become my custodian or my confessor. His Lares and Penates were against it; so was his whole morality; so was his wife.
After some time my mother ceased to summon William, and at last erased in me any look of claim. She gave up her hope of Puritanism with the shrewdness of a seer; she saw, in her politic way, that a temple can never supplant a museum: history has it the other way around—the friezes of the Parthenon turning up in Bloomsbury, bits of Scottish-Norman churches with ice-cream carts at the door. But no barbarian relic-gallery (even supposing there were such a thing, collected by some rich odd old Visigothic Rome-lover) has ever been replaced, within its own walls, by ecclesiastical paraphernalia, altars and elders and the rest—how then, in that singular time of Protestant rebuff, when William's costive integrities were shutting me out, how could my mother have dreamed that spires might sprout from the iron museum roof? or that Tilbeck's halberds might change into bishops' crosiers? She dreamed it mistakenly and therefore only briefly, and gave me Enoch instead. What Holiness might not undertake, said Enoch, Worldliness would.
Part Two
EUROPE
1
And upon what Holiness cannot build, Worldliness is founded. Now when Holiness essays introspection and ends with self-deception, it gives birth to Worldliness. That moment when Holiness, with whatsoever good will, enters the museum hall—in the guise, oh, of the quaint artifact, grail shown under glass, for instance, or miracle-working saint's toe-bone displayed as remarkable (for new reasons, in a newer sense)—in that moment exactly Holiness dies, and in that moment exactly Worldliness inhales its expirations and lives.
—These aphorisms (for all their windiness I don't hesitate to call them that, for they were less than parables and more than mere turns of phrase) were Enoch's long ago, when my mother attempted to compensate me for the inaccessibility of Puritanism with its opposite, cosmopolitanism, which (I have already mentioned it) she liked to term the recoupment of Europe. And she equated Enoch with Europe, and carried me to France the very year the war ended, together with the refugee from Holland whom she had taken on as my governess, and stood with us at the border of Germany, a place where too many roads met, each infested with a line of abandoned tanks like enormous vermin—and there, while I writhed and vomited close by one of those great dusty tractor-wheels, full in the sight of a handful of unamazed Cockney infantrymen (afterward my mother learned that the country cow whose milk I had been given to drink had a disease), the Dutchwoman said, "I shall not go across there." And my mother complained, "But I'm married to a Jew, and I don't mind going across." We did not go across, but wandered southward instead, pleasure-seekers among the displaced, hence more displaced than anyone—"I feel like a survivor," my mother said now and again, "I don't mean from the war of course," while the Dutchwoman reached out for me with strong freckled arms and, fiercely and privately, trusting I would not betray her, whispered, "a survivor from the age of governesses!"—before Hitler she had been a medical student at the University of Leyden. ("Yet she didn't even ask whether the milk was pasteurized!" my mother fumed. "She could have asked to have them boil it at least! I don't approve of refugees, they have no sense of responsibility.") So I was sick against a tank, and in the pit of that sickness, while the pad of dust on the tank's steel belt swam spasmodically under my rain of filth, I heard my mother rail against the unsanitary survivors of a war not yet three months dissolved into history.
For some reason—perhaps it was the laughter of the soldiers, guiding and advising me: "Puke on, darlin', lots of muck oh the Jerry barstid, 'ere naow 'aven't yuh missed a bit of its bluddy foot?"—my mother felt compelled to explain herself:
she
was a survivor, she
After some time my mother ceased to summon William, and at last erased in me any look of claim. She gave up her hope of Puritanism with the shrewdness of a seer; she saw, in her politic way, that a temple can never supplant a museum: history has it the other way around—the friezes of the Parthenon turning up in Bloomsbury, bits of Scottish-Norman churches with ice-cream carts at the door. But no barbarian relic-gallery (even supposing there were such a thing, collected by some rich odd old Visigothic Rome-lover) has ever been replaced, within its own walls, by ecclesiastical paraphernalia, altars and elders and the rest—how then, in that singular time of Protestant rebuff, when William's costive integrities were shutting me out, how could my mother have dreamed that spires might sprout from the iron museum roof? or that Tilbeck's halberds might change into bishops' crosiers? She dreamed it mistakenly and therefore only briefly, and gave me Enoch instead. What Holiness might not undertake, said Enoch, Worldliness would.
Part Two
EUROPE
1
And upon what Holiness cannot build, Worldliness is founded. Now when Holiness essays introspection and ends with self-deception, it gives birth to Worldliness. That moment when Holiness, with whatsoever good will, enters the museum hall—in the guise, oh, of the quaint artifact, grail shown under glass, for instance, or miracle-working saint's toe-bone displayed as remarkable (for new reasons, in a newer sense)—in that moment exactly Holiness dies, and in that moment exactly Worldliness inhales its expirations and lives.
—These aphorisms (for all their windiness I don't hesitate to call them that, for they were less than parables and more than mere turns of phrase) were Enoch's long ago, when my mother attempted to compensate me for the inaccessibility of Puritanism with its opposite, cosmopolitanism, which (I have already mentioned it) she liked to term the recoupment of Europe. And she equated Enoch with Europe, and carried me to France the very year the war ended, together with the refugee from Holland whom she had taken on as my governess, and stood with us at the border of Germany, a place where too many roads met, each infested with a line of abandoned tanks like enormous vermin—and there, while I writhed and vomited close by one of those great dusty tractor-wheels, full in the sight of a handful of unamazed Cockney infantrymen (afterward my mother learned that the country cow whose milk I had been given to drink had a disease), the Dutchwoman said, "I shall not go across there." And my mother complained, "But I'm married to a Jew, and I don't mind going across." We did not go across, but wandered southward instead, pleasure-seekers among the displaced, hence more displaced than anyone—"I feel like a survivor," my mother said now and again, "I don't mean from the war of course," while the Dutchwoman reached out for me with strong freckled arms and, fiercely and privately, trusting I would not betray her, whispered, "a survivor from the age of governesses!"—before Hitler she had been a medical student at the University of Leyden. ("Yet she didn't even ask whether the milk was pasteurized!" my mother fumed. "She could have asked to have them boil it at least! I don't approve of refugees, they have no sense of responsibility.") So I was sick against a tank, and in the pit of that sickness, while the pad of dust on the tank's steel belt swam spasmodically under my rain of filth, I heard my mother rail against the unsanitary survivors of a war not yet three months dissolved into history.
For some reason—perhaps it was the laughter of the soldiers, guiding and advising me: "Puke on, darlin', lots of muck oh the Jerry barstid, 'ere naow 'aven't yuh missed a bit of its bluddy foot?"—my mother felt compelled to explain herself:
she
was a survivor, she
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