Читать книгу Master Kierkegaard: Summer 1847 - Ellen Brown - Страница 7

(May 29–July 13, 1847)

May 29

I, Magda, a servant in the house of Kierkegaard, answer to the younger living son, who is my master. As I am slight of build and not raised up to do the work of a charwoman, my household duties are light, though not supervisory in nature. Mrs. H. holds the keys. I would be a mere chambermaid had my master not taken an interest in my peculiar circumstances and temperament. His inquisitiveness into these matters is most surprising for two reasons. Before coming to work here three months ago, I had heard unkind things said about him in particular, who is known to have a razor-like tongue, while the whole family, though quite wealthy, seems to have lived and died under a curse of some sort. Copenhagen is not so large and sophisticated a town as not to indulge itself in village gossip of a superstitious and petty nature. I know better than to trust entirely in such reports, therefore. More surprising is my master’s capacity for taking an interest in one such as me, not the most unfortunate of women, but fallen in rank and esteem sufficiently to have suffered rudeness and indifference from previous masters. An afflicted person (particularly an unmarried woman) becomes an easy target for those enamored of their little bit of power, but for those possessing both wealth and nobility of mind, a stinting meanness holds no appeal. He is more generous in every way than most people realize. And more kind.

My own pride and memory of my former prospects impel me to make plain the fact that I have not sought the sympathy of my master. He has found me out, not through embarrassing questions that might cause me to dissemble, but through sheer attentiveness—no, I mean attention. He has a way of looking at me that feels as though he is looking through me, though not beyond me as in a vacant stare, but with a piercing gaze that picks up my essence and drives it deeper within, yet also out into the light, where I may see it for what it is, without boasting or shame. I hear he is a terrific critic of others, however, especially intellectuals who pretend to lead the elect to enlightenment by means of the catchphrases1 of the day. I am not surprised. The sharpness of his tongue (or pen) is matched only by the sharpness of his gaze, which cuts through me quite painlessly. But enough of that.

Tonight’s Holy Scripture2 is Matt 13:24–30. Allowing the weeds to grow alongside the wheat until the harvest—what patience this requires! One of my favorite activities is helping the gardener pull weeds. Imagine if we house servants were to let the dirt run its course—alongside the cleanliness?—what nonsense! The weeds, like the dirt, will overtake everything. But I suppose patience looks like foolishness, imprudence, naiveté, to the impatient. The last parable was about a sower sowing seeds. That is my master. This parable is about the servants tending the crop. This is I. And yet we are the seeds and the crop as well. Blessed be God forever!

May 30

Moving about the house today, accomplishing little, wanting to be out of doors, I finally told Mrs. H. I would go for a walk. She consented of course, not being my jailor, but with a worried look. Too much freedom for a servant leads to no good, she has told me before in dark tones. I have heard gossip—not from Mrs. H., who is all discretion, as a person in her position must be—that the freedom of a servant was the cause of this family’s supposed curse. I do not subscribe to primitive notions of cause and effect, though I think if there had been any grievous wrongdoing, the personal guilt attached to it could bring about any manner of unhappiness, illness, even death. Humanity is so deeply moral that it finds ways to punish itself one might not think possible. My master seems bent on some form of penance, though for whose sins is not quite clear to me. And yet he never takes the tone of a preacher with regard to either morality or religion—he is quite clear on the difference between the two. He seems to believe God could command a person to behave immorally and that person would have no choice but to comply. Such thinking frightens me, I confess. I believe my master takes Holy Scripture to heart in a manner most of us would never dare to do, the Old as much as the New Testament, maybe even more so.

Matt 13:31–32. Birds sheltering in the tree that grows from the tiniest of seeds, the mustard. The kingdom of heaven is not the tree, but the seed. Our souls are the birds. Our souls are the fruition of our bodies, in the same way that the tree is the fruition of the seed. When our bodies complete themselves, they will be at ease in the sky. The man who plants the seed is our Lord Jesus Christ. He grows a home for our souls that is rooted in the earth.

I sometimes help the gardener plant seeds and wonder how something that looks so dead could bring forth life. The gardener tells me the seed contains within it not only the pattern of its future life but also all the food it needs until it can take in the nutrients of soil, water, and light. I imagine what it would be like to be the seed, buried in the ground, straining toward the surface. How do people who live crowded together in large cities make sense of these parables, I wonder? Do they have little gardens of their own, at their windows or on their rooftops?

