Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

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.

And so as I wielded the axe in my brother’s name, and as I watched the bare branches toss against the sky, a feeling came over me, or else I felt surrounded by a way of feeling that preceded me and would carry on once I was gone, an awareness of catastrophe just beyond the garden gate, some small and precipitate decision of my own sending me careering towards it. After all, there was nowhere else to go, everything reached its terminus. It was an anticipation congenital, intermittent and providential. It was barely concealed and not totally unwanted.

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.

As I cycled across town, to the dump, to the farm, as I cycled back up the hill to my brother’s house, I thought often about life and its chance encounters, the inexorable question of complicity, about how not one of us could claim to be innocent any longer. I thought that naivety, though it had long proven useful in protecting one from facing facts more squarely than it suited, was more inexcusable, more repugnant than ever.