Lucerna et tintinnabulum

The Lantern and the Bell
author unspecified

"The Lantern and the Bell" has long been a controversial text. Despite its troubled past, its binding remains decidedly unassuming, set into a small and mottled brown calfskin cover with scant reinforcement. To believe Iohannes Monachus, of course, this would aid its purpose as an underground Eleanorian text, to be passed from cloak to cloak by sinister fingers.

In reality, even the most careful reader is met with, not a theocratic manifesto, but a porridge of theory so rambling and dense as to nearly qualify it as the Tan Book of Lem. We are lend on wandering suppositions that depart entirely from the sphere of the magical, at one point even venturing into a ten-page analysis of the (anonymous) author's mental experience on an evening walk about the garden. We spend two paragraphs alone in the presence of a single hollyhock blossom and its perceptual intricacies, a feat only trumped by the infamous ragweed passage in the popular student text The Epic of the Ant.

The prejudicial eye will inevitably find much in its vague musings to imbue with sinister undertones, but it is less An Infinite Quiet and more Mare Argentum.

The titular lantern and bell do not represent, respectively, the light of Eleanor held aloft in the dark suppression of the Cholaeic Order, and the pure vibration of the soul devoted to the cause of its godly masters. Instead it represents the illuminating qualities of a carefully examined perception, and its conveyance to others in the form of poetic texts like this volume itself.

While its revelations do not quite equal the effort to unravel its musings, it is nonetheless a diverting tome. Its much ballyhooed reputation as an extended critical metaphor for the human inability to ever truly distinguish Loving and Reasonable responses in a world of multiplied perception is, in the opinion of this scholar, wholly undeserved.

Of course, it is entirely possible that we are wrong.