Fanaticism and the need to believe in an ideal blinker our vision. When can we be even halfway sure that what is proclaimed actually happened the way it is described, particularly when the news about it comes from people having blind allegiance to their faith?
The reliability of testimonies to past events is something that continues to fascinate me. Christ is the present and the future, we declare. But He is first and foremost the past. Whichever way I interpret
the Bible, I am dealing with events that happened and were recorded two thousand years ago. My gaze is therefore fixed on the past. Most people's gaze is fixed on some point in the distant future. No, that's an exaggeration. Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future, they explore neither truth nor lies, they gaze at the television.
When we were still in Kamenice, our local Secretary for Church Affairs was a fellow named Berger, a former PE teacher. Maybe they had chosen him for his physical fitness and sobriety, in view of the fact that the previous incumbent had fallen asleep in a ditch when he was in a drunken stupor and frozen to death. I was required to apply in person to the Secretary every time I wanted to organize an activity that in any way went beyond my regular services. Sometimes he would make a personal visit. He would take a seat in my office, Jitka would bring him a coffee and he would start to persuade me that everything I did was a waste of time, as in the space of two generations there wouldn't be a single Christian left in our country, apart from a few crazy old grandmothers. He knew the content of all of my sermons and would warn me against any political allusions. I used to assure him that I had no interest in politics. 'I know full well what you mean when you talk about the Jews being taken into captivity and yet they never stopped believing in a Messiah who would free them. ' When I objected that that was simply the way it was, he would say: 'Sometimes I really can't make up my mind whether you're a shrewd operator or just naive. '
When Jitka died he came to the funeral. 'Death is terrible, Reverend, ' he said to me. 'You have my sympathy and I hope your faith helps ease your pain. '
A few days later I went to see him and mentioned that I desperately needed to return to Prague where my parents could help me take care of Eva who was six months old at the time.
He told me he understood my position and that it should be possible to arrange. I don't know whether it was really he who sorted it out but shortly afterwards the ban on my preaching in Prague was lifted for a while at least.
I'm writing about all and sundry in an effort to get that woman out of my mind to avoid writing how I have yearned for her, how I have an urge to meet her again. An urge for love or for sin?
There was this quote from Marti in a recent issue of The Protestant: 'Religion and eroticism — a wild, but inseparable, couple. Even though they fight like cats and dogs, call each other names and curse one another, the one cannot last long without the other. Where religion is dying, eroticism wastes away and becomes simply sex. Where eroticism is dying, religion shrivels up into abstract metaphysics (as was once the case) or into arid ethics (as it is now). '
I also recall what Balthazar the Cabalist says in Durrell's Justine: 'None of the great religions has done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man's wholeness match the wholeness of the universe — even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure. '
Where is the boundary between freedom and licence, between responsibility and self-denial that no longer serve life but inertia? Inertia that is one of the signs of death!
I've written nothing for almost a month. Have I lost the courage to be intimate with my diary? Or have I found a different form of intimacy?
I definitely don't have the courage to contemplate the consequences of what has happened. A month ago, B. called and asked if I could spare her a moment. There was a note of urgency in her voice and it struck me she had had some misfortune or other. I told her that I would of course find time for her, and straight away if necessary. She then asked if we might meet in the Small Quarter as she happened to have some business there at that moment. She described to me a bistro halfway along Carmelite Street where we could meet.
I arrived there in under half an hour and when I sat down at one of the small tables I could not rid myself of a sense of something unbecoming. Fortunately the bistro was empty, with just a sickly melody wafting from some unseen loudspeaker.
She arrived a little late. She started to apologize in her usual overstated fashion and thank me for coming. I ordered wine for the
two of us and asked her if anything had happened to her.
She said she was suffering from depression, a feeling of anxiety that there was nothing permanent in this life, in her life, in people's lives, in the life of the Earth. Not even in the life of the universe, she added.
I pointed out that there was something permanent in life and the universe too.
'God, you mean, ' she said and straight away objected that she didn't want any false consolation, that shed sooner get drunk on wine than on some illusion. Then she spoke about her marriage. It was possible to put up with anything if one had a little support from one's partner. She maintained that she loved her husband but she had no support from him. On the contrary, she had to support him. 'You're different, 'she told me, 'you're strong, you don't foist your burden off on to other people, you help them with theirs. '
Just as on the previous occasion, there were moments when I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying but instead simply registered the melody and tonal colour of her voice, and her appearance. I was also distracted by her fingers that involuntarily drummed the rhythm of the obtrusive muzak.
As we emerged from the bistro it was already getting dark. I wanted to say goodbye, but she detained me, saying that her mother lived a short way from there. Her mother was away at a spa and she had the keys to the flat. She had to go and water the house-plants; perhaps I might like to accompany her.
I remained silent and she asked if remaining silent always meant just remaining silent in my case. I continued to remain silent.
Her mother's flat is in an old Small Quarter house: just one room with a view on to a narrow little courtyard. Old furniture dating back to some time at the beginning of the century, a brass menorah on the high bookcase. On the couch lay a black cushion with a Star of David embroidered on it in white. The room was full of vegetation with a cheese plant in one corner and a dragon arum in a large flowerpot, while fuchsias and pelargoniums blossomed on the window-sills.
She went into the bathroom and filled the watering can. She asked if I was cross with her for bringing me there. I told her I wouldn't have come if I hadn't wanted to. While she was watering the plants she spoke to me continuously about how I was a remarkable person, the most remarkable person she had ever met. She said she could sense the goodness of my heart and also my wisdom, that there were words