Gilead

had the morning to think and pray and also to do a little reshelving, and while I was doing that, it came to my mind that I should consider what I would say to myself if I came to myself for counsel. In fact, I do that all the time, as any rational person does, but there is a tendency, in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less algebraically — this is true, but on the other hand, so is that, so I discover a kind of equivalency of considerations that is interesting in itself but resolves nothing. If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible. Not deciding is really one of the two choices that are available to me, so decision must be allowed its moment, too. That is, as behavior, not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act. If I were to put deciding not to act at one end of a continuum of possibility and deciding to act at the other end, the whole intervening space would be given over to not deciding, which would mean not acting. I believe this makes sense. My point in any case is that I must put special, corrective emphasis on the possibility of doing the thing I dread doing, which is telling your mother what I think I ought to tell her.

Question: What is it you fear most, Moriturus?

Answer: I, Moriturus, fear leaving my wife and child unknowingly in the sway of a man of extremely questionable character.

Question: What makes you think his contact with them or his influence upon them will be considerable enough to be damaging to them?

Now, that really is an excellent question, and one I would not have thought to put to myself. The answer would be, he has come by the house a few times, he has come to church once. Not an impressive reply. The truth is, as I stood there in the pulpit, looking down on the three of you, you looked to me like a handsome young family, and my evil old heart rose within me, the old covetise I have mentioned elsewhere came over me, and I felt the way I used to feel when the beauty of other lives was a misery and an offense to me. And I felt as if I were looking back from the grave.

Well, thank God I thought that through.

And while I am being honest, I will add here that for perhaps two months I have felt a certain change in the way people act toward me, which could be a simple reflex of the way I act toward them. Maybe I don’t understand as much as I should. Maybe I don’t make as much sense as I should.

The fact is, I don’t want to be old. And I certainly don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember. I bitterly wish you could know me as a young man, and not really so young, either, necessarily. I was trim and fit into my sixties. That was one way I took after my grandfather and my father. I was never rangy like them, but I was very strong, very sound. Even now, if I could trust my heart, there’s a lot I could do.

I don’t have to fault myself for feeling this way. The Lord wept in the Garden on the night He was betrayed, as I have said to people in my situation many times. So it isn’t just some unredeemed paganism in me that I dread what I should welcome, though clearly my sorrow is alloyed with discreditable emotions, emotions of other kinds. Of course, of course. “Who will free me from the body of this death?” Well, I know the answer to that one. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” I imagine a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort. Paul couldn’t have meant something entirely different from that. So there’s that to look forward to.

I say this because I really feel as though I’m failing, and not primarily in the medical sense. And I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me. I had a dream like that last night.

I was Boughton in the dream, for all purposes. Poor old Boughton.

This morning you came to me with a picture you had made that you wanted me to admire. I was just at the end of a magazine article, just finishing the last paragraph, so I didn’t look up right away. Your mother said, in the kindest, saddest voice, “He doesn’t hear you.” Not “He didn’t” but “He doesn’t.”

That article was very interesting. It was in Ladies’ Home Journal, an old issue Glory found in her father’s study and brought over for me to look at. There was a note on it. Show Ames. But it ended up at the bottom of a stack of things, I guess, because it’s from 1948. The article is called “God and the American People,” and it says 95 percent of us say we believe in God. But our religion doesn’t meet the writer’s standards, not at all. To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you