It had happened the moment she first encountered, somewhere in Simone Weil’s writings, this poem by George Herbert, the poem whose setting she was preparing to sing. Simone Weil had read the poem on retreat at the Monastery of Solesmes, and it had struck her with epiphanic force. For Weil, it gave utterance, with unworldly clarity, to the soul’s wondering disbelief when brought face-to-face with God’s love:
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
The poem surfaces again and again in Weil’s writing, even to the last months of her life. It was as though (Miriam explained) the poem like Love itself persisted in inviting her, bidding her to take its sustenance, even as Weil’s body hollowed and broke. When Miriam stumbled upon the poem in the course of her studies, knowing what she knew of Weil’s final days, the encounter shook her. An instant, it seemed, had transformed the whole purpose of her studies, or rather, this new sense of purpose revealed itself to have been the motive all along. A text that had seemed at first merely a constituent part, a single step on her professional ascent, was now suddenly a door—a door through which she had already passed, a door already shut and sealed at her back.
But wasn’t it strange (I asked her) that the same poem that struck Simone Weil with such force should overcome her, Miriam, as well? She wasn’t claiming that it harbored magical or mystical virtue, was she? Maybe what she had experienced was merely an intoxication, a bewildering but explicable identification with the object of her study. Perhaps it was an occupational hazard for an academic, the risk of discerning in an object of scrutiny a promise of spiritual transformation, an intimation of transfiguring clarity….
“Clarity?” she said with a sigh halfway between dismay and disgust. There was no clarity. All she knew was that everything she had thought, known, wanted, all of it had been entirely wrong. She had watched her dream of wisdom crumble. The path that remained to her was the path through the rubble field, the path of patience. “But in the end it was not so different a path,” she said, “not so great a change. I went from being a student, a student of Simone Weil’s work, to being—”
“A disciple?” I asked.
“Are you mocking me?”
“Not at all.”
“No, not a disciple. A novice, if you want to know. That is the difference: I realized I was not a student but a novice, not even a novice—a postulant.”
“And now you are about to become a real postulant, a real novice—”
“Nothing will have changed. I will just go to a place where people will call me what I am, a novice if you like, a beginner.”
“If I like.”
But, she chided, I seem to have forgotten that I had a job to do.
A job?
The translations. My job was to help her.
But why choose me? Had she confused me with some sort of authority on Renaissance English poetry? I was a shrink, not a professor. As for modern English, Paris was infested with native speakers.
But I suited her purposes, she said, then added: Most deliciously.
Had she chosen me because I had an expiration date?
“But that is what the poem says, n’est-ce pas? Doesn’t it say there are things you can learn only from someone you love?”
“Is that who I am?” I asked.
“And…,” she said, not answering my question but adjusting the thought, completing it, “and from the one who loves you?”
TWENTY-ONE
The latest photograph arrived three days ago, unaccompanied: no note, no inscription, no sheared-off poem-fragment. The image—if you could call it that—is a patchwork, a botch-up of half-shapes, some pale, some dim, large or small. If you could see it, would you think that shape there, that grayish oblong shape, resembled a sort of dog, a dog lying on its side? Would you feel an inexplicable sadness for it, as I did? That is what I felt, an unexplained sadness, before it came to me, the name, the dog’s name: Obus.
He is almost at the center, a little lower, at the feet of those other shapes. You see how Obus, lying down, is outlined in profile, because the picture is taken from above, just as the picture of the river’s surface had been taken from above. It is as though the earlier picture of the river has evolved into this one, as though the water’s surface has curdled, clumped into masses. But what, or who, are those other shapes, shapes that like the dog appear to be lying on their sides?
I cannot say, yet must.
I think, Father, I can no longer tell what I remember from what I have imagined. A boundary has vanished, the boundary separating my own memories and the memories I devised for Clementine: Your eyes, they are your mother’s exactly. All I remember is how those eyes looked, looked at me or rather through me—her long, level stare, how even when
