p. 28 Rufinus’s translations of Origen’s works (from Green to Latin) “also changing the voice of Origen to the voice of Rufinus-as-Origen and at the same time to the voice of Origen-as-Rufinus, in order to transform their readers. In the preface, Rufinus writes ‘The interpretation of the 36th, 27th and 28th Psalm contains everything that is the moral life. They provide us with teachings for the correction of our lives, showing us both the path to conversion and repentance and the path to cleansing and perfection… The book, Rufinus promises his friends, this bundle of plant bodies platted and painted by human hands, can help you change… In manifold ways, the words and languages and hands and bodies touch and change each other.”
p. 29 “The force that Origen, in Rufinus’s Latin, calls ‘the power of words” illuminates and sanctifies the speaker’s soul. This is a bodily change, not just persuasion. In his late treatise Against Celsus, Origen says of majical spells that ‘it is not the significance of the things which the word describe that has a certain power to do this or that, but it is the qualities and characteristics of the sounds.”
p. 36 “Papyrus can wait a long time in the dark. Pliny writes that ‘Cassus Hemina, a historian of many years ago states, in his Annals IV, that Gnaeus Terentius, a clerk, when digging his land on the Janiculum, unearthed a chest that held the body of Numa, king of Rome, and some books of his. This happened 535 years after Numa’s reign. Hemina further writes that the books were made of paper (papyrus) which is all the more remarkable because they remained intact. The books, in this story, are later destroyed, some deliberately and some by accident. Pliny’s story is about how old papyrus can be, but it ius also a story about trust, about the mutual confidence of plants and humans resting together in bodies, and about remembering… papyrus is the caretaker of the human body and it becomes the body; undone and woven back together in plant form. The plant cares for the human that touched it, although its care is inhumane. It cares for the human in this way because it is inhumane, for no human could provide the same long afterlife for another.”
p. 51 Unlike plants and humans, stones and earthy matter exist at the obscure limits of aliveness. Sometimes they are alive and sometimes they are records of past aliveness or signs of aliveness in the future. Sometimes they exist on the barest possibility of aliveness. They are a logical problem. In his translation of Origen’s On First Principles, Rufinus, in Origen’s voice, simultaneously denies that stones will be reunited with God at the end of the world, and concedes that one might think that scripture implies they could be… In Origen’s Homily 4 on Ezekiel, Origen, this time in the words of Jerome, admits: 2If I look over the whole broad ‘forest’ of Scripture, I am constrained to suppose that this visible earth is a living creature…. The whole creation groans and suffers pangs.” ] Rom 8:22] If the whole creation groans and suffers pangs, but the earth and heaven and aether are a part of the creation … then who knows whether the earth also is subject to some sort of sin according to its own nature, and held liable?”
p. 72 “The limestone, brick and marble of Aquileia also changed over the course of the 5th century. The city fell to Attila the Hun in 452, and afterwards the forum, the walls and other public spaces were reconfigured or abandoned… But humans are not the only rebuilders of limestone: wind, weather, salt deposits, changes in water flow, or seismic action are equally involved in the movement and reshaping of stone matter. The tendencies and reactions of stone to its chemical or atmospheric surroundings are some of what Origen might call the characteristics of the stone’s parts.”
“Plotinus believed that the earth, in its nonhuman, seeing, sensing form, was good. Origen believed that the earth, graning in labour pains, desired to become good… Theophrastus says that the most wonderful of all are the stones that give birth to young.”
p. 76 “Rufinus was an intellectual, but he was also a traveller. In the world in which he lived, thinking and moving were the same. Thinking and knowing and hoping and trusting and believing happened in inbetween space…. Learning was often pictured as a path or journey, and the stories of migrations – the wanderings of Odysseus, the wanderings of Abraham or Moses – were stories of intellectual motion. Knowledge was not an accumulation of facts but a navigation, a directional skill that one could practice well or badly… In a universe made up of divine thinking, to go out from the land of Egypt, to cross the sea, to move in our tiny human way through the landscape, is to exist inside knowledge. To find, and be found by, the nonhuman things that lie between us and the horizon is to live inside the mind and body of the world.”
p. 80 Vitruvius, from whom we learn much of what we know about Roman architectural theory, insists that the Roman builder of houses ‘should have learned the art of medicine, because of the influences of the different zones of the world… and of different types of air and location – some of them healthy and others conducive to illness – and because of the importance of different waters. Without all these considerations, no place to live can be healthy. In siting a farm, according to the agricultural writer Palladius, “a wholesome air is indicated by a location well away from valley bottoms and night mists, and by appraisal of the inhabitants’ physique. The forms our bodies take are manifestations of the air and water around us; we are products of their tendencies and constraints.”
p. 134 “The movement and touch of hands is ephemeral, but it is also a way of creating knowledge that is different from the knowledge that we find elsewhere. Knowledge from hands is from and with a body, so it is hard to put into words, though words too can be part of a hand’s work… Zeno of Citium, we are told, said that knowing something is like grasping it firmly in your hands.”
p. 135 “This physical conversation between maker and matter is a way of knowing, as Tim Ingold puts it, from the inside; it is a responsive practice of inquiry…” the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the material with which we work. Knowlewdge construction, when it is literal construction, is both experiential and multidirectional, in the sense that knowledge is neither simply imposed on a material object of knowing nor purely extracted from it. The nonhuman interlocutor and its human partner are together greating and inhabiting a period of time in which knowledge occurs as the coming together of their bodily actions and tendencies. In this way, making is a process of creating events and times that are full of knowledge… is a turn away from a model of knowledge that locates knowing exclusively or primarily in the mind, and that defaults to the propositional as the primary form of knowledge.”
p. 150 “Intimacy is not an individual experience but happens between beings. Theorists of intimacy focus primarily on the intimate relationships between beings who are alive at the same time, at the same time scale. What does it mean to have or to make, an intimate relationship with the past? In such a relationship, to the degree that we can reach out and touch the past, that is, to a very small degree, the strangeness and decentering is mutual. We are destabilized when we touch the past, but the past is also destabilized by us and by our touch.
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