Disibodenberg, a nine-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland region of western Germany, is a majestically dismal ruin, its roofless buildings overrun by ivy and interspersed with stands of oak, ash, and beech. When I searched out the site, last May, I was the only visitor. I half expected to come across Caspar David Friedrich painting at an easel. One sector, consisting of scattered blocks and fragments of walls, is marked with a sign, in German: "Area of the Hildegard Convent (12th Cent.)." This, according to one guess, is where the nun, theologian, poet, and composer Hildegard of Bingen spent about forty years of her eight-decade life. In her teens, she was enclosed with two other nuns at the monastery, seemingly destined for a life of anonymous devotion. Something of the ambience of the place seeps into Hildegard's hymn to St. Disibod, the Irish bishop for whom the monastery is named: "You hid yourself out of sight/drunk with the smell of flowers in the windows of the saints/reaching towards God." Hildegard did not stay out of sight.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin February 06, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin February 06, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
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