Status Updates From Study for Obedience

"Nevertheless, something had transpired, I had at the very least encountered the concept of habit and understood that custom too had its point of origin."

"One tried and failed to retain one’s integrity through a bad education, I reflected; one had been trained in certain ways which, with some distance and hindsight, one might come to see as unhealthy, if not utterly depraved."

"Perhaps after all I was beginning to let go of this inhuman fixing, the freezing into expression. My senses had been dulled by the abiding nature of the world’s provocations, and I knew that my habits and usual practices would be difficult to break. What remained of me, after a life of service?"

"How ineluctable the paths one treaded! And yet if something could happen, was indeed ever happening, did it not then follow that nothing, too, could happen?"

"Here I was, sitting in my brother’s garden, after all that effort, all those years, nothing any different, the underlying ideology adapting again and again to each liberation as it presented itself. The faces changed, sure they did, but ways of doing just persist, all one’s born days. What else is there to say?"

"But as for myself, I recognised in the end something behind the brand-newness of the world, a shadow just visible beneath its seams."

"One’s very ashes would be sifted for the gold tooth, the wedding ring."

"One always seemed to fall into the hands of a judge who was also one’s enemy. No plunder too low, no picking too slim."

"I became more interested in the sound of my colleagues’ sentences, the shape of their words, the occasional and probably unintended sibilance, the repetitions and elisions, the hesitations or pauses where the grammar did not mandate them. I found new ways to mark these idiosyncrasies, making use of space on the page. It seemed to me a truer notation of the language than how I had proceeded up to that point."

"It was the late twentieth century. What did we have left? A prayer book, some scraps of song, a history lesson beginning with devastation."

"It was part of my training, I understood that now, my uncommon pride and self-love which needed to bend, needed to be subdued, and it was of some comfort to me to see that there were others who faltered similarly, who needed the guiding hand of semi-public shame."

"I had stood in these groupings myself, listened as my most cherished, my most dearly held, most intimate thoughts were articulated by a distant relative or one-time acquaintance, usually to a total stranger, and we all laughed together. How we laughed."

"The distinction between the two spheres, public and private, had been an insoluble problem over the course of my upbringing, particularly during my teenage years, but even before that, yes, much earlier than that."

"The woman had, doubtless, her own worldview, one that was evidently incompatible with mine but no less true, according to its own internal rules."

"I believed in truth, and yet if I had learned anything in life it was that in the world of creation, nothing stayed still; everything was becoming and dissolving."

"(for had not the sages said that good deeds are better done in anonymity, without gratitude?)"

"And so I lived in the historical rupture of the present, in the historical aberration of my life, and I submitted to those that had me at their mercy in an effort to soften their hearts. But now, for the moment, things were well."

"My experience of continuity had been limited to the way each new catastrophe sat in the last, as if it had already happened and would go on happening, on and on."

"It went without saying I hoped my efforts would prove something to the townspeople, about my will to service, that I wanted to build bridges, that finally I consented to my role and responsibility in our shared history, a role whose outlines I had only then dimly imagined."

"In the country, I would overcome this final difficulty at last, renounce my will to knowledge, give up my attachment to expression, and in this way come to understand the meaning of things."

"I might come to see the form and plan of the world. Not to frame it within systems of understanding, of domination, no, I would work to allow the world its right to illegibility, to move in darkness. To take shape in its contact with people but to remain essentially itself."

"It was physically demanding work but pleasurable for that, although I tried to control the satisfaction I derived from what was after all a sad but necessary task, a task any number of working people had engaged in before, not, like me, as hobbyists, but by coming to it honestly. Nevertheless, my mind felt clear."

"I wanted so badly to live in my life, wanted to meet it head on, wanted above all for something to happen, for this terrible yearning to be quenched. What was underneath it all, vibrating beneath the faces of the people I saw, something in their expressions?"

"I had never before been conscious of having made any kind of imprint on anyone, had never so far as I was aware aroused any substantial emotions or reactions, except perhaps that placeless and silent loathing of the underdog that I have already described."

"My breath rang in my ears, the pumping of blood through my body, some sudden unreadable urge: urge and urge and urge. How curious. It was connected to that thrill of fear I had felt emanating from the woman. Nobody before had found me frightening."

"What was there to fear from me, the most benign, the most insipid, person in the area, notably weak and small of frame?"

"O suns! I thought. O grass of graves! For I had been reading poetry that morning in the garden and was exultant still. I felt as though I might weep for the beauty of it all, for the vanishing world."