The best laid plans of mice and men, said someone somewhere in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, oft go astray. I’m not sure what role the mice play in the Bard’s world-embracing stage, where we’re all players, but it’s true that life rarely works out as tidily as one’s grand designs on the back of an envelope. Or in my case, on the back foot.

It would be neither meet nor seemly to disclose how things are happening differently than planned and perhaps better than expected. Nothing is yet engraved and I daren’t tempt fate, though I often come close. The possibilities are still just ephemeral sprays of ink in the wind. But there is a great virtue in letting that process happen to you. Gird up the loins of purposeful endeavour, and if it’s for the right reasons, there’s often an inexplicable and providential obviousness that infuses the life around you.

Close readers of the Neocrats will note that this isn’t my normal style of writing. Firstly it’s even more prolix than usual and, secondly, it’s an unfocused and entirely disjointed jaunt through random thoughts. My typical neocratic entries try and blend into a few oddly chosen words the entire force of the spirit moving through me at a given moment. But today I must quickly post something because I’m already a day late: you see, as part of the extravagant necromantic project to bring the Neocrats back to life, the writers have all been set deadlines. Mine was first (and it was yesterday) so I am frantically stringing together any old words simply to file. In this respect the Neocrats is perhaps becoming a more earthly blog.

But the discovery of heaven shall ever be our true pursuit and in this light I have a couple things to say. Firstly the novel by Harry Mulisch by that title offers a happy reading to the friends. At first glance it seems self-absorbed and I acknowledge some spongy, squishy sogginess in its second half, however Mulisch and his characters transcend the earth-bound mundanity of too much intellectualism and use that same ladder for an inevitable revelation at the end, which I hope will be of such life-altering force as to earn the book a place in my pantheon of texts. [Ed: This is a terrible paragraph.]

Another point about heaven: it happens sometimes that a youth ascends to the concaved tip of a beautiful tower, and sees a view of the cosmos impossible elsewhere. Standing on the ground of clouds and washed by sky and sun above, the improbabilities of the universe are briefly almost at hand. We should all seek to live in the tower yet walk the streets below, to manage this life in tandem, becoming the ecstatic link between the kingdoms of earth and heaven – which we testify are Thine, oh Lord of the worlds.

Does that count as my daily oblig? Tune in next time.

S.

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