Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

Not just the air but the emptiness of the hallway, which minutes ago had teemed with activity, had a flavor of Easter. In the middle chapters of the Gospels, crowds of people followed Jesus everywhere, gathering around him on the Mount, receiving fishes and loaves by the five thousand and the four thousand, welcoming him with palm fronds on the road into Jerusalem, but in the late chapters the focus narrowed to scenes of individual departure, private pain. The Last Supper: clandestine and death-haunted. Peter alone with his betrayals. Judas going away to hang himself. Jesus feeling forsaken on the cross. Mary Magdalene weeping at the sepulcher. The crowds had dispersed and everything was over. The worst thing in human history had happened sickeningly fast, and now it was another Sunday morning in Judea, the first day of the Jewish week, a particular spring morning with a particular spring smell to the air. Even the truth revealed that morning—the truth of Christ’s divinity and resurrection—was austere in its transcendence of human particularity, in its own way no less melancholy. Spring to Russ was a season more of loss than of joy.