'the truth' and only
cowardice could be preventing me from admitting as much. All that time, though, I think he was just finding his way to Edward, and I can't really blame him for it. He did try to take me along with him.
In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle
it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding 'existence,' which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would
have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however.
I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something;—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogetherif God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. That is
clearly a source of confusion. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we can have no experi178
ence whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only the slightest likeness or affinity. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It
seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.
So my advice is this—don't look for proofs. Don't bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they're always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. 'Let your works so shine before men,' etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.
No sleep this night. My heart is greatly disquieted. It is a strange thing to feel illness and grief in the same organ. There is no telling one from the other. My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. That old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself—that same good weight worries me these days.
But the fact is, I have never found another way to be as honest with myself as I can be by consulting with these miseries of mine, these accusers and rebukers, God bless them all.
So long as they do not kill me outright. I do hope to die with a quiet heart. I know that may not be realistic.
179
Well, I close my eyes and I see Jack Boughton, and it seems to me that more than he has matured or aged he has wearied. And I think, Why must I always defend myself against this sad old youth? What is the harm I fear from him?
Well, that really is not a purely rhetorical question. This morning your mother gave me a note from him. It said, 'I am very sorry that I offended you yesterday. I will not trouble you again.' He writes a good hand. In any case, I felt from her manner that your mother knew what lay behind the note. It
was just a folded slip of paper, but she would never have read it if he had not shown it to her. Perhaps he told her what it said. Or simply that it was an apology. I heard them talking on the
porch before she brought it in to me. She looked sorry and concernedfor me, for him perhaps, or for both of us. They do
talk, I know that. Not much and not often. But I sense a kind of understanding between them.
'Understanding' might be the wrong word, since I have never spoken to her about him, and it is precisely the fact of
her knowing so little about him that worries me. Or 'understanding' might be exactly the right word, no matter what she
knows or does not know. I can't decide which thought worries me more. Maybe neither one could worry me more.
I sent him a note. It said I was the one who should apologize, that my health has not been perfect lately, and so on, that
I hoped we might have a chance to speak again soon. And your mother carried the note back to him.
I was thinking about the time when he was just ten or twelve and he filled my mailbox with wood shavings and set them on fire. He rigged up a sort of fuse of twine dipped in paraffin. At that time the mailbox was on a post by the gate. It was that loaf-shaped kind people use in the country. I was 180
walking home from a meeting at the church in the dark of a winter evening. I heard a poof and looked up, and just then flames came pouring out of the mouth of that box. It gave me quite a turn. But I didn't doubt for a minute whose prank
it was.
That boy was always alone, always grinning, always intent on some piece of devilment.
He wasn't more than ten when he took off in a Model T he saw idling in the street downtown.
Cars were still pretty rare around here in those days, so his interest was understandable.
He drove it straight west for a number
of miles, until it ran out of gas, and then he just walked home. A couple of young fellows with a team of horses
