The interior lives of monks

Monks are not saints.

Back in the Middle Ages, when Illuminated Manuscripts were all the rage, the monks poured themselves into this craft.  Written on velum, animal hide or sheets of parchment, the monks would painstakingly–with a sharpened quill feather– copy and illustrate ancient texts. For whatever reason, I imagined that they did so with a kind of superhuman stoicism, so blissed-out by God that they’d be oblivious to the actual drudgery of this ball and chain office job. However, I recently came across a list of comments that monks had written into the marginalia of the pages they were working on.  This is a sample of some of them:

New parchment, bad ink:

I say nothing more.

I am very cold.

Often, when my mind

is idle, I wonder of

women.

That’s a hard page and a

weary work to read it.

Brother Michael has gas

from the cabbage, and

I can take no more.

The parchment is hairy.

Thank God, it will

soon be dark.

Oh, my hand.

If I had a horse,

I would ride her away

through meadows and

into the sun!

My chair is wobbly.

My heart has been

sad for a long time.

Now I’ve written

the whole thing: for

Christ’s sake, give me a

drink.

Writing is excessive

drudgery. It crooks your

back, it dims your sight,

it twists your stomach

and your sides.

If Brother Ignatieff

coughs one more time

I will be called to act.

The hair shirt is

asking too much today.

Why, O Lord, why?

St. Patrick of Armagh,

deliver me from writing.

The ink is thin.

Impure thoughts,

Impure thoughts,

Impure thoughts!

Curse you Brother Francis!

While I wrote I froze

and what I could not

write by the beams of

the sun I finished by

candlelight.

And to make matters worse,

today the bread did not rise!

This is sad! O little

Book! A day will come

in truth when someone

over your page will say,

“the hand that wrote it

is no more.”

I can see what he is

doing beneath his cloak

and I am curious.

Vespers cannot come soon enough.

I fear it is my feet that smell rotten.

I should like to be the

wolf that devours the lamb.

I killed a bird yesterday,

so rich is the boredom in my life.

I like killing birds.

Pink rays are spreading

over the blush of sky.