Et in sempiternum pereant

Disturbing follow-up to Many Dimensions. The English genius for intensity through a glass.

By itself, the story of a man nearing the end of his life, afforded a glimpse of hell and an opportunity to experience self-sacrifice and service.

As a sequel to Many Dimensions, Lord Arglay has a limited experience of the submission and self-sacrifice that Chloe fulfilled in the earlier novel.

Arglay, tempted to anger and rage and vengeance - the last most anathema to one who had devoted his life and shaped himself to the service of Justice - offers us his formula “there is entire clarity in the Omnipotence” for recalling oneself into peace from tumultuous and negative emotions. “It operated; the temptation passed into the benediction of the Omnipotence and disappeared.”

But for the Personalization this could as well be a Taoist or Buddhist approach, perhaps. But Williams is a Christian, and I think he wants us, through Arglay, to come to something closer to Christian faith. Arglay came late in life to belief: he chose belief in the novel as a carefully reasoned response to his enemy’s actions, chose it as an intellectual posture, chose to give himself over to acting out of belief, without, I think ever understanding what it means to believe. Chloe demonstrated that submission to the will of God is belief, that sacrifice is belief. Lord Arglay understood what she had done; I think in this short story he is given the opportunity to do so himself.

The second half of the piece is a ghost story, a very disturbing ghost story, largely atmospheric tho’ with one intensely unforgettable image (borrowed I think, like the last line of the story, from Dante.)

The best part of the story are Lord Arglay’s observations on aging and the acceptance of aging in the first half.