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Mr. Blue
Mr. Blue put his hands into his trouser pockets and leaned backward, his face toward the heavens, now filling with stars.
“I think,” he whispered half to himself, “my heart would break with all this immensity if I did not know that God Himself once stood beneath it, a young man, as small as I.”
Then, he turned to me slowly.
“Did it ever occur to you that it was Christ Who humanized infinitude, so to speak? When God became man He made you and me and the rest of us pretty important people. He not only redeemed us. He saved us from the terrible burden of infinity.”
Blue rather caught me off my guard. I might have admitted in him a light turn for philosophy. I did not expect any such high-sounding speculation as this. But he was passionately serious. He eyes were glowing in the dark. He threw his hands up toward the stars: “My hands, my feet, my poor little brain, my eyes, my ears, all matter more than the whole sweep of these constellations!” he burst out. “God Himself, the God to Whom this whole universe-specked display is as nothing, God Himself had hands like mine and feet like mine, and eyes, and brain, and ears!….” He looked at me intently. “Without Christ we would be little more than bacteria breeding on a pebble in space, or glints of ideas in a whirling void of abstractions. Because of Him, I can stand here out under this cold immensity and know that my infinitesimal pulse-beats and acts and thoughts are of more importance than this whole show of a universe.”
–Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue, published in 1928
Published in General
This is always a good reminder.
Happy Easter Peter.
Wow, I had never seen that quote. Very moving. Thank you.
I hadn’t heard of Mr. Connolly or Mr. Blue before this.
Thanks, Peter. It’s on the reading list with a bullet.
Myles Connolly was one of the original Hollywood conservatives. An interesting career.
Gary and Gary alone would know this!
This novella is available for free checkout from Archive.org. I’ve put it on my list.
I checked Gutenberg already. Boy, that site has been “reimagined” pretty hard. Archive.org it is.
Pascal said,
He found his way within Christianity to deal with the fear of insignificance. Mr. Blue has a nice response to that fear, too.