For often the thing in an artwork that is most moving or affecting is not a completeness of revelation, though sometimes that is affecting too (to the extent that such completeness is possible), but a bounding off, into a district of the audience’s psyche, a revelation that the audience can perceive by its contours and dimensions alone.
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Meaning that if that story can be said to impart a tranquility that might settle a reader (even if the story isn’t absent of tension), such tranquility is owing to an interiority and a hiddenness that seems to be cherished by the characters, and essential to the plot (if so brief a story can be said to have a plot, which I think it can).
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Or, I should say, because it seemed to keep something of itself to itself, not ‘even if’ it did.
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Though I do know that it settled me in some way, even if it seemed to keep something of itself to itself.
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Which I thought of for some reason, though I don’t know what that reason was.
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There is the story of a queen who went out in her garden one morning, to look at the flowers, and overheard, on the other side of a hedgerow, the king, not knowing the queen was in earshot, talking to one of his councilors about the state of the realm, with which he was unhappy, though he’d not indicated as much to the queen herself, whenever she happened to be alone with him, which was often. So that when the king and the councilor rounded a corner of shrubbery, and greeted the queen in a way that was not unexpected (the king with surprise, and the councilor with quiet formality), the queen pretended not to have known they were near, and made an innocuous remark about the bees, which were hovering here and there, in accordance with the season and the weather, and to which all three of them gave their attention for a moment, while the queen tried to decide how she felt about what she’d just learned.
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And every morning finds one in an effort to unite within one’s self the threads of one’s fugitive sanity.
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All of it can drive a person crazy. One feels adrift, ill at ease, far from providence.
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Which is another way of saying, I think, that humankind is made in the image of God. And thus cannot desecrate that image, by living through instinct alone (or even through intelligence and emotion alone, in addition to instinct), without experiencing a pang of conscience.
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Although the complexity of human consciousness would make unseemly an attempt, on our part, to live according to instinct alone, as animals seem to do.
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For animals are beautiful, and are sufficient to themselves, even in their brutality, but humankind constantly degrades itself.
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Although maybe to live like an animal would not be so bad, who is to say?
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And yet to live without something like discipline is to not rise above one’s animal nature.
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Though I’m not certain that is the case either, that I need to get things ‘right,’ so to speak, and don’t need only to live.
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Or maybe, and this is more likely, I have gotten some things right and some things wrong, and must persist in the sorting out of the two, until some time when the error has diminished to such a degree that one could describe it as negligible.
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Though maybe I have gotten everything wrong, maybe I am mistaken in all the trajectories of my thought.
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The fact is, I suppose, that if I believe the Church to have been entrusted with certain truths, and with the dispensing of certain graces that cannot be found elsewhere, and that do not represent merely another variation on the many religions and systems of belief that humankind has articulated, throughout the ages, and that some would regard as equal, or interchangeable (and that might even, in some cases, bring upon the soul an order, tranquility, and virtuousness that puts it on a path to salvation), I cannot, in good faith, pretend as though her exigencies do not apply to me, even if, in various ways, the failures of those who have misrepresented her, at different moments in history, have caused suffering.
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Which I know is not a brave nor an original thing to say, but which I feel I need to say nonetheless. For it is in the context of such misdeeds that I can’t help but wonder, sometimes, at the futility of what I find myself writing about, and caring about, and advocating for.
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And that is to be generous. I still do not understand, and have no wish to understand, how certain elements within the Church, during certain eras, thought themselves justified in condoning, or allowing for, the torture and execution of persons found to be in possession of views that were deemed heretical, and that those persons would not recant or abjure. Even when I account for the fact that those elements might have viewed the Church, accurately, as involved in a battle for the salvation of souls.
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Which has always been the case, but which, admittedly, has not always been apparent, especially in those instances, historically, when the magisterium of the Church, from an abundance of caution with regard to its pastoral responsibilities, or from injudiciousness and hubris, may have made missteps in how it involved itself, like an overbearing parent, in the disseminating of information that, resulting from scientific learning or speculation, had relevance to our understanding of cosmology, and thus had implications theologically.