Isola

by Allegra Goodman

I bowed my head because the world was stranger and more terrible than ever I’d imagined. The sea more mysterious—and I more blessed. How could I think otherwise? That I was blessed to witness such a thing. I did not deserve to see such beauty, and yet this wonder spread itself before me. And I felt God’s presence as I had never done in grief and anger; I knew it in my insignificance. I had given up, and yet God came to me in winter and in ice, in the hard world and in the night.

Sadness overwhelmed me and sank back. Then, like the tide, joy crept in on me again.

I sat outside my cave and saw the moonrise. I watched the brightening stars, and I said these verses. The heavens declare the glory of God, / The firmament his handiwork. / From day to day they extol / From night to night they explain. / They cannot speak; they have no words, / But their voices fill the world. I spoke these lines and thought, The stars are words enough. I understood this on the island.

In silence, I took this in. My enemy had been my teacher’s benefactor. My guardian tormented me with psalms, and later the same verses comforted me. He had carried me away aboard a ship, where I pledged myself to a princely man, his servant. How was life so full of contradictions? Good and evil intermixed—but I could never say that. I could not explain it—nor could I excuse my behavior to one so pious as the Queen.