truest vision

The Venerable Bede's "truest vision of life" as recast by Wallace Stegner in The Spectator Bird strikes the same Stoic note as Thanatopsis. But Bede himself apparently was less composed, when the time came to wrap his drapery. Simon Critchley says he broke down and wept over the dread departure of the soul from the body and the prospect of God’s judgment. Too bad he lived too early to read Emerson's Divinity School Address, which might have emboldened him a bit.