Ash Wednesday

 And so Lent begins.

I should have posted something edifying about Lent but today has not been the best of days.  So today just a paragraph from The Inn's archive.  This is Evelyn Waugh on an Ash Wednesday he spent in New Orleans:

"There is witchcraft in New Orleans, as there was at the court of Mme. de Montespan. Yet it was there that I saw one of the most moving sights of my tour. Ash Wednesday; warm rain falling in the streets unsightly with the draggled survivals of carnival. The Roosevelt Hotel overflowing with crapulous tourists planning their return journeys. How many of them knew anything about Lent? But across the way the Jesuit Church was teeming with life all day long; a continuous, dense crowd of all colors and conditions moving up to the altar rails and returning with their foreheads signed with ash. And the old grim message was being repeated over each penitent: 'Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.' One grows parched for that straight style of speech in the desert of modern euphemisms. . . ."