On my walk, feather-like seeds, a steady stream in the sky, followed by a yellow-green wave of finer particles, barely discernible yet pervasive. The whole a flow for long enough to suggest that with stronger vision I might see everything that way. I wish my master would walk out more. Mrs. H. wishes I would stay in more. I asked my master what sort of plant the mustard is and he said, “Irrepressible—a weed, essentially.”

June 1

The Sunday before last was Pentecost. We were called to the altar to renew our baptismal vows and confirmation. I touched the hem of the altar linen and felt a current pass through me, then returned to my seat and wept for all my losses. Was this my healing miracle? No one noticed anything I did, which in our small church is a miracle in itself. My boldness often gets me into trouble, but just as often it is my salvation. My master, who knows Greek, tells me the Gospel word for faith or belief can also mean trust or confidence. It seems different words speak to different situations.

I am reluctant to write about my master. He is a mystery to me and would not wish to be written about, I feel, whether I understood him or not. When he first found me, in the library looking into one of his German books (I cannot read Danish)—I was supposed to be dusting but became curious—he was not angry with me. He did not seem the least annoyed, in fact, at the liberty I had taken. It was Faust, which had fallen open to the garden scene. With a slight smile, my master gently took the volume from my hands, casting a quick glance onto the pages before closing the book and returning it to its place on the shelf. I have remarked already on his manner of looking, accentuated by his awkward posture (unfortunate in such an otherwise elegant man), which makes him seem to stoop to peer at the world from a discomfiting elevation, rather like a vulture, I am sorry to say.

Matt 13:33–35. The kingdom is like yeast that a woman mixes with three measures of flour. Jesus speaks only in parables. This woman3—I identify with her. I help in the kitchen too—all I do here is help because I have no real housekeeping skills of my own, not having been raised to this kind of work. What I was raised to is a good question—for dependence on men, but with sufficient education to make them entirely wary of me. I can learn about this yeast by working with it. Its growth is mysterious, miraculous to the ancient mind, but not the modern (though while I believe science can explain the growth of yeast under certain conditions, I myself do not understand what happens). What is important is the experience, the handling, of warm, soft dough with the expectation of the desired result: bread. Maybe ein Weib understands this better than eine Frau.

June 2

Matt 13:36–43. One minute Jesus speaks only in parables and the next he is explaining his own parable (the one about weeds). But he is at home in this scene. Maybe he only speaks in parables in public, so that those who would kill him cannot quite be sure what he is talking about. Goethe has his Doctor Faust say that those few who knew something of the goal of knowledge who were foolish enough to bare their hearts to the people have always been crucified and burned4 (yes, I have been back to the library). Jesus knew this as well as anyone. He was cagier than most, and yet he also understood the goal of his existence—death for the sake of life outside time. This “harvest,” Jesus says, is the work of the angels.

If people, Christian people, really believed this, then death would not be a curse. I wonder what my master really thinks about death. He seems to believe in this family curse—only he and an older brother surviving of seven children—as much as anyone. The town talks of the father having been a pious man, a devoted parent, perhaps less devoted as a husband (the first wife died childless), but nonetheless an excellent provider and a model of fidelity to his second wife, my master’s mother—though as a former servant in his house and a distant cousin, I understand, she never rose to the rank of a true wife and matriarch. In short, she never gained her husband’s respect. But she had my master’s love—I can tell from Mrs. H.’s remarks, which she lets out from time to time with a sigh, absent-mindedly, as though there were no one to hear her. She does not talk to herself on other topics, only this—how much our master loved his mother, a former servant in the house of Kierkegaard. “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect from his realm all who give offence and who do wrong and will throw them into the furnace.”

June 3

On my errands I found a dog lying in the gutter—run over by a vain and careless driver. A pedestrian had pulled the poor creature to the side to prevent its being struck repeatedly. Bleeding from both ends—I cannot get the sight out of my mind. My master, noticing my red and swollen eyes this afternoon, asked what was the matter. I told him what I had chanced upon and said I stayed, looking on helplessly, until the trembling animal died. He looked at me in his characteristic way for quite some time, and then said, “There is only one way to understand the suffering and death of the innocent. They are selected by God for the sacrifice.” “But what of the carelessness of people?” I asked. And he answered, “They will be dealt with in time.”

