Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

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In Rundell, Donne has an authoritative and sympathetic chronicler. If Super-infinite is ultimately stronger on the thematic and literary than the historical – Rundell’s evocations of court and international intrigue are gripping, but veer away from the book’s protagonist – then its achievements are substantial enough to make any shortcomings seem petty. This fine book demands and rewards your fullest concentration, just as its subject does: a super-infinite amount, in fact. No life of Donne can be a hagiography. Apart from all the ambiguities around the marriage, it is hard for the contemporary reader to stomach the humiliating flatteries that pretty much every aspiring literary figure of the era had to offer to potential benefactors. In a society still dependent on patronage to an extent we can barely imagine, very few could afford to stand on their dignity. It is tempting to reduce – as some have wanted to do – Donne’s priestly career to a last, barrel-scraping effort to find secure employment. But Rundell insists that this is a skewed picture when set against the evidence of Donne’s own letters; he is never less than serious about ordination and its demands. A sensibility like Donne’s was never going to be comfortable company. It is not surprising that his various attempts to establish himself as soldier of fortune, civil servant, member of parliament and diplomat were not successful. Single-mindedness and professional competence were not his priorities. Most spectacularly, he jeopardised his career and his freedom by marrying the teenage daughter of an aristocratic patron without the family’s consent. The poetry of the past, like its fiction and drama, and indeed its theology or philosophy, will often shake us by its tone-deafness to the moral registers we take for granted. It is no concession to moral relativism to say that it still deserves intelligent reading; we can even say, in many instances, that such reading helps us see how the resources of a historic text lay foundations for new perceptions that its authors would not and could not have contemplated directly. We can appreciate without absolving or ignoring – and without a desperate attempt to show that any anxieties are unfounded and that a historical author is really just an inoffensive contemporary in fancy dress. If it doesn’t get super cold where you live, or if you just love any excuse to wear a bit of lace, then give this design a try. The reversible lace stitch pattern uses knit, knit 2 together, purl, and purl 2 together stitches along with yarn overs. It’s knit in the round, so you don’t have to worry about seaming anything. You can just knit it and then wear it!

In poetry, this can be turned into a new cycle of inventiveness (that extraordinary poem “The Flea” is a case in point); in prayer and devotion, it serves more as a humbling reminder of the difficulty of focusing one’s attention on God: “I ignore God and his angels for the noise of a fly.” But something of the same spirit is there throughout: nothing is beneath notice in this kaleidoscopic world of material change. To quote Rundell again, “The human animal is worth your attention, your awe, your love.” Being aware of mortality does not divert your attention from the passing world but challenges you to think of the depth of what you experience, what you will lose, and – for Donne and his fellow Christians – what you will rediscover in some unrecognisably enriched mode. Super Saiyan Infinity - it was achieved by Goku. Its extremly powerful, nearly nigh-omnipotent. It is far stronger than super saiyan 100 and super saiyan prime 1 million. The vessel is en route to INDIA CHENNAI, sailing at a speed of 11.9 knots and expected to arrive there on Oct 4, 22:00.

That’s unfortunate. My only regret was not buying from aliexpress so that I could write a review and warn others.

Rundell has an engagingly idiosyncratic and playful style, with chapter titles that include The Erratic Collector of His Own Talent, The Anticlimactically Married Man and The Paradoxical Quibbler, Taking Aim at Women. It suits her subject, who took delight in combining high learning with bawdy humour; only Donne could suggest, as he did in his poem The Flea, that his mistress should surrender herself to his attentions after both have been bitten by the titular insect. But there is welcome revisionism, too. Rundell debunks the traditional, self-perpetuated image of the young Donne as a lothario, observing that “women of his class would have been hard to seduce … make a mistake … and you could be punished for life”. The great chronicler of libertine passions emerges here as serially monogamous and uxorious, if hardly chaste: he had 12 children, after all. Eternity, in its particular manifestation as infinity, is Rundell’s central theme. This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an “infinity merchant”. In embracing infinity, he turned eternity into a mathematical concept, and there is pulsing excitement to his quest for this quality, which runs through his writing about sex, death and God – his three great subjects. To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness.Rundell is right that Donne – “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.” Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.” Ben Jonson’s stern judgment on his contemporary, the metaphysical poet, cleric and scholar John Donne, was mitigated by his concession that he was “the first poet in the world for some things”. Nearly four centuries after his death, Donne remains a man of his age and a thoroughly contemporary figure, whose love of ambiguity and paradox, in life and art alike, baffles and thrills. Catholics in the late 16th and early 17th centuries were thought of in a similar way as we might think of Islamic State or al-Qaeda: for English Protestants, the Catholic martyr was not far removed from the suicide bomber in the modern imagination, someone who was as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own. Donne was to write about these matters in his late thirties with just a touch of obsessiveness, overcompensating, perhaps, for guilt at the abandonment of his family’s costly faith.

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