where I help. I’ll give you an example,” he said, putting his fingers to his lips, pursing them as if in deep thought.
“You know Michelangelo’s Moses, hillbilly boy?”
“Of course,” I said, irritation bubbling up inside me. I didn’t like being reminded of my roots, especially when someone used so-called high culture to try to catch me off guard.
“It’s a statue,” I said, “of Moses seated with the Ten Commandments he’s brought down from Mt. Sinai. In the Bible, it says Moses came down from the mountain, and the skin of his face was radiant. By most accounts,” I said, though not wanting to state it as a fact, because I was pretty sure the devil was out to trip me up, “Jerome mistranslated the Hebrew word for ‘radiant’ as ‘horns.’ That’s why there’s horns instead of a halo on the statue.”
The devil squealed with delight. “Delicious, isn’t it? We wrestled with that one for days. But finally Jerome came around. A man who brings commandments from God? What a trip!” His eyes brightened, experiencing the thrill of some victory had long ago.
“Don’t you see?” the devil asked. “A man who speaks for God, holding God’s commands in his hands. That’s something that makes for power! Moses had a tool, and he used it. Yes sir, Jerome finally got it. At the heart of every man is a desire for power, and when that power comes, even in the guise of a god’s gift—or especially when it comes in the guise of a god’s gift—it turns that man into a force. A force to bend men’s wills; a force to impose order. Darkness creeps into the heart, and little by little, the light goes out.”
The devil exulted in his conquest. “With my help, Jerome finally saw through to reality. Fundamentally, any being who obtains the tools of real power becomes a god unto himself. Jerome knew: coming off that mountain, Moses reflected, more than anything else, everything I stand for.”
He laughed to himself. “No, the critics be damned. Jerome knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote down that Moses came off the mountain with horns. He finally got the story!”
I simply fluttered my hands in the air, as if to shoo away everything the devil had said. Yet, as I got to know him, I realized that, in some way, he did know the great doctors of theology; I just wasn’t sure how much he had contributed to their work. According to him, quite a bit: order, rules, principles, the sort of things that make for an unbending syllogism that, once you’re locked into it, you can’t fight your way out.
“But you’ll find out more about me as we get to know one another,” the devil continued. “Let’s talk about you. A rich, fairly good looking if a little pudgy, considerate fellow like you sitting here all alone. Pretty bright, if not brilliant. You want more; you don’t have it. A self-described hack.”
Then the devil came closer, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s not just a word that describes what you do, my dear Timothy,” he explained. “It’s who you are. Bit by bit, tedious gift book after another, you’re hacking away at your essence. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left.”
Then that tenor voice started up again, the third time.
Zwangvolle Plage!
Müh’ ohne Zweck!
A flash of light (the devil is such a show-off at times), and the devil stood before me in a doctoral gown, hood and cap included. A blackboard had appeared beside him, and the words of his song had been written there.
“Timothy,” he said, in a voice that eerily matched that of my dissertation advisor. “Translate, please.” He rapped the board hard with an old-time wooden pointer.
“Er . . . ” I started.
“F!” he cried. “Timothy,” he said, his voice heavy with disappointment, “how can you have read the great Germanic literature on Augustine? This is easy stuff, and you hesitate?”
He had caught me there. Though my Latin finally, after years, had become passable, I never really learned German. I had to take the German exam three times before passing it. Everyone in the divinity school had to pass French and German. The third try constituted a miracle; I have no clue how I passed.
“Timothy,” he said in a sing-song voice, “I know your secret.”
I immediately turned red.
“Shame, shame, shame, shame on you!” he sang, a disco beat in the background.
“Too much to do, not enough time to learn,” I said, grabbing the first excuse that came to mind.
I knew he knew. I had to pepper my aborted dissertation with occasional notes to the German scholarship on Augustine. I tried my best to find English translations of the German and then painstakingly look up each word in a German-English dictionary to make sure I wasn’t making any huge mistakes. Then I’d paraphrase, occasionally making the translation so clumsy that my committee could draw no other conclusion but that I had translated the lines myself. Those few books and articles they drew my attention to that had not been translated into English I paid a PhD candidate in the German department to translate for me. Thankfully, not much of that, or it would have broken my very small piggy bank.
I sighed. “A few words, a phrase here and there, an idiom that got stuck in my head for some reason,” I admitted, “that’s all the German I know.”
“No wonder you don’t like opera, then,” the devil said. “You don’t get it. Of course, Italian would be nice, but, by and large, give me Germanic opera, Wagnerian opera, that’s a vision of the world for you!”
He used his pointer, this time more delicately pointing to the words he had written on the board and translating:
Wearisome torment!
Aimless effort!
So we sat there while the devil gave me a mini-lecture on Wagner’s Ring tetralogy. I knew of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs, and I even had a slight notion of what it was about. But I didn’t really know the details.
So he talked, I listened. He actually made it interesting; more than that, the verses he kept singing at me made sense, both in the context of the opera and in the framework of my life.
The words, turns out, open the third drama of the tetralogy, Siegfried. Mime, a dwarf, is singing, slaving away at a sword he is forging, knowing all along that the sword will do no good. Yet, Siegfried requires it, so Mime makes it. But against the great dragon Fafnir, it will fail. And Mime knows it. What a useless waste of time and talent, creating, making, forging an instrument that you know will break when called upon.
How like my life, I thought, and the devil was kind enough to point it out as well. Wearisome torment! Aimless effort! Indeed. God, I hated writing those stupid gift books. I knew more was in me, but what exactly that more was, I didn’t know. But I did know that the day had come when sitting down at the computer to work felt like entering the first level of hell. I remember reading Kierkegaard, and he said that despair made every waking moment seem like three o’clock in the morning—that time when you want to sleep, but can’t. Every minute, every second, passing in slow motion, time running like molasses, daybreak an eternity away. Wearisome torment, that was it. I guess opera was good for something, if just to help me see the true state of my life.
And talk about aimless effort. I always hoped that, even if the books themselves
