The Touch of the Magdalene by Diana Barsham

Author:Diana Barsham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2021-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

*

That is all I had to say of the quarry. The sickness of a hell I had no power at all to transform.

But I see that it fits in somehow; that it is not, as I had thought it, the opposite of my life before: there is a thread connecting them, a queer kind of continuity. It is part of the same fabric after all. I put away my half-finished basket and think about my writing instead.

*

Good news! The order of what I have to say has come to me in the nights, sleepless or sleeping, since I saw Marcus last. It came of its own accord, this ordering of my life – my life as it became, my life afterwards. After I came to Provence, unrisen, as Paul might say.

I shall tell it to myself; I shall rehearse it, write it down perhaps! It will be, after all this time, a valediction, my way of saying what I couldn’t say then, a farewell to those, myself included, who I never saw again!

I wish it were true that I had no self, for it is the self in me that sickens. Perhaps when I have finished telling its story, imposing an order, that self will disappear with the sickness and I will become laundered, washed clean of the rags that have choked my inner life since I left Judea. It will start in Massalia, after I had crossed that endless water, stepped out of the boat and onto a new shore.

Hard to recognise, perhaps, but a continuity nonetheless!

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