human mind. Our sense perceptions proceed from God. Main work: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).
Yes, it was decidedly odd. Hilde stood thinking for a few seconds before going back to bed and the ring binder.
In one way, it was her father who had hung the two pictures on the wall. Could there be any connection other than the similarity of names?
Berkeley was a philosopher who denied the existence of a material world beyond the human mind. That was certainly very strange, one had to admit. But it was not easy to disprove such claims, either. As regards Sophie, it fitted very well. After all, Hilde’s father was responsible for her “sense perceptions.”
Well, she would know more if she read on. Hilde looked up from the ring binder and smiled when she got to the point where Sophie discovers the reflection of a girl who winks with both eyes. “The other girl had winked at Sophie as if to say: I can see you, Sophie. I am here, on the other side.”
Sophie finds the green wallet in the cabin as well— with the money and everything! How could it have made its way there?
Absurd! For a second or two Hilde had really believed that Sophie had found it. But then she tried to imagine how the whole thing must appear to Sophie. It must all seem quite inscrutable and uncanny.
For the first time Hilde felt a strong desire to meet Sophie face to face. She felt like telling her the real truth about the whole business.
But now Sophie had to get out of the cabin before she was caught red-handed. The boat was adrift on the lake, of course. (Her father couldn’t resist reminding her of that old story, could he!)
Hilde gulped a mouthful of soda and took a bite of her roll while she read the letter about the “meticulous” Aristotle, who had criticized Plato’s theories.
Aristotle pointed out that nothing exists in consciousness that has not first been experienced by the senses. Plato would have said that there is nothing in the natural world that has not first existed in the world of ideas. Aristotle held that Plato was thus “doubling the number of things.”
Hilde had not known that it was Aristotle who had invented the game of “animal, vegetable, or mineral.”
Aristotle wanted to do a thorough clearing up in nature’s “room.” He tried to show that everything in nature belongs to different categories and subcategories.
When she read about Aristotle’s view of women she was both irritated and disappointed. Imagine being such a brilliant philosopher and yet such a crass idiot!
Aristotle had inspired Sophie to clean up her own room. And there, together with all the other stuff, she found the white stocking which had disappeared from Hilde’s closet a month ago! Sophie put all the pages she had gotten from Alberto into a ring binder. “There were in all over fifty pages.” For her own part, Hilde had gotten up to page 124, but then she also had Sophie’s story on top of all the correspondence from Alberto Knox.
The next chapter was called “Hellenism.” First of all, Sophie finds a postcard with a picture of a UN jeep. It is stamped UN Battalion, June 15. Another of these “cards” to Hilde that her father had put into the story instead of sending by mail.
Dear Hilde, I assume you are still celebrating your fifteenth birthday. Or is this the morning after? Anyway, it makes no difference to your present. In a sense, that will last a lifetime. But I’d like to wish you a happy birthday one more time. Perhaps you understand now why I send the cards to Sophie. I am sure she will pass them on to you.
P.S. Mom said you had lost your wallet. I hereby promise to reimburse you the 150 crowns. You will probably be able to get another school I.D. before they close for the summer vacation. Love from Dad.
Not bad! That made her 150 crowns richer. He probably thought a homemade present alone wasn’t enough.
So it appeared that June 15 was Sophie’s birthday, too. But Sophie’s calendar had only gotten as far as the middle of May. That must have been when her father had written this chapter, and he had postdated the “birthday card” to Hilde. But poor Sophie, running down to the supermarket to meet Joanna.
Who was Hilde? How could her father as good as take it for granted that Sophie would find her? In any case, it was senseless of him to send Sophie the cards instead of sending them directly to his daughter.
Hilde, like Sophie, was elevated to the celestial spheres as she read about Plotinus.
I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig— or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery.
This was the most giddying passage Hilde had read up to now. But it was nevertheless the simplest. Everything is one, and this “one” is a divine mystery that everyone shares.
This was not really something you needed to believe. It is so, thought Hilde. So everyone can read what they like into the word “divine.”
She turned quickly to the next chapter. Sophie and Joanna go camping the night before the national holiday on May 17. They make their way to the major’s cabin...
Hilde had not read many pages before she flung the bedclothes angrily aside, got up, and began to walk up and down, clutching the ring binder in her hands.
This was just about the most impudent trick she had ever heard of. In that little hut in the woods, her father lets these two girls find copies of all the cards he had sent Hilde in the first two weeks of May. And the copies were real enough. Hilde had read the very same words over and over. She recognized every single word.
Dear Hilde, I am now so bursting with all these secrets for your birthday that I have to stop myself several times a day from calling home and blowing the whole thing. It is something that simply grows and grows. And as you know, when a thing gets bigger and bigger it’s more difficult to keep it to yourself. . .
Sophie gets a new lesson from Alberto. It’s all about Jews and Greeks and the two great cultures. Hilde liked getting this wide bird’s-eye view of history. She had never learned anything like it at school. They only gave you details and more details. She now saw Jesus and Christianity in a completely new light.
She liked the quote from Goethe: “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”
The next chapter began with a piece of card which sticks to Sophie’s kitchen window. It is a new birthday card for Hilde, of course.
Dear Hilde, I don’t know whether it will still be your birthday when you read this card. I hope so, in a way; or at least that not too many days have gone by. A week or two for Sophie does not have to mean just as long for us. I shall be coming home for Midsummer Eve, so we can sit together for hours in the glider, looking out over the sea, Hilde. We have so much to talk about. . .
Then Alberto calls Sophie, and this is the first time she hears his voice.
“You make it sound like a war.”
“I would rather call it a battle of wills. We have to attract Hilde’s attention and get her over on our side before her father comes home to Lillesand.”
And then Sophie meets Alberto Knox disguised as a medieval monk in the twelfth-century stone church.
Oh, no, the church! Hilde looked at the time. A quarter past one ... She had forgotten all about the time.
Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much that she cut school on her birthday. But it did mean that her classmates wouldn’t be celebrating with her. Oh well, she had always had plenty of well-wishers.
Soon she found herself receiving a long sermon. Alberto had no problem slipping into the role of a medieval priest.
When she read about how Sophia had appeared to Hildegard in visions, she turned once again to her encyclopedia. But this time she found nothing about either of them. Wasn’t that typical! As soon as it was a question of women or something to do with women, the encyclopedia was about as informative as a moon crater. Was the whole work censored by the Society for the Protection of Men?
Hildegard of Bingen was a preacher, a writer, a doctor, a botanist, and a biologist. She was “perhaps an example of the fact that women were often more practical, more scientific even, in the Middle Ages.”
But there was not a single word about her in the encyclopedia. How scandalous!
Hilde had never heard that God had a “female side” or a “mother nature.” Her name was Sophia, apparently
