The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

In this silenced house, quill and ink do not resist the press of my hand, and paper does not flinch. Let these pages compass, at last, the truth, though none read them.

Today, when he’d peered under that staircase, it was as though what he’d starved for all these lifeless months of dissertation research had been restored to him. History, reaching out and caressing his face once more, the way it had years ago as he sat reading at his parents’ kitchen table. The gentle, insistent touch of something like a conscience, stilling him. Waking him to a lucid new purpose.

Professor Ice Queen looked like she was going to behead me with her fountain pen.

Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

Do not consider then, however learned you are, that your knowledge is complete. For learning is the river of G-d and we drink of it throughout our lives.

In that too-brief time of her studies, a tide of words and reasoning had lifted her and rushed her far past the stagnant canals that hemmed the Jewish neighborhood, toward some bright distant horizon. She’d wanted that horizon so much, it dizzied her.

The writing table seemed abruptly to be a vast expanse—a plateau where some small remaining freedom might be possible. A tidy stack of paper, a wide glass jar of quills, a pen knife. A stick of red sealing wax. The smooth grain of the tabletop. She felt her body rush with quick heat, as though every bit of her, every plain and hidden part, were waking.

If we looked through the eyes of history, we’d live differently. We’d live right.

“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”

How could desire be wrong—the question seized her—if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. Mustn’t desire then be integral—a set of essential guideposts on the map of life’s purpose? And mightn’t its very denial then be a desecration?

never let your true thought be known, for it is by truth that you are noosed and for truth burnt.

“What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.”

Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking on me then should make you woe.

Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

he’d wanted Ester’s story to serve up something staggering: some triumphal parade showcasing the very qualities Aaron wished to see in his own reflection. He’d wished Ester to be independent, clever, indomitable, rebellious. He’d expected her story to serve as something unseemly: his own coronation. But in fact history was indifferent to him. It didn’t matter what he wanted.

People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.

Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.

What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.

There would be no grand revelation, no smoking gun, no hidden three-century-old wisdom to galvanize his drifting life.

being barred from learning might give a young woman with enough hunger for education—enough love of the work of thought itself—sufficient incentive to invent a Sabbatean crisis?”

How wrong she’d been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing.

Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly? The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body—and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn.

Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she dre...

She’d been wrong to think the universe cold, and only the human heart driven by desire. The universe itself was built of naught but desire, and desire was its sole living god.

I speak not of mere fleeting urges of the senses, but of deeper desire, desire not only of body but of spirit. I speak of your love, and mine, for truth. I speak of the impulse that bids us risk danger to pen these letters. We do this not because we are rational seekers after our own well-being—for we are not driven merely by Conatus. We do this because we are creatures of desire.

Perhaps we who struggle much in darkness, as all thinkers must, may be forgiven for faltering at the contemplation of such a wondrous and unbounded thing as freeborn light.

And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

It was a precept so universal as to seem a law of nature: one aspect of a woman’s existence must dominate the other. And a woman like Ester must choose, always, between desires: between fealty to her own self, or to the lives she might bring forth and nurture.

Yet sacrifice of the self is everywhere viewed as the highest calling, and the more so for a woman, who must give every element of her life to others. Kindness is at all times counseled to women, who are called unnatural if not kind. Yet how can a kindness that blights the life of even one—though it benefit others—be called good? Is it in fact kindness to sever oneself from one’s own desires? Mustn’t the imperative to protect all life encompass—even for a woman—her own? Then must we abandon our accustomed notion of a woman’s kindness, and forge a new one.

It is not for me to determine which of the seeds I scatter will blossom, nor have I the vanity to think I ought leave greater mark upon the world that has so marked me.