I now understand why my master was never ordained. He is too honest to be a minister. Most Christians are not comforted by truth. How ironic, when our Lord taught us that he is the great liberator by being the embodiment of truth. Perhaps people do not wish to be liberated from falsehood. And I cannot blame them, really, when I consider that our choice is between being sacrificed and being punished, unless, as ordinary people who are neither entirely innocent nor inveterately wicked, we repent and seek the narrow path of faith and love.

When I find myself overcome with evil, I think on our Lord’s mother and what she must have felt, and I pray to her that all the innocent may be allowed to live free and happy, as I am sure she would have them do, and the wicked may be relieved of their impulses, and the rest of us may live in peace. Why this machinery of good and evil, in which all creation is ground to a pulp? To teach us forgiveness?

Matt 13:44–46. Or to teach us what is truly of value—like the treasure in a field or the precious pearl, buried or locked away in nature’s vaults, which only great effort and expense will secure? The heavenly kingdom has its own resources and economy so unlike our own, and seemingly so unjust at times. It is the injustice that makes me angry, and the anger that stays with me. Mother Mary help me!

June 4

I woke up this morning with a heavy head and went down to the kitchen to help, but Mrs. H. sent me right back up to my room with a bit of bread and a cup of steaming broth telling me to keep my cold to myself. She has learned from her midwife-friend that colds and fevers can pass from one person to another, even through a healthy person, though she says doctors do not seem to know this. They go from the bed of a patient who is seriously ill to the bed of a healthy woman in labor and soon the mother is dead of childbed fever. Midwives attend to only one mother at a time. Mrs. H. says the midwives have long noticed that the doctors lose many more mothers than they do, but neither the doctors nor the fathers who hire them seem to notice or care. “The arrogance of men,” she said with some heat, and I thought, “the bitterness of women,” but kept that to myself.

Along with the dinner left at my door this afternoon there appeared the volume I looked into a few days ago containing Faust. My master’s contribution, as neither Emil nor Mrs. H. would recommend such reading. He does not wish me to be lonely or bored. I feel a fever coming on and wonder how this fantastic seduction is likely to affect my addled brain. Perhaps this is an experiment on the part of my master. He is so curious about everything, and to me, likewise.

My mother died of childbed fever soon after giving birth to me. In addition to being something of an orphan and, one might say—metaphorically, at least—a widow, I am also an alien. Like Ruth, I meet all the criteria for the mercy which does not seem at all characteristic of the northern European Christian temperament. This is not self-pity, but honest self-appraisal, along with an unflinching indictment of my brothers and sisters in Christ. I find the Danish not that different from Berliners. I say not self-pity, but then illness does cause one to feel a bit sorry for oneself, as it heightens ongoing affliction. I have never felt I held a proper place in this world, and being ill I feel it more strongly. “A small death” I have heard illness called. The advantage of deadly disease is twofold: one’s self-cherishing is no longer exaggerated when it quite suddenly becomes short-lived. The dying person has a moral superiority and even spiritual acumen that no sane person could possibly envy, and yet the benefit is real—perhaps a recompense for what is to be lost. Most dying people do not know how to use it, however. I like to think that if I were dying I would know all the right things to say to my father. And I would greet our Lord with the deepest gratitude for having released me into the hands of my mother.

Faust confesses to his attendant Wagner5 that his perseverance in medieval medicine, in keeping with the training provided him by his father, actually did more harm than good to the simple people he tried to help—the cure worse than the disease. The magic coat Faust wishes might carry him to unfamiliar lands, to be singled out from humanity as Joseph was from his brothers, who then sold him into slavery—another mad dash out of the rain into the gutter.6 What does this two-souled man, panting after heaven and earth in the same breath, really want, and whom will he not harm to get it?

June 5

A little better this morning.

Matt 13:47–51. The scribe who becomes a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a family who hauls out of his storehouse both new and old provisions. Jesus liked scribes better than Pharisees. There was hope for the scribes, men of letters, but no hope for the Pharisees, men of the cloth (Matt 12:38–45), that they could be renewed by a new set of writings, a new teaching.

