The Lamp Still Burning
In a quiet cell he wrote a quiet book, and five centuries have not exhausted it. A complete 22,000-word book, free and yours to keep. Not a sample chapter.
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The candle has burned low, and the light it throws across the desk is the color of honey. Outside the small window of the cell, the marshland around Zwolle lies dark and flat under a Netherlandish sky, the Ijssel a thread of black beyond the priory wall. It is 1441. Inside, an old man sits bent over a table worn smooth by forty years of elbows, and in his hand is a pen he has trimmed himself, and under that pen is the last page of a book he has been building, one patient line at a time, since before some of the young canons singing compline down the corridor were born. His name is Thomas. The brothers call him Thomas à Kempis, after Kempen, the little town on the Rhine where he was born, though by now Kempen is a memory so old it has gone soft at the edges, like wax held too near a flame. He has lived at this monastery — Mount St. Agnes, Agnietenberg, the hill of Saint Agnes rising over the river plain — for most of seventy years of life, and he will die here too, though that is still more than twenty years off and no one in the room, least of all Thomas, is thinking of it tonight.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Thomas à Kempis from beginning to enduring memory.
- The Hand That Signs the Book
- A Boy in Kempen
- The House on the IJssel
- The Long Walk North
- A Life Poured Into Vellum
- How the Imitation Grew
- The Trials and the Trust
- The Cell Left Empty, The Book Still Speaking
- The Doorway
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What is the free book, and is there a catch?
No catch. The Invitation is a real book, free, and yours to keep: a complete portrait of this life in about 20,000 words, not a sample or a teaser. It is the doorway. The three volumes tell the life in its fullness, and they are here whenever you wish to go deeper.
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The three volumes are available as ebooks today; the audiobook narration joins your library when each life is voiced, at no extra cost to owners.
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