Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

I continued to spend the long years since childhood cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon, a pursuit that demanded a particular quality of attention, a self-forgetfulness on my part that would enable me to bring to bear the most painstaking, the most careful consideration to the other, to treat the other as the worthiest object of contemplation. In this process, I would become reduced, diminished, ultimately I would become clarified, even cease to exist. I would be good. I would be all that had ever been asked of me.

was sure that, in each of their minds, with their eyes closed, they were with someone entirely other, not me – the tender kiss on the hairline, the holding of the back of the head, the grasping of the wrist, none of it was directed at me, all of it was for someone else, from before, some beloved, lost long ago.

And so as I tramped daily through the woods, feeling for once in the world, I told myself over and over that I must remember this moment, here, now, a moment which could not last and would inevitably be followed by an unhappiness that would be commensurate with if not exceeding it in strength, and that I must therefore carry it with me, the knowledge that once, for a time, for a series of hours, even stretches of days, I had seen what happiness might look like, that would have to be enough.

Since girlhood I had an instinct for retreat, knowing perhaps even then that withdrawing into myself was my only talent, the only way I had and ever would have of exercising any control over the situations in which I found myself in the course of my life, a control that was negligible but nevertheless all I had.

Every single one of us on this ruined earth exhibited a perfect obedience to our local forces of gravity, daily choosing the path of least resistance, which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action.