Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation
-- Sir Walter Raleigh, The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage
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| Bring forth the mollusk, cast unto me |
Hey, little boy, whatcha got there?Kind sir, it's a mollusk I've found.Did you find it in the sandy ground?Does it emulate the ocean's sound?Yes, I found it on the groundEmulating the ocean's sound.Bring forth the mollusk, cast unto me.Let's be forever, let forever be free.Hey, little boy, come walk with me,And bring your newfound mollusk along.Does it speaketh of the Trinity?Can it gaze at the Sun with its wandering eye?Yes, it speaks of the Trinity,Casting light at the Sun with its wandering eye.Bring forth the mollusk, cast unto me.Let's be forever, let forever be free.You see, there are three things that spur the mollusk from the sand:The waking of all creatures that live on the land.And with just one faint glance back into the sea,The mollusk lingers with its wandering eye.
The apparent inspiration for these lyrics is the story of St. Augustine, the Holy Trinity, the Child and the Seashell (edited slightly).
Saint Augustine of Hippo spent over 30 years working on his treatise De Trinitate, endeavoring to conceive an intelligible explanation for the mystery of the Trinity.He was walking by the seashore one day, contemplating and trying to understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity, when he saw a small boy running back and forth from the water to a spot on the seashore. The boy was using a seashell to carry the water from the ocean and place it into a small hole in the sand.The Bishop of Hippo approached him and asked, "Hey, little boy, whatcha got there?""I am trying to bring all the sea into this hole," the boy replied with a sweet smile."But that is impossible, my dear child. The hole cannot contain all that water," said Augustine.The boy paused in his work, stood up, looked into the eyes of the Saint, and replied, "It is no more impossible than what you are trying to do -- comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your small intelligence."The Saint, taken aback by such a keen response from the child, turned his eyes from him for a short while. When he glanced down to ask him something else, the boy had vanished.
I know the official line is that this eldritch child was an angel, or perhaps even Christ himself, in disguise. Perhaps, but the story gives me goosebumps nevertheless. I suppose the legend will, for any modern reader, inevitably be colored by the horror-movie cliché of the sweet little child who suddenly looks you in the eye and reveals himself to be something sinister and otherworldly. No matter how many times I read it, I can't shake the sense that the Saint's visitant had more about him of Faerie than of Heaven -- a cousin, perhaps, to the strange little person encountered by Saint Anthony (qv).
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In the allegory acted out by Augustine's apparition, the ocean is God, and the hole in the sand is the Saint's philosophical and theological system -- and the mollusk? Well, what part of a man is the most like a mollusk, most like a soft, slimy gray creature encased in a protective shell and occasionally producing pearls? The brain.
"Casting light at the Sun" -- one thinks of the absurdity, but also the profundity, of J. S. Bach's dedicating all his works "to the greater glory of God."
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Also, I apologize for this in advance, but the sync fairies insist -- for cephalopods are mollusks, too.
