Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

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.

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.

With regard to the problem of language, it was not the weather of the place that hindered me, for I liked the cold, had been born in the wintertime, as a child had often lain down in the snow, in my snow-suit, and looked up at the white sky for hours, for hours.

I was used to being alone. 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.

I wanted so badly to live in my life, wanted to meet it head on, wanted above all for something to happen, for this terrible yearning to be quenched. What was underneath it all, vibrating beneath the faces of the people I saw, something in their expressions? What howls restrained there, by decorum, by cowardice, for fear of sinking?

My experience of continuity had been limited to the way each new catastrophe sat in the last, as if it had already happened and would go on happening, on and on. And so I lived in the historical rupture of the present, in the historical aberration of my life, and I submitted to those that had me at their mercy in an effort to soften their hearts.