The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes, over the sensations of which we have very little control. Donne looked at it, saw it, and did not blink. He walked straight at it: no explanation, justification, so cheerful sallies. There was just the clear-eyed acknowledgement of the precise anatomy and scale, the look and feel, the reality of ruin.
K. Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022), 69
No comments:
Post a Comment