Status Updates From Study for Obedience

"In the bowl of the lake, my voice came back to me, and it sounded closely – it was more intimate than ever. I spoke and listened to myself at length as I watched the dark shapes move under the thinning ice."

"Over the course of my life, so much of which I had spent in solitude, I developed a habit of speaking aloud, to myself or to my surroundings: at times this was to offer encouragement, some kind word to help me carry on, in spite of it all; at others to offer observations on the passage of time."

"And yet there it was: presence and absence twisting together."

"And so although I walked in the forest nearly every day of the year, I felt perpetually estranged from it, as indeed I had felt estranged from most of the settings in which I had found myself over the course of my life."

"It was as if I had been living my life against the backdrop of a roaring noise that I had not known was there and that had ceased suddenly and absolutely. My perceptions turned outward."

"to my teachers, in whose presence I steadfastly refused to say the bracha over our classroom Sabbath ceremonies each Friday afternoon. It was the one act of defiance I allowed myself in childhood, and it came to define me, no matter how hard I worked to be good, so long as I persisted in this unaccountable refusal to join in, the light of grace was and would continue to be withheld from me."

"For my part I learned that nobody got what they deserved."

"I learned early on that money could clean you up and make you anybody."

"My people: for yes, they were that, I had to admit it, after years of denial, of immersing myself among strangers, if I had learned anything it was that I had no people if not them, and yet over the course of my adult life, and although I searched high and low, there never seemed to be any around."

"The work of family, the domestic order. A problem. I went back to the beginning, starting the process again. Over and over. It was my practice and I repeated it often, particularly at such times as there was no one to remind me of that crucial and fundamental thing, the void at the centre of the work."

"The problem, I felt, was that I had, at a certain point, without noticing it, departed from the basic principle of my own wrongdoing on which my practice of doing good ought to have been based."

"Had I not spent my life imagining myself in the shoes of the other? Had I not done my utmost to see everything from other people’s perspectives, rather than my own?"

"If imagination was to be understood primarily in terms of morality, I needed to know how to cultivate it, I needed to understand the terms and structures of goodness and its pursuit."

"It’s true, I thought, pausing the audio, that imagination may be a moral faculty, as some writers have maintained, but how to understand its workings? What sort of self could be said to have an imagination? And was the self in this equation fixed, or was she mobile?"

"If I could keep this balance, heeding the structure of what was said rather than parsing its significance, I could just about compose myself."

"and that I must therefore carry it with me, the knowledge that once, for a time, for a series of hours, even stretches of days, I had seen what happiness might look like, that would have to be enough."

"And so as I tramped daily through the woods, feeling for once in the world, I told myself over and over that I must remember this moment, here, now, a moment which could not last and would inevitably be followed by an unhappiness that would be commensurate with if not exceeding it in strength,"

"I understood vaguely that I must confine myself to what was possible, but what was to be done when everything was refused in advance? To what extent was I responsible?"

"I pictured any number of violent incidents resulting in injury or else death, yes, an array of potential painful deaths, deaths it must be said I had courted in both action and imagination, in both thought and deed."

"What happened to one’s past when one got beyond it? That solitary life, the shadows on the bedroom wall at dawn, waking suddenly to the sound of the window rattling against the catch as a small pair of gloved hands tried to prise it open."

"Whenever a branch fell in the forest after a storm, whenever the wind blew smoke back down the chimney, whenever my arm twinged, I thought, by long years of habit, supposing that is death itself?"

"I tended to be deferential, basically meek, tugging at the proverbial forelock until all my hair fell out. This attitude presented its own set of problems – namely, that meekness brings out the sadist in people, the atavistic desire to bite at the heels of the runt of the litter."

"Another way of putting this is that they had the soul of the lake, not of the river, and not of the sea."

"I had learned over the course of my life that there was something unpleasant about this opaque kind of inwardness: at any rate the people among whom I was reared demanded legibility – if there was one thing they could not stand it was the obscure, they were not a people much interested in the pursuit of meaning. They liked constancy."

"Since girlhood I held a great sense of injustice, I was always rooting for the underdog, it was a matter of principle. On the question of standing up for what I believed in however I was somewhat less certain, perhaps even weak-willed, what resistance I presented was negligible."

"I became his pupil and his retainer and he made me understand the necessity of temperance and silence. I had made an essential error when organising my consciousness early on in life, my brother explained, and this was by entertaining the idea that it was reasonable for me to form my own judgements about the world, about the people in it."

"I knew I must not weep, I must not scream, I must not run, though I wanted to do these things, yes, and to retch until my skin turned inside out. I was, it must be said, a sensitive child."

"My presence simplified things, since all the tasks previously divided between my brother’s wife and children would be my responsibility alone – the cleaning, the cooking, the shopping, the laundering, the airing out, the closing down, the warming up, the cooling off, the chopping of wood, the cutting of grass, the uprooting of weeds and many other things besides."