Faust is a tragedy of failed covenants and false promises. I wonder what sort of writing my master is doing at this moment.

I dreamt last night that I was a prisoner and that my guards (or guardians—I am not sure which) were dogs. I rarely remember my dreams, but I awoke in the middle of the night when the fever broke and the dream was fresh in my mind. So I made a mental note of it before I fell back asleep and did not recall it until a few minutes ago. Mrs. H. has sent word to keep to myself until tomorrow, when I can be useful again. In the meantime, more Faust.

June 6

This morning’s sermon: a ramble on everything to do with God. The minister, a young man, prides himself on his ability to preach without notes or an outline in front of him. As a result, though, he manages to repeat himself endlessly without, however, establishing a focus, which makes it impossible to stay on topic. Such argument as manifests is familiar and predictable to the point of utter banality. My master’s elder brother is a pastor, but he (my master) has little use for the clergy due to some past disappointment—so many in this family!

We Christians are called upon to put our faith in one another as well as our Lord (though not to the same extent, I trust), and particularly when it comes to the ordained. This can result in tremendous expectation and letdown. As a woman I have an advantage; it is evident to us that men set things up for their own edification, and so I would never imagine that my spiritual growth is their objective (the clergy’s, I mean). But my master, being a man, believes he has every right to expect utter sincerity from Bishop So-and-So, whose interest lies in the wealth rather than the wellbeing of my master’s family.7 Most servants are of a better sort than religious authorities, I find, though there is rot in every profession.

Matt 13:53–58. “A prophet is nowhere worth less than in his fatherland and his own house.” Jesus’ works are dependent on the faithfulness of those on whom he works. Those who do not take him seriously never really know him. My master has the brilliance and daring (and anger) of a prophet, and so people fear him mostly, but with fear comes the need to discount. Perhaps he has a tendency to discount himself, being the youngest. No one expects anything of the youngest, so that when they do make a mark, it is an affront, to be dismissed as effrontery.8 I prattle on here worse than a preacher. The Lord’s Day is not set aside to be filled up with words.

The clouds this afternoon look like the flow of a glacier in spring, white opening into blue. The birds sing so sweetly in the trees. I never learned the names of birds and trees in my youth. This puts me before (or behind?) Adam, who could not rest easy until he had named everything, including Eve, I suppose. Now it clouds over; the contrast is lost.

June 7

My strength comes back through honest effort, washing woodwork and windowpanes. One must be well to read Faust and not succumb to its seductions. The language, the variety of verse forms, the subject matter, any of these things alone is enough to make one swoon.

June 8

I see little of my master. He stays to himself while he works or else goes out. He has a reputation for witty, even brilliant conversation—maybe monologue would be more accurate. He entertains sophisticated Danes with satirical talk, but they would not be his friends. His only friend is Emil. There are no ladies in his circle, as far as I can tell, though there was once an engagement, of which we are forbidden to speak in this house or on the street. Part rake and part saint, he is a lonely man. The one thing my master is not is the self-interested Bürger, obsessed with war and taxes, casually ridiculed by Faust,9 and so familiar to me from my youth. As a girl, however, I did not realize how dangerous this Bürger-mentality is, all blood and treasure, treasure at the expense of blood. My master, as cynical as he may seem (or be, for that matter), knows where his treasure is laid up. He has renounced the pursuit of money and worldly honor for the sake of wisdom and grace. That to me is courage. But of course his father’s relentless pursuit of wealth and uncompromising avoidance of luxury (an asceticism resulting from the perception of some wrongdoing—the family curse again) has made my master’s seemingly contradictory course possible. A modern saint is a living contradiction, yet all saints are modern, witnesses to the moment in which they live. I believe in him, and he senses this.

