We're currently reading John Donne (one of my favorite poets) in my Seventeenth Century Lit class, so here's a bit of his prose for you from his famous Meditation 17:
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.....No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
I like the metaphor of heaven as library, as long as I'm not employed there :-)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.....No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
The phrase "...every book shall lie open" also reminds me of one of my favorite scriptures, 1 Corinthians 13:12: "...now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known."
