The Passion

by Jeanette Winterson

I never told my mother that the priest had a hollow Bible with a pack of cards inside. Sometimes he took it to our service by mistake and then the reading was always from the first chapter of Genesis. The villagers thought he loved the creation story.

Most of these recruits aren’t seventeen and they’re asked to do in a few weeks what vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather up their passion for life and make sense of it in the face of death. They don’t know how but they do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning summer in their bodies and all they have instead is lust and rage.

For myself, if I am to die, I would like to do it alone, far from the world. I would like to lie on the warm stone in May until my strength is gone, then drop gently into the canal. Such things are still possible in Venice.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

I never go to confession; God doesn’t want us to confess, he wants us to challenge him, but for a while I went into our churches because they were built from the heart. Improbable hearts that I had never understood before. Hearts so full of longing that these old stones still cry out with their extasy. These are warm churches, built in the sun. I sat at the back, listening to the music or mumbling through the service. I’m never tempted by God but I like his trappings. Not tempted but I begin to understand why others are. With this feeling inside, with this wild love that threatens, what safe places might there be? Where do you store gunpowder? How do you sleep at night again? If I were a little different I might turn passion into something holy and then I would sleep again. And then my extasy would be my extasy but I would not be afraid.

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion. Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.

Love is a fashion these days and in this fashionable city we know how to make light of love and how to keep our hearts at bay. I thought of myself as a civilised woman and I found I was a savage.

Although their lives were not much changed, they felt slighted because their leaders had been slighted, they felt out of control and resented the armies and the puppet Kings Bonaparte left behind. Bonaparte always claimed he knew what was good for a people, knew how to improve, how to educate. He did; he improved wherever he went, but he always forgot that even simple people want the freedom to make their own mistakes. Bonaparte wanted no mistakes.

There’s no such thing as a limited victory. One conquest only leads on, ineluctably, to another, to protect what has been won. We found no friends of France on our journey, only crushed enemies. Enemies like you and me with the same hopes and fears, neither good nor bad. I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people. But the ordinary people were looking for devils too. The Austrians in particular believed the French to be brutal and beneath contempt. Still believing us to be Italian, they were generous to a fault and compared us favourably in every way with the French. And if I had thrown off my disguise? What then, would I have turned into a devil before their eyes? I worried that they would smell me, that their noses, so disdainful and attuned to hate anything that had a whiff of Bonaparte, would detect me straight away. But it seems we are as we appear. What a nonsense we make of our hatreds when we can only recognise them in the most obvious circumstances.

‘Will you stay?’ she said. No, not in this life. Not now. Passion will not be commanded. It is no genie to grant us three wishes when we let it loose. It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose.

He used to say he loved Bonaparte and I believe him. Bonaparte, larger than life, sweeping him off to Paris, spreading his hand at the Channel and making Henri and those simple soldiers feel as if England belonged to them. I have heard that when a duckling opens its eyes it will attach itself to whatever it first sees, duck or not. So it is with Henri, he opened his eyes and there was Bonaparte. That’s why he hates him so much. He disappointed him. Passion does not take disappointment well. What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

And for myself? For myself I will plant a cypress tree and it will outlive me. That’s what I miss about the fields, the sense of the future as well as the present. That one day what you plant will spring up unexpectedly; a shoot, a tree, just when you were looking the other way, thinking about something else. I like to know that life will outlive me, that’s a happiness Bonaparte never understood.