I have doubts about keeping this journal though. It seems like a waste of time. I have no story to tell, or rather no story worth telling. I never was fond of involved plots. My days are boring and empty, and that is fine by me, though I fear getting lost in the vacancy of my life. But writing is a balm, a mercy, a way of being simple; pen to paper, thought by thought, impression after impression. Perhaps I should spend more time praying and less time writing, but simply to breathe conscious of a world of suffering is prayer. Otherwise, how could we pray always, as our Lord enjoined us?10

Matt 14:1–12. The “fury” of “a woman scorned.”11 The daughter of Herodias is used as a tool for her mother’s revenge against the Baptist. Herod so naive as to think Jesus was the resurrected Baptist and so rash as to make an open-ended promise to a charming little dancing girl. The story of the Baptist’s death, his head presented on a banquet platter—could it have been stuffed with an apple in the manner of roasted swine? No, Herod was a Jew of some sort after all12—all told in the past perfect, twice removed from the present—too awful to relate. A man who shouts “Repent!” must be thoroughly debased by those determined to stay their course.

And yet I feel for Herodias, hardly mistress of her fate, teaching her daughter the worst of feminine wiles as a matter of survival—for how was Herodias to have provided for herself and her daughter with their husband and father dead if Herod had obeyed the Baptist’s injunction against a purely figurative incest and repudiated her? Who would dare to have her and her child after that? All victims of a cosmic plotline in which the Baptist, who had given new life to so many, had by one device or another to die, in order to make way for Jesus. It is a wonder more people do not doubt the goodness of God on the basis of Scripture alone. Had the Bible been the work of one man, he would be considered a misanthrope.

Under the mattress with you; it is not safe to write so freely in such a heretical mood. If Mrs. H. were to find this and have someone translate it for her, I could be out on the street before my master or Emil would have a chance to intervene. Fortunately, I keep my own chamber and she is too proud to snoop.

June 9

Rain all day today. Helping in the kitchen. No skill, just the ability to take direction. A father cannot teach a girl how to cook, but he can habituate her to discipleship. Conversation in the kitchen is lively—a welcome relief from my relative isolation, though hardly edifying. Mostly gossip not worth relating. I enjoy watching the dog make itself comfortable by the stove—what a handsome and good-natured animal. Sometimes I think the true child of God is more like an animal than a human being in simply accepting the good that is at hand. My fingernails are still black from digging in the garden yesterday!

Matt 14:13–21. “And he had the people arrange themselves on the grass”—five thousand men, not counting the women and children, so five thousand families, really—an entire town, but not arranged as people arrange themselves, according to rank and wealth and language and livelihood, but in an order not known to us, of angels or animals, an invisible pattern, seemingly random, in which no one wonders where one belongs. The dog belongs beside the stove because that is where it is warm, that is all. He can feel the warmth—he does not have to see it. He does not have to ask after his food like the theologian who wants to know, why five loaves and two fishes precisely? He just eats and drinks and is satisfied. And yet it can be dangerous for a human being to be so simple-minded as to huddle with whatever warmth is offered. Not every man who offers what is needed in the moment is a son of God. How trite I have become in my disillusionment—how stupid!

June 10

My master told me a parable this morning—the story of three sons who loved their father so much that they gave up their lives for him, each in a different way. That was not what their father wanted for them, but they could not help it, he had so devoted himself to them. One gave up his life by trying to do everything right and going mad, another by running away and catching a fatal disease, the third by acquiring a name for himself that was not his own. But the saddest thing of all was that while they were living, the brothers could not abide one another, so intent was their focus on the father. And all died childless.

Matt 14:22–36. “O you little-believer, why do you doubt?”13 A little belief gets us into a lot of trouble. And so we sink before we can rise, because we are all littlebelievers at first. Even Peter, so full of himself—O Lord, let me do exactly as you are doing, whether it is walking on water or sitting with you at the right hand of the Father—sank like a stone.14

My master’s parable haunts me. He is too much like Peter, I fear, trying too hard to be the disciple who never disappoints, spurning established religion just as Jesus did, honoring the Father beyond all reason. More rain today.

June 11

Extremely damp and chilly today. Unpleasant outdoors, dark within. Even the gardener seems dispirited. Staying indoors by the fire I helped with the mending. I have learned so much in this household to make an honest woman—by that I mean a useful person—of myself. But my master’s influence, unlike that of his servants, takes me in a different direction—not exactly back to my childhood days spent in my father’s library with great curiosity but little sense of real purpose. No, with my master there is a sense of urgency, and not so much to know more as to be more. Book-learning is a paltry thing in comparison to—what? “Being” does not convey the quality, because we all in fact “are”—we exist, like it or not. But being—not exactly with a sense of purpose. Whatever it is, I feel it most in my master’s presence. Being with him I feel that being itself has new possibilities. And yet he barely takes note of my existence these days. He is mostly out on one of his infernal carriage rides,15 busy with his work, or sleeping off a night on the town.

