Thrasher's Call

taken from the discourse between Syme and Gregory in chapter 1 of "The Man Who Was Thursday", which, on discussing the miraculous nature of commonplace reality, contains the line:

It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it is the victory of Adam.

Now and then, I glimpse it: the sequence of events that is my life; the succession from past to present, that coalesces to the current “me.” How quickly my miraculous past fades indeed, when “ex et ad nihilo” feels realer than “ex et ad victoria”, and future hope seems fantasy. Oh, how dim my vision! It cataracts with cascading cataclysm so – until what is clouds what really was and what will truly be: the sure and certain shearing curtain, the victory of resurrected life that casts off the pain of death – new life in second Adam.