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The telling of stories is the abiding act by which people of all times and places pass down to the coming generations their hard-won fragments of wisdom. One can call it culture, or one can call it fun, but it will always remain indispensable. Wisdom is often purchased at great price, and much of it fades into disremembering because of silence or modest restraint, or because of shame and grief. Yet without the telling, we would soon cease to understand who we are.
Her heart beat wildly, and her breath came in shallow gasps. For as they passed the first few outcroppings of tents, the entire panorama of her situation was instantly laid bare, and she saw her error: she was too small for this land.
There was a decided absence of other women on the siding, though a hefty creature in pants was lumbering over. “You the teacher?” it growled in an approximately female voice, a big yellow grin tossed in for measure.
“What shall I teach them about their past?” she asked the screaming gulls. “Which version is the true one? Upon this question hangs their understanding of their own lives, and their future.”
The eyes of the children had begun to bore through her, the teacher, champion of order. Their eyes were hoping, and she found this intolerable in her state of helplessness.
In time of crisis it is better to do any intelligent thing quickly than to hesitate, searching for the ideal.
Let us suppose that a man and woman, understanding their limitations and their greatness, were to choose to give life to each other by giving away their very selves. Then both would be defeated, and both would win. In the process, both in the end would become a new kind of being, something they could not understand in the beginning and would never choose if they could foresee the struggle involved. If they were to persist, however, both would eventually become free, because neither would be dominated by the will to power. Only by the will to love.
As he went, he thrust his hand inside his jacket to protect the stone thing. It was warm and stained because his father had pressed it to his body. He ran and stumbled over the sweep of turf and rock. The stone grew hot against his flesh, and though it was not heavy, it seemed to take on an unfathomable weight, as if it bore the being, the life, of a man.
The sun cowered behind a storm and forced curtains of light to sweep across the hills. Light, darkness, light, darkness, the boy’s eyes contracting and expanding as he walked home with his weeping mother and the young ones. Droplets began to fall out of the clouds.
The boy could find no comment, for there was darkness and light, darkness and light upon the hills, just as there was darkness and light upon the hearts of men. And he saw that darkness was winning.
“Stephen”, she called, loving the sound of her voice calling to him, loving his reply. It was often this way. They came closer, it seemed, at those moments when they were calling to each other from a distance, deliberately searching through smoke.
He looked closely at his wife, who was cooling her fingers in a water bucket. It came to him that there would be levels of her being he might never be able to enter. Who was she, then, this lover of words, braving fire to save a rhyme.
I loved her, but how could I ever ally myself with her alien creed, with two thousand years of bad Catholics. “We are all bad Catholics”, says Stephen.
We are starved for the unknown God. A few, like Stephen, will consume him in a sacrament. Others, like myself, are driven out into the waste places in search of his presence. That elusive presence that is neither here nor there but arrives, strangely, when we are becoming resigned to absence.
Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire consumed by either fire or fire.
“Love doesn’t need rules. Love should be like the fruit in a wild orchard, free for the picking.” “I think there is nothing so powerful as love, and nothing that is so much in need of rules. Orchards need exquisite care, you know. Otherwise the fruit gets smaller and bland and the tree puts out a thousand new branches; then it dies prematurely. Only for a while do the beasts gorge on the fruit that lies rotting in the forest glades.”
He did not relish the idea, did not love suffering, as his wife had accused. But the thought did cross his mind that their present pain might be a route to higher ground if they could hold onto each other.
