Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

In spite of all this, all these efforts, I felt radiating from the landscape, surely as ever now, the anger of the townspeople, who after all could not help but think historically, and who, having been in a sense exiled from the modern world to their own home town, a town like any other, whose people had behaved like those in any other, who thus understood the need for roots, whose continued existence depended on this understanding, depended in fact on the pact of silence, on groping, blindly, for the future, saw me as nothing more than a stranger of a fixed, old age, who had appeared out of nowhere to herald, perhaps even bring about, a truly inauspicious time. I was so different to my brother, could hardly be related to him, had perhaps been collected in childhood as a servant waif by a soft-hearted father away on business, only to appear in the township in these too-late days, yes, in order to make them look at themselves, take a long, hard look at their wretched selves, slaves to the past, slaves to their ancestral hatreds, who had lived for so long, for a time anyway, in blithe forgetfulness, in the beautiful rush of the seasons, finding refuge in an earlier way of being, skipping right over the cold and terrible machine age into the distant past, drawing then a line from that much beloved past directly to the present.