I myself am on that very island, as the apartment from which I am writing these entries is in Brooklyn.
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Of course, I shouldn’t say that is where the house is, but where the imagined house would be.
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I just remembered that it isn’t California, where the house is, but Long Island, which is the eastern most part of New York, extending as it does into the Atlantic.
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Although perhaps she was typing the pages for another reason altogether, or for no reason at all.
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It was almost like she was typing the pages for God, if in fact she believed in God, which I think she did, though I cannot say for certain.
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And those typewritten pages became what we are reading, they became the document that accounts for that ‘novel’.
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She typed those recollections on a typewriter in a house on a beach in what had once been, I think, California.
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She seemed to be the last person on earth, and went from place to place, at first looking for other people, and then just looking at things, and noticing what memories the sight of those things did recall to her.
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I remember, for example, that her name is Kate, and that the loneliness of her story made an impression on me.
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The narrator of that novel isn’t real in the same sense that I am real — she exists only on the page, and then in the reader’s imagination — but the influence such a figure can exert on a person’s life most definitely is real.
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Although, “real” is probably not the best term I could use to differentiate us, as the connotations of that word can diminish the fact that fictional characters, and art in general, can impart to us great truths.
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Of course, the narrator of that novel is a fictional character, whereas I am not fictional, but am real.
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Which isn’t to say I intend my logic to be unclear, but that, on some occasions, like the narrator’s in that novel, it might be clear only in retrospect, after I’ve said the same thing in various ways.
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That statement puts me in mind of the novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, by David Markson, which, although it does contain a plot, proceeds by a series of observations and memories that seem to find their momentum in a logic that is associative, and not always clear.
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I’d started talking about the Great Schism, and then I’d gotten sidetracked, which is ok, that is probably how this diary will go. Think of it as a compendium of asides. I’ll have to keep circling back to earlier topics.
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Which isn’t to say that I would distance her, from some such person, merely by articulating those tenets or truths that belong to her, but that, given the state she is in, one must be mindful of how one introduces her. There are stages that must be gone through, when any two people are getting acquainted.
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I say this, I suppose, as a Catholic whose temperament has been forged by the times and the culture in which he lives. I am not unaware of how the Church must appear to those who, though not of her fold, have witnessed her sorry state, and I do not wish to distance her, from those who might yet seek her, any further than she already has been distanced.
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There is much good to be said of anyone who tries to help others discover their selfhood, and soul, and I see no reason to place myself at odds with Transcendentalism, or any similar philosophy, and in fact mention it only to illustrate a difference that is, I think, while not unimportant, more a difference of degree than of kind. A Catholic might describe this difference as that which would exist between a path to truth and the fullness of truth.
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This line of reasoning has much in common with Transcendentalism, the philosophical movement that flourished in New England in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that emphasizes the individual, and the purity or goodness of the insights of which an individual is capable, while regarding organized religion as unnecessary, even harmful. Among the figures associated with it are Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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People sometimes wonder, I think, why the Church is necessary (beyond, perhaps, her care for the poor); why, for instance, she should have any bearing on the spiritual life of individuals. Even if a person believes in, say, the divinity of Christ, why shouldn’t that person merely follow the impulse of their own conscience and imagination, with regard to that belief? What can the Church give to that person that he or she can’t obtain for themself?