and evil warring in people’s hearts; he just wants to keep the focus on the internal orientation of the conscious sinner, as opposed to the focus on externals which is typical of the unconscious sinner. Matthew must have been very angry at his own Jewish people who did not convert to Christianity. He makes it seem as though the non-Christian Jews have everything backward. I do not think Jesus could have hated his own people the way Matthew seems to. But then Jesus does say those who do not follow him are not his people. For a religious Jew, this statement is inconceivable. How angry was Jesus, I wonder.
June 12
More rain. Working my way through Faust (which I have read before but hardly remember) and finding Mephistopheles’ reputation for subtlety understated. Is he a mystic (“In the beginning was the void”), a Manichean, or merely evil? Merely evil seems the least profitable reading. Consider the following exchange with Faust.
Faust.
You call yourself a part, and yet you stand before
me complete?
Mephistopheles.
The modest truth I tell you.
Though humanity, the little world of fools,
Ordinarily considers itself a totality;
I am a part of that part that in the beginning was
everything,
A part of the darkness that gave birth to light,
The proud light, which henceforth Mother Night’s
Ancient rank and realm has troubled;
And yet it does not succeed, because however
much it strives,
It remains imprisoned, stuck to bodies.16
Darkness prior to, superior to rebellious light—light shackled, like Prometheus on his rock, to form, while darkness, the void, floats free, unformed and uncreated. Is this darkness prior to creation not the very being of God, neither form nor formlessness, uncaptured by any concept, the inconceivable turbulence that so loudly confronted Job in his first silent and then discursive misery?
Faust’s response is essentially what my father taught me to call an ad hominem attack, blaming Mephistopheles for being too intellectual: “You cannot destroy anything on a large scale and so you begin on a small scale.” Faust, a doctor and professor of medieval medicine (he would have been a contemporary of Luther’s) is talking to and about himself. He wants no more of his suffocating study and small life-denying profession. Great irony here—no talk of medicine as healing, except that the good doctor is “healed” of his compulsion to acquire knowledge. What he wants is not knowledge but experience, the tiny bit that is “parceled out to the whole of humanity.” Parts and wholes again, but not exactly as Mephistopheles saw it.
Faust.
I will say to the moment: But stay a while! You
are so beautiful!17
So much is said of Faust’s thirst for godlike knowledge (I too have repeated this silly error), but this is exactly wrong. Perhaps Eve has been similarly misread. It was experience she wanted, not a godlike knowledge, not a paradise with everything neatly labeled in Adam’s head, whose only claim to expertise was that he had arrived on the scene a few hours before she did. She wanted to experience the world as it had been given to Adam, before he “mastered” it.
Matt 15:21–29. The Canaanite woman cries out, “O Lord, you Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is plagued by a demon.” Jesus compares her, a gentile, to a little dog, and says the children’s food must not go to the dogs, but she reminds him that even the dogs are entitled to the tablescraps.18 And so her daughter is healed “in that hour,” Scripture says, but I am thinking it was in that moment. A hint of sun.
June 13
One gets a glimpse of Genesis 8—the renewal of the world after the deluge—when after a week of steady rain, the sky is drained and the earth begins to dry out. People walk about with one another or their dogs and seem grateful simply not to have drowned, given up hope, or gone mad from the sheer grayness of everything. My master stayed in the last couple of days but still we do not see much of him. One encounter in the library—he asked me how my Faust was coming along, and I said nicely, thank you, but that I was getting a different impression reading it for the second time, that Faust was tired of books and wanted life. He seemed pleased to learn the play was not new to me—he knows a bit of my background from Emil, but not more than Emil saw fit to tell. My master said he would like to hear my impressions after I finish Part One. I asked why Part Two (which I have not read) is not included in the same volume as Part One, and he said that it was because it was written decades later and only published after Goethe’s death. It seems impossible to carry on a conversation in this house for more than five minutes without the topic of death coming up. Is this the life Jesus came to give us? But I should not be so critical. My master is a sensitive man who has given me a home, however frequent the reminders of its end. I should be grateful.
Matt 15:32–39. Why repeat the miracle of the loaves and the fishes with fewer people and more food? Matthew seems to be pulling things together from different sources, but then what are his sources and why are they not included in Scripture? Anyone who has ever been truly hungry (as I have been) understands why food is miraculous, no matter how much food or how many people. The wild ratios (and the repetition) drive home the point that we are all starving and that it is not necessary to live in that way, though, as my people are fond of saying, “A person gets used to anything.”19 Mrs. H. worries that my master’s appetite is not what it should be. He works long hours in his library and merely “grazes,” as she likes to say. She is quite maternal toward my master. It is possible she is a distant relation from the Jutland, as was my master’s mother, who was brought to this house presumably as a family favor. Such a large family at one time, and now just one brother and a handful of nieces and nephews. My master’s books are his children, I like to think, which puts me off the moroseness that the very walls of this house seem to breathe, not to mention the family name.20
June 15
I am grateful my master does not have real children, for if he did, I would be called upon to teach them. It was in my past life as a governess that my prospects for future happiness were ruined. If I were a man and could have had a choice in my profession, I would have chosen the ministry over teaching. But aside from marriage, which is the livelihood of most respectable women, the choices are few: a nurse, a governess, a prostitute. I became a governess and learned to play a variety of roles.
Matt 16:1–4. The Pharisees want a sign. Good and bad signs. Good and bad times. What is the sign of Jonah? His prophecy of the destruction of Ninevah? Its people and animals in sackcloth? The withered shrub? Or the storm that delivered him into the belly of the big fish (since all the talk here is of weather)? The story of Jonah, so short, so ridiculous, so deadly serious. I wonder if Jesus is not making fun of religious credulity itself, which cannot see what is in front of its nose while asking after the supernatural. This tendency to misread signs or to look in the wrong places for the truth is just as much a fault of the educated as the ignorant. I certainly misread the signs when I was a governess, and the being that was delivered into my belly did not come out alive. How awful to remember—impossible to forget. I am destined to make many more mistakes in this life, but that will not be one of them.
June 16
Is it a sin to use Scripture as a crutch merely to keep going, to
