I am re-reading Brideshead Revisited.
I first read it on the flight home from my epic trip to England in February. The novel touched on many of the locations I had been to, the banks of the Avon River, London, especially Farm Street Church where I had spent a full week with the Jesuits and then, of course, Surrey landscape.
The novel takes place between the two World Wars, capturing a time now lost, the last days of the gentry and large houses with families of no occupation or vocation.
I was shocked, especially, after a month away to focus on faith, specifically in Catholic communities, to discover this book is about a Catholic family, in a world where there are very few Catholics. Each character struggles with love, so much that it isolates them from each other. They want love so desperately, yet they know, deep down that the love they are settling for is a lessor love. It is not the ultimate love, the love of God, this is what they hope and long for, echoing Augustine’s “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
I finished the book as the plane began its descent into Seattle after a full month of being away from my family, and just sobbed.
Six months later, I began to read the book again, underlining and furiously taking notes in the margins. I fear this book will be like Mad Men, which I have watched continuously in loop for a decade now. I have begun watching the 1981 miniseries as well, watching just as far as I have read in the book. Friends have sent me articles and essays on the novel. It is as if I want to know everything about it---to figure the book out. I think the word might be obsessed.
I can vividly remember standing in a book store in Whittier, California, where I grew up, in 1990, staring at the cover of this novel, trying to decide whether to purchase it with my babysitting money or not. I cannot remember the book I chose instead but it is as if God saved this book just for the right time for me. 33 years later, it would mean something else to me that teenage Shemaiah would not understand. Of course, she wouldn’t. She hadn’t even been to England yet or been in love or understood that the love of God surpasses all those other loves.
I just read this book for the first time. I have a lot of thoughts and questions about it-- it is so rich! It's interesting that you mention Augustine, because I was just pondering how Sebastian's journey ends in North Africa (Tunis/Carthage partly) and (as Cordelia recounts it) there's a priest that says to her regarding her brother: "all I can do is pray for him" (so reminiscent of Bishop Ambrose's words to Monica about Augustine).
It's a great book about a time when all that had been attacked by the Rhodes conspiracy could have been restored. And was not.