AUGUST 29
I was in a garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes
I was alone, sitting on a stone bench between two long
hedges of roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I felt the most powerful
feeling of peace, and I had the thought that death, if it means
an absorption into a reality like the one that was before me,
might be all right.
—IRVING HOWEWhat are the sources of epiphanies like this moment de-
scribed by the eminent literary critic Irving Howe?
The sociologist Peter Berger suggests that gods are not,
as some claim, human projections of our wishful thinking,
but that humanity and its works—angels, skyscrapers,
symphonies—are God’s projections into the world. He
speaks of an “otherness that lurks behind the fragile struc-
tures of everyday life.”
We read these statements and conjectures, and our hearts
rise. As we wend our way through the shadows and high
moments in the wake of loss, these statements and intuitions
are as food to the starving, as water to those all but overcome
with thirst.
I will watch for my own moments in the garden.