Matt 15:1–20. “What goes into the mouth does not pollute the person, rather what comes out of the mouth pollutes the person . . . What comes out of the mouth, comes out of the heart.” A sinner knows what is in her heart and does not worry, therefore, about externals. Did Jesus really have such a grim view of humanity? He says nothing here about the good in people’s hearts. Maybe he does not want to get into a consideration of good and evil warring in people’s hearts; he just wants to keep the focus on the internal orientation of the conscious sinner, as opposed to the focus on externals which is typical of the unconscious sinner. Matthew must have been very angry at his own Jewish people who did not convert to Christianity. He makes it seem as though the non-Christian Jews have everything backward. I do not think Jesus could have hated his own people the way Matthew seems to. But then Jesus does say those who do not follow him are not his people. For a religious Jew, this statement is inconceivable. How angry was Jesus, I wonder.

June 12

More rain. Working my way through Faust (which I have read before but hardly remember) and finding Mephistopheles’ reputation for subtlety understated. Is he a mystic (“In the beginning was the void”), a Manichean, or merely evil? Merely evil seems the least profitable reading. Consider the following exchange with Faust.

Faust.

You call yourself a part, and yet you stand before

me complete?

Mephistopheles.

The modest truth I tell you.

Though humanity, the little world of fools,

Ordinarily considers itself a totality;

I am a part of that part that in the beginning was

everything,

A part of the darkness that gave birth to light,

The proud light, which henceforth Mother Night’s

Ancient rank and realm has troubled;

And yet it does not succeed, because however

much it strives,

It remains imprisoned, stuck to bodies.16

Darkness prior to, superior to rebellious light—light shackled, like Prometheus on his rock, to form, while darkness, the void, floats free, unformed and uncreated. Is this darkness prior to creation not the very being of God, neither form nor formlessness, uncaptured by any concept, the inconceivable turbulence that so loudly confronted Job in his first silent and then discursive misery?

Faust’s response is essentially what my father taught me to call an ad hominem attack, blaming Mephistopheles for being too intellectual: “You cannot destroy anything on a large scale and so you begin on a small scale.” Faust, a doctor and professor of medieval medicine (he would have been a contemporary of Luther’s) is talking to and about himself. He wants no more of his suffocating study and small life-denying profession. Great irony here—no talk of medicine as healing, except that the good doctor is “healed” of his compulsion to acquire knowledge. What he wants is not knowledge but experience, the tiny bit that is “parceled out to the whole of humanity.” Parts and wholes again, but not exactly as Mephistopheles saw it.

Faust.

I will say to the moment: But stay a while! You

are so beautiful!17

So much is said of Faust’s thirst for godlike knowledge (I too have repeated this silly error), but this is exactly wrong. Perhaps Eve has been similarly misread. It was experience she wanted, not a godlike knowledge, not a paradise with everything neatly labeled in Adam’s head, whose only claim to expertise was that he had arrived on the scene a few hours before she did. She wanted to experience the world as it had been given to Adam, before he “mastered” it.

Matt 15:21–29. The Canaanite woman cries out, “O Lord, you Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is plagued by a demon.” Jesus compares her, a gentile, to a little dog, and says the children’s food must not go to the dogs, but she reminds him that even the dogs are entitled to the tablescraps.18 And so her daughter is healed “in that hour,” Scripture says, but I am thinking it was in that moment. A hint of sun.

June 13

One gets a glimpse of Genesis 8—the renewal of the world after the deluge—when after a week of steady rain, the sky is drained and the earth begins to dry out. People walk about with one another or their dogs and seem grateful simply not to have drowned, given up hope, or gone mad from the sheer grayness of everything. My master stayed in the last couple of days but still we do not see much of him. One encounter in the library—he asked me how my Faust was coming along, and I said nicely, thank you, but that I was getting a different impression reading it for the second time, that Faust was tired of books and wanted life. He seemed pleased to learn the play was not new to me—he knows a bit of my background from Emil, but not more than Emil saw fit to tell. My master said he would like to hear my impressions after I finish Part One. I asked why Part Two (which I have not read) is not included in the same volume as Part One, and he said that it was because it was written decades later and only published after Goethe’s death. It seems impossible to carry on a conversation in this house for more than five minutes without the topic of death coming up. Is this the life Jesus came to give us? But I should not be so critical. My master is a sensitive man who has given me a home, however frequent the reminders of its end. I should be grateful.

