings-of naked human beings – with spears in their hands, with bows, with shields, with wild glances and savage movements, were poured into the c...
with it and blamed the slave woman Tituba for forcing her to join the devil.
The concepts of good and evil resonate throughout the work of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir. In Muir’s important poem “The Horses,” guilt and innocence, good and evil, are also in the plainest view. But the poem is not sabotaged artistically because of it, as so many such poems are. “The Horses” is about the unexpected return, after an apocalypse, of new horses that restore the “long lost archaic companionship” with the surviving humans. The narrator condemns the “old bad world” that wreaked the damage:
In the effort to purge their surroundings, they ended up killing their loved ones. This extreme effort to secure perfection and rid themselves of sin left no room for earthliness, for human error and weakness. They would both rather lead lives of complete perfection than lives where amounts of imperfection are tolerable. The younger man sees the sin in the eye of the older man and exudes a severe reaction of enraged sinfulness, where he himself takes on his own gruesome mortal sin and his own extreme imperfection in the act of murder. Similarly, Aylmer sees the sin in the birthmark of Georgiana and reacts with repulsed sinfulness, where he himself also takes on his own horrible mortal sin and his own severe imperfection in the act of murder. In the attempts of both men to purge themselves of sin, they invite even greater sin into their
... she developed her own beliefs, which were nothing like those that had been taught by her environment.
When they first find the old man, the villagers claim that “he’s an angel” (Marquez 1). There is no denying the man’s divinity but he seems to represents much more than your average angel. In fact, the old man doesn’t resemble the typical image of an angel at all. Rather than being a young and pure angel, he is “much too human” with his “unbearable smell”. His angelic wings are even “strewn with parasites” with mistreated feathers (2). This contrasting imagery, however, doesn’t completely undermine the old man’s divinity; rather it draws attention to his lackluster appearance. The disappointments we feel towards the old man along with his particular characteristics make him remarkably similar to the one of bible’s tragic heroes; he is th...
“The room was silent. His heart pounded the way it had on their first night together, the way it still did when he woke at a noise in the darkness and waited to hear it again - the sound of someone moving through the house, a stranger.”(4)
At last I arrived, unmolested except for the rain, at the hefty decaying doors of the church. I pushed the door and it obediently opened, then I slid inside closing it surreptitiously behind me. No point in alerting others to my presence. As I turned my shoulder, my gaze was held by the magnificence of the architecture. It never fails to move me. My eyes begin by looking at the ceiling, and then they roam from side to side and finally along the walls drinking in the beauty of the stained glass windows which glowed in the candle light, finally coming to rest on the altar. I slipped into the nearest pew with the intention of saying a few prayers when I noticed him. His eyes were fixated upon me. I stared at the floor, but it was too late, because I was already aware that he wasn’t one of the priests, his clothes were all wrong and his face! It seemed lifeless. I felt so heavy. My eyes didn’t want to obey me. Neither did my legs. Too late I realised the danger! Mesmerised, I fell asleep.
era and so she soon became a sinner in the eyes of those around her.
and he was not in her own image. If she did create God in her own
of her action as a sin. In chapter four she tells her husband that it was
and she believes that by following God's moral code she will be right and just.