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By Root 12293 0

and truncated passions. They involved my nights of black despair with Leslie Lapidus and Mary Alice Grimball, and they also had a legitimate place in this narrative. So much of the rest of what I wrote was made up of callow musings, pseudo-gnomic pretentiousness, silly excursions into philosophical seminars where I had no business horning in, that I decisively cut off any chance of their perpetuation, by consigning them, a few years ago, to a spectacular backyard auto-da-fé. A few random pages survived the blaze, but even these I kept less for any intrinsic worth than for what they added to the historical record—the record, that is, of myself. Of the half-dozen or so leaves I’ve kept from those final days, for instance—beginning with the frenzied scribbling I made in the latrine of the train coming up from Washington and extending to the day after the funeral—there are exactly three short lines I’ve found worth preserving. And even these have interest not because there is anything about them that is close to imperishable, but because, artless as they now seem, they were at least wrung like vital juices from a being whose very survival was in question for a time.

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?”

And the answer: “Where was man?”

The second line I have resurrected from the void may be a little too facile, but I have kept it. Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at a certain level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lumplike English syllables, and as I see them now on the ledger’s page, the page itself the hue of a dried daffodil and oxidized slowly by time into near-transparency, my eyes are arrested by the furious underlining—scratch scratch scratch, lacerations—as if the suffering Stingo whom I once inhabited, or who once inhabited me, learning at firsthand and for the first time in his grown-up life about death, and pain, and loss, and the appalling enigma of human existence, was trying physically to excavate from that paper the only remaining—perhaps the only bearable—truth. Let your love flow out on all living things.

But there are a couple of problems about this precept of mine. The first is, of course, that it is not mine. It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted—on the wing, so to speak—by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone. Thirty years later they are still abroad in the ether; I heard them celebrated exactly as I have written them in a splendid twangy song played on a country-music program while I drove through the New England night. But this brings us to the second problem: the words’ truth—or, if not their truth, their impossibility. For did not Auschwitz effectively block the flow of that titanic love, like some fatal embolism in the bloodstream of mankind? Or alter the nature of love entirely, so as to reduce to absurdity the idea of loving an ant, or a salamander, or a viper, or a toad, or a tarantula, or a rabies virus—or even blessed and beautiful things—in a world which permitted the black edifice of Auschwitz to be built? I do not know. Perhaps it is too early to tell. At any rate, I have preserved those words as a reminder of some fragile yet perdurable hope...

The last words I’ve kept from the journal comprise a line of poetry, my own. I hope