Matt 15:32–39. Why repeat the miracle of the loaves and the fishes with fewer people and more food? Matthew seems to be pulling things together from different sources, but then what are his sources and why are they not included in Scripture? Anyone who has ever been truly hungry (as I have been) understands why food is miraculous, no matter how much food or how many people. The wild ratios (and the repetition) drive home the point that we are all starving and that it is not necessary to live in that way, though, as my people are fond of saying, “A person gets used to anything.”19 Mrs. H. worries that my master’s appetite is not what it should be. He works long hours in his library and merely “grazes,” as she likes to say. She is quite maternal toward my master. It is possible she is a distant relation from the Jutland, as was my master’s mother, who was brought to this house presumably as a family favor. Such a large family at one time, and now just one brother and a handful of nieces and nephews. My master’s books are his children, I like to think, which puts me off the moroseness that the very walls of this house seem to breathe, not to mention the family name.20

June 15

I am grateful my master does not have real children, for if he did, I would be called upon to teach them. It was in my past life as a governess that my prospects for future happiness were ruined. If I were a man and could have had a choice in my profession, I would have chosen the ministry over teaching. But aside from marriage, which is the livelihood of most respectable women, the choices are few: a nurse, a governess, a prostitute. I became a governess and learned to play a variety of roles.

Matt 16:1–4. The Pharisees want a sign. Good and bad signs. Good and bad times. What is the sign of Jonah? His prophecy of the destruction of Ninevah? Its people and animals in sackcloth? The withered shrub? Or the storm that delivered him into the belly of the big fish (since all the talk here is of weather)? The story of Jonah, so short, so ridiculous, so deadly serious. I wonder if Jesus is not making fun of religious credulity itself, which cannot see what is in front of its nose while asking after the supernatural. This tendency to misread signs or to look in the wrong places for the truth is just as much a fault of the educated as the ignorant. I certainly misread the signs when I was a governess, and the being that was delivered into my belly did not come out alive. How awful to remember—impossible to forget. I am destined to make many more mistakes in this life, but that will not be one of them.

June 16

Is it a sin to use Scripture as a crutch merely to keep going, to survive? I have never heard a sermon on this and probably never will, as Christendom is complicitous in this crime of misuse of the Word. Life is good when I do not think on the past and unbearable when I do—mistakes and failures with years-long consequences overshadowing bright moments. John the Evangelist writes: “In him was life, and the life was the light of humanity. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it.”21 Scripture keeps me in the present and orients me toward the future on the basis of a summary recognition that my past is a morass best left behind, where my sins are forgotten not by me, but by God, who covers them over with his darkness, the darkness that precedes all sin, the darkness that gives birth to light. Yes, that gentle darkness is the feminine side of God, containing the potential for life within. God is in the pre—no, Jesus is in the present—no no, the Holy Spirit is in the present (the Spirit of Jesus)—Jesus is past (supplanting Satan, like Jacob supplanting Esau, though Esau did nothing wrong!) and future, and God comprehends all of it. Probably not sound Trinitarian doctrine—what would those fierce Dominicans have to say, those wolves in sheep’s clothing, though I think the sharp contrast of their black-on-white habit gives them away—but it matches my experience in this body.

What happens to the Holy Spirit after death, I wonder. It cannot be our lifeline to Jesus any longer—it seems it will not be necessary. Does Jesus stop having a spirit when there are no longer any bodies to get in the way? What kind of talk is this? This is why I need Scripture as a crutch—to keep from landing in a heap on the side of the road, lost in fruitless supposings, passed over by the priest, who hurries on to more important errands.22 But what I really wanted to express is the notion that the very same book, whether the Bible or Faust, can open one’s mind to reality one day and shut it down the next, depending on how one uses it. So its being a “crutch” is not the point so much. I am not clear on this—maybe another time.