Forward & Upward
In his account from 1768 of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Laurence Sterne evokes an encounter with a Franciscan begging for alms. Sterne disapproved of the exercise. He was firmly resolved ‘not to give him a single sous‘. Yet he was intrigued by the man, above all by his eyes ‘and that sort of fire which was in them’. The friar’s head, he wrote, ‘was one of those heads which Guido has often painted,—mild, pale—penetrating, free from all commonplace ideas of fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth;—it look’d forwards; but look’d as if it look’d at something beyond this world.—How one of his order came by it, heaven above, who let it fall upon a monk’s shoulders best knows: but it would have suited a Bramin, and had I met it upon the plains of Indostan, I had reverenced it.’ The notion of ‘fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth’ is dispiriting. We need to meet people who direct our gaze forward and upward. Perhaps, by God’s grace, we may even be such to others.
