Contemporary American Essay by Phillip Lopate

Author:Phillip Lopate [Lopate, Phillip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

The ancient religions all have injunctions against speaking the name of God. Truth, they know, rests in silence. As Dora Diamant, unarmed against the august priests of literature who surrounded her, also knew in her loneliness: What happens in the dark of human intimacy is holy, and belongs to silence. It is not, as we writers say, material.

* * *

—

There is no betrayal, as there is no love, like the first one. But then, I hadn’t betrayed my mother—I had saved her. I freed her from silence, from secrecy, from the benighted attitudes which had caused her such anguish, and from the historical suppression of women’s voices—and so on and so forth. If Dora Diamant was someone who didn’t believe in literature, I was one who believed in nothing else.

This defining moment: I must have been about twelve, not older. A spring day, certainly in May because the windows and even the heavy doors at St. Luke’s School are open. Fresh air is gusting through the building like a nimble thief, roller shades slapping against windows from the draft, classroom doors banging shut. The classrooms are festooned with flowers, mostly drooping masses of lilac stuck in coffee cans and Mason jars, placed at the bare feet of the plaster Virgin who has a niche in every classroom: Ave, ave, Ma-ree-ee-ah, our Queen of the May.

For some reason we, our whole class, are standing in the corridor. We are waiting—to go into the auditorium, to go out on the playground, some everyday thing like that. We are formed in two lines and we are supposed to be silent. We are talking, of course, but in low murmurs, and Sister doesn’t mind. She is smiling. Nothing is happening, nothing at all. We are just waiting for the next ordinary moment to blossom forth.

Out of this vacancy, I am struck by a blow: I must commemorate all this. I know it is just my mind, but it doesn’t feel like a thought. It is a command. It feels odd, and it feels good, buoyant. Sister is there in her heavy black drapery, also the spring breeze rocketing down the dark corridor, and the classroom doorway we are standing by, where, inside, lilacs are shriveling at the bare feet of Mary. Or maybe it is a voice that strikes me, Tommy Howe hissing to—I forget to whom, “OK, OK, lemme go.”

These things matter—Tommy’s voice, Sister smiling in her black, the ricochet of the wind, the lilacs collapsing—because I am here to take them in.

That was all. It was everything.

I have asked myself many times about that oddly adult word—commemorate—which rainbows over the whole gauzy instant. I’m sure that was the word, that in fact this word was the whole galvanizing point of the experience because I remember thinking even at the time that it was a weird word for a child—me—to use. It was an elderly word, not mine. But I grabbed it and held on. Perhaps only a Catholic child of the fifties would be at home with such a conception.

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