Enlightenment

by Sarah Perry

Do you think you lose your faith, because your faith does not want you? That would be easy! My life would have been a happier one! But all these years there have been two fires in me and neither puts the other out!

Mist disturbed the perspective: not possible to see how large the green was, or where it ended. Still—she stepped forward, and the obliging mist went with her—was it possible they were not after all alone?

Now you will ask me what I know of this woman. I should tell you that she is clever, as you see. I have said she is unhappy. Well, clever women are always unhappy. When she is not unhappy, she is all a kind of stupid joy. She is rich. She complains of her broken heart, but keeps it like a pet and wouldn’t mend it if she could.

Wind released beech leaves from their branches and raised eddies that made James think a devil was on the move; then “Look!” his wife said. “Look: isn’t that your ghost?” The leaves abruptly dropped. “It is,” she said.

“Doesn’t an attempt at faith constitute faith itself? It’s a dreadful thing to confuse faith with certainty.”

He was alone, he’d always been alone, the worms were fleeing from him through the soil—no old man at his table, no red velvet coat hanging in the hall; no cross affectionate child, no somber congregation, no loving stranger’s look of recognition, no household ghost: he was born in sin and shaped in iniquity and the lights had gone out on the moon.

Dawn broke. Light slipped under the railway bridge, and over the lip of the windowsill: it arrived at the carpet, the notebooks, the uneaten toast; it lit the opposite wall with Pentecostal fire.

Then he does mention home—he mentions his daughter, he implies a wife, and never names either—and this brings a grieving splitting sensation: there’s a whole life there she cannot see and will never occupy—a series of loves and languages all incomprehensible to her, she is absolutely peripheral, bolted-on, and the bolts are coming loose.

It’s autumn here. Mists are coming up the banks of the Alder and nearly reach the high street. No swifts now. Blackberries on the verges are dropping sugar on the bones of deer. Orion has come back as he always does, and the children have gone back to their schools. There were storms on the sun, and they’ve blown themselves out.

“Cora Seaborne,” said Carleton (and out of the corner—displacing the silk skirt, the coffee machine—there came the scent of a receding tide, and perhaps of oyster shells). “That’s a good name.”

AHHHHHHHH

Now, she suffers. He’s gone away from her, she says, that kind of drifting a woman feels more than she sees. “It’s like he was holding my hand,” she said, “and let it go one finger at a time until I was clutching at air.” I knew that look she had. I knew how bewildering it is to love and know your love goes unmet and unmatched. It’s the law of harmonies, I thought, it is all as Kepler said, and this is what we have in common: our bodies moved by forces not possible to resist. Then she said, “He is gone again, and now I’ll be as sad as you.”

But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand we are made in the image of God—because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. Go on loving when your love is unreturned, I said, and you are just a little lower than the angels.

I wonder in that case if the world and everything in it—you, me, the moon and the water—consists not of solitary beings, but rather out of how each thing relates to another, so that in the end it is only out of connection that the whole world is made.

How absolutely improbable it is, he thinks, standing amazed between the comet and the water, what a miracle that I am here at all—that out of matter I was made, to stand here with a button missing on my coat, heart broken by nothing but illuminated dust!