Allegra Goodman (whose next book — “The Other Side of the Island” — will be published in September) has a lovely essay in the latest issue of The New Yorker, entitled “Counting Pages.” She recounts liking as a child to escape from services to climb an old tree house and read Wizard of Oz stories:
As a young girl, I spent more time outside synagogues than in them. Services were long, and I always found some excuse to get away. . . .
My parents did expect me to participate at least some of the time. During the High Holidays, I amused myself by hanging upside down on my chair. I’d pretend I was a bat and stare at the appropriately named Mrs. Batkin’s feet. Then my mother would whisper, “Doesn’t this day mean anything to you?”
I was a daydreamer and a page counter. On Yom Kippur, I kept my finger on the last page of the evening service. Only seventy pages to go. Fifty! Maybe now I could get up and make a trip to the water fountain. . . .
In my own brief experience, I had known the crashing waves of the Pacific and the long summer evenings of the Catskills. The world, so complex and beautiful, must have a creator. The sky, the stars, and all the trees must come from something. They could not generate themselves. But my belief in God did not translate into action. At school, my younger sister refused to sing Christmas carols because she was Jewish. She was six. I, on the other hand, looked forward to the Christmas pageant every year. . . .
And yet, inexorably, some of my own religion rubbed off on me. Might that be the way belief works for some people? Not a sudden epiphany but a long, slow accumulation of Sabbaths. No road-to-Damascus conversion but a kind of coin rubbing, in which ritual and repetition begin to reveal the credo underneath.
As I grew older, I was drawn to poetry, and I began to study the haftarah — the weekly selection from the prophets. As I grew busier, I began to appreciate time away from the world. Services became a refuge. I did not need to rest when I was a child, because I did not work. I did not want to come inside, because the outside world was still entirely beautiful to me.
Tobias Wolff has a nice essay in the same issue, entitled “Winter Light.” He writes about a night in 1970 at
So what was on offer that night? Nothing of interest but a Bergman film, “Winter Light,” showing at a local church. I wasn’t a churchgoer, nor was Rob, but neither of us had seen the movie, and, after all, it was Bergman, and free, so we went. . . .
There couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, thirty of us scattered around the pews in our overcoats and scarves. The minister, a rugged-looking man with a Northern accent, stood before the screen and welcomed us, said he looked forward to the discussion that would follow the film. . . . Before taking his seat, he bowed his head and asked us to join him in prayer. Rob and I exchanged arch glances: so this wasn’t quite free. . . .
That night . . . changed his life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church, and went on to become a missionary in
And what drew me back, some time later, toward the possibility of faith? Poetry. George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot. One night, I was reading the last lines of “Little Gidding” . . . .
Little Gidding is the fourth of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Here is an excerpt from the concluding verses, with echoes at the end that take one back to Allegra Goodman’s essay:
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them. . . .
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Eliot published “Four Quartets” in 1930. Nearly a quarter century before, he had published his first poem, while at prep school, in the Smith Academy Record:
If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.
The flowers I gave thee when the dew
Was trembling on the vine
Were withered ere the wild bee flew
To suck the eglantine.
So let us haste to pluck anew
Nor mourn to see them pine.
And though our days of love are few
Yet let them be divine.
Man does not live by prose alone.