Ink and Faithfulness

Ink and Faithfulness

Dear Damian

Thank you for your phone call at the end of your long day. It was a great pleasure to receive your encouragement with its stimulus to identify space for personal enrichment; a faithfulness to my own recreation and renewal.

Ink and Faithfulness: At school there was an elderly janitor called Sushil. He was a slight, wiry man, dressed in khaki, and, on occasion, he wore a Kashmiri felt black hat. He smelt of books and paper. Many generations of students, even Phyllis, knew this faithful servant of the school in Kalimpong. Sushil was a multi-tasker: he arranged the school playing fields, rang the school gong at thirty-five minute intervals to mark the class periods, he wound the clock and chimes of the school tower by climbing two hundred feet through the body of the great tower, between its bells with a total weight of half a dozen tons, he set out the school assembly boards for the Art Master to write the assembly hymn on Mondays. He distributed post throughout the school, and countless other essential duties.

But, a wonder of Sushil's tasks was the weekly decanting of hundreds of black ceramic inkwells, and refilling them with fresh school ink. This school ink, prepared in a glory hole (an untidy cupboard or store room Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus 2006) beneath the staircase to the Headmaster's office, was made from tablets to produce a deep, mysterious indigo fluid like mercury, that had the most gallo-tannic scent ever. The brew was left to stand several days before Sushil would fill stone flagons to then replenish the hundreds of scholars' inkwells.

Over the generations from 1900 to 1960s, when ink all but disappeared, Sushil's school ink never varied in its consistency, colour, and corrosiveness on steel! It had faithfulness!

On Monday this week, HH Pope Benedict XVI delivered his customary address to the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, at the close of the academical term. This gifted thinker made the remark:

..faithfulness is linked to the gift of Faith;

a natural "idem sentire"

expressed by the word Faithfulness..

idem, the same, likewise, also

sentire, feel, see, perceive, experience, observe, understand, think, judge, decide

Collins Latin English Dictionary 1957

natural, genuine, spontaneous

I was struck by the phrase ..a natural idem sentire..

Fondest greetings.

Acknowledgements

Vatican Radio News

Collins  Latin English Dictionary  1957 Professor D A Kidd, General Editor G F Maine

Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus 2006

My photographs Fuji Finepix X 100

S T Dupont Black Ink and Fidelio Fountain Pen

OMAS 360 Fountain Pen