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.

One had always to tread so carefully at the turn of the season, to keep one’s wits. Who knew what might happen, what one might be capable of?

Another way of putting this is that they had the soul of the lake, not of the river, and not of the sea.

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.

In the intervening years, as I scrolled or clicked through these photographs, I often wondered which of us could be said to be more perverse: my schoolmates, every last one of whom, it appeared, had turned away from the world, retired to their enclaves, chosen the lives of their parents; or I, who had been plagued since childhood with the feeling that I needed to scrub myself clean, that all that was needed to be free was to physically remove myself from the company of people who comprised the community in which I had grown up, as though life were easy, or even possible.

how long and lovely and terrible the springtime, how unbelievable to be alive.

Lives layered upon lives, the concentric logic of the world and its continual co-optations. I felt a motiveless sorrow.

And yet, I thought, popping one of the strawberries in my mouth, it was spring. There was that.

I wanted to be good in the terrible world.

I had observed that nobody ever did seem any better off for my intervention. I felt this had to do with the vagaries of human suffering, and yet at times I wondered what this might say about me, some spiritual poverty of mine, no doubt, a failure of attention, even though it was my attention, or more precisely and usually my presence at the point of a reckless and personal disclosure, that seemed to be the problem. I said so little and yet it was too much. Much too much. I vowed to make myself smaller and smaller, on numerous occasions throughout my life I had made this same vow, after speaking too rashly in the primary school lunch room or in the high school corridors, I would sit in my bedroom telling myself over and over again, hour after hour, that I would not speak a single word the following day, that I would limit myself in all ways, that I would take up less space. I

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?

It was only a tree in springtime, only the memory of sitting in the empty bleachers behind the high school, still a girl, feeling as if my skin would burst open, but nothing, nothing ever happened.

I had stood in these groupings myself, listened as my most cherished, my most dearly held, most intimate thoughts were articulated by a distant relative or one-time acquaintance, usually to a total stranger, and we all laughed together. How we laughed. It was part of my training, I understood that now, my uncommon pride and self-love which needed to bend, needed to be subdued, and it was of some comfort to me to see that there were others who faltered similarly, who needed the guiding hand of semi-public shame. I understood this even then as part of the process of community formation, of the operations of power and the delegation of roles, who and what lay beyond describing the outlines of whatever lay within.

What was it that I was thinking of? Something about the world and its vain promise of the present. Why had I believed in it? Choice, the individual, the world and what it made possible on the one hand; and us, the family, on the other. For my parents, the world out there would never be the world they knew, that could never be put back, no. But as for myself, I recognised in the end something behind the brand-newness of the world, a shadow just visible beneath its seams. Here I was, sitting in my brother’s garden, after all that effort, all those years, nothing any different, the underlying ideology adapting again and again to each liberation as it presented itself. The faces changed, sure they did, but ways of doing just persist, all one’s born days. What else is there to say?

the summer days were beginning to take on a different texture, things drying up and diminishing, and one felt it, one felt it just as the dogs felt it, the sadness of the passing days, the melancholy of autumn approaching, it was only the strangeness peculiar to the time of year, the disruption, the death one felt in the air and in oneself, the swift contraction of the days acting as a reminder of all the things one had overlooked, one had forgotten, and now the time for those things had passed, it was too late, far, far too late.

What after all was the difference between thought and deed?

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.

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.