Matt 17:24–27. The king’s children do not pay a toll for entering his kingdom. Of course not! They get in for free, Jesus says. And yet the hungry mouths of the temple fundraisers must be filled. In a lovely reversal, the two-penny coin32 comes from the mouth of a fish that Peter (a fisherman) fetches up out of the Sea of Galilee: one penny for Jesus and one for Peter.
I cannot help but think of my master’s financial freedom in this regard. He came “duty-free” into his inheritance. As the youngest, he did not earn it in any sense other than perhaps in terms of the emotional toll his youth took on him. I gather from the little that Mrs. H. has said and the perpetual gloom that hangs over this house that he and his brothers were much shut up in the library or their bedrooms, the father as strict as a drill sergeant and protective as a mother hen, the suffocating combination blanketed over with an additional layer of religious guilt. That the daughters were shut up goes without saying; girls are thought to be suited to imprisonment, better able to adapt to the hothouse atmosphere. And yet, mysteriously, all his sisters are dead. This business of making children feel personally responsible for a sadistic crime committed by imperial overlords against an innocent man nearly two millennia ago makes my blood boil.
And the mother, a lively spirit in my estimation, yet a former servant, a poor relation, helpless to do anything about it. My dream comes back to me. I had a unique destiny (a pleonasm) that I was being kept from by people who were afraid of what I was or might become. Is this not true of each and every one of us? There is only one miracle necessary to make the whole of creation sacred, and that is life.
For you have my kidneys in your grasp; you governed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you that I am wonderfully made; wonderful are your works, and my soul well knows it.
My bones were not concealed from you, as I was made in hiding, as I was formed below in the earth.
Your eyes saw me when I was not yet ready: and all the days were written in your book, those yet to be and of which there was none.33
Life must be made in hiding, for the world works against it.
June 27
This is one of those days—the sun is shining brightly and the dog rolled in another dog’s shit and it was my task to bathe him—when I see through my own talk to the angry little girl who lies beneath, fists clenched, jaw set, voice silenced, too angry to speak. Not at the dog certainly. I think they do this to feel safe, taking on the stench of a strange dog so as not to become its victim. Masking one’s own smell. Angry at my condition—such a small world I live in, when I love and long for the whole of it. If I were a more instinctive animal I would have learned this trick of rolling in another’s shit to protect myself. It is too late for me to learn. And too early for me to start over, to relinquish this “me” and begin again from “scratch,” as Mrs. H. would say. I cannot help feeling that the life I am leading is not the one I was meant to have. Life itself is precious, but this life seems petty. If there were some quiet, passive way to simply disappear, I would do it. Who would be harmed by it? Is it a sin to die when I have no other way out of my prison? I know it is a sin to commit violence against my body, which is not my own. But what if there is no one to claim it? To fade away, as Clarissa34 is famed for having done so virtuously at what should have been the hopeful age of eighteen. I am twice that. As far as harming others, my father has disowned me, I have no children or husband, and as a domestic I am eminently replaceable. There is no other work for me. This is not self-pity. This is an attempt to be mercilessly objective about my futureless state in a way I am sure men and women younger than myself and in better circumstances (real or imagined) have no difficulty being. The kindness of my master and the good will of his household are not enough to anchor me, I fear. They are inwardly indifferent, and I feel that. The only creature really attached to me is the dog, who loves to attend me on my walks.
Matt 18:1–11. Turn around and become like a child! See that not one of you despise these little ones! The other two greatest commandments of our Lord,35 reducing all pride and despair to nought.
June 29
The cellar cool and damp. Also dark. I work there quickly.
Matt 18:12–14. When I was small I used to hear this parable of the lost sheep and think the little lamb had not strayed (the one out of a hundred) but was hiding. The herd is not always safe, and our Lord knows that. The lamb who loves the Lord is not brought back into the herd but is singled out—no longer hidden but raised up onto the shoulders of God. John writes of this recognition: “I know mine and mine know me as my father knows me and I know the father.”36 There are two ways we know him, by his voice, and by his laying down his life for us. The thieves and robbers we must hide from, or at least not answer to, for they choke the life out of us. They not only rob and steal—they murder our souls with shame.
Auerbach’s wine cellar—a little glimpse of hell, all goodness turned on its head, and a foreshadowing (more immediately) of the very next scene, “The Witch’s Kitchen.” The men in the tavern, full of passion and lacking all wisdom (unlike Faust, who possesses both), resemble the monkeys who serve the witch, warming their paws in their mistress’s absence. Faust’s aversion to the witch—he prefers the devil to old women37 and their folk remedies. But the devil does not do his own dirty work. A youth potion takes time and patience to distill, Mephisto insists, and so Faust must deal with the pharmacologically gifted old woman whether he likes it or not. How interesting that the young woman in the mirror (Margarete) appears to Faust seductively stretched out. He is seeing her in the mirror of his destiny not as who she is, as yet an undefiled maiden, but rather as what she will become in response to him.38
June 30
I think my master’s ironical demeanor—a few remarks today about Mrs. H.’s housekeeping regimen seemed to poke fun—is intended to avoid falsehood, but also tends toward falsehood. Everyone plays the straight man to Mephistopheles, Goethe’s master ironist. The witch’s magic spells are no more nonsensical than the theological doctrine of the Trinity, according to Mephisto. And while, of course, Mephisto himself does not actually believe this (the ironist is never persuaded), he sets us to guessing. I would say he makes us think (rather than swallow mystifying contradictions whole), but that is not what he is after. As the witch chants:
The high power
Of knowledge,
Hidden from the whole world!
And the man who does not think,
To him it is given:
He has it effortlessly.
To the academically trained Faust this is all nonsense, and yet there is sense in it. It goes back to something the Lord says—not entirely clear which person of the Trinity this is supposed to represent, since Jesus was also there from the beginning—in the play’s “Prologue in Heaven”: “A person strays so long as he strives.”
God and Satan are so often on the same page, so to speak, while noble humanity (Faust) fumbles to find its place. The perspective of the ironist—rising above. The perspective of the contemplative—resting within. Those poor desert mystics, how did they keep from going to the devil?
Matt