Free The Feel of Steel by Helen Garner Page A

Winter Light and the codification of a rule I have always followed and was to follow from then on: irrespective of everything, you will hold your communion. It is important to the churchgoer, but even more important to you. We shall have to see if it is important to God. If there is no other God than your hope as such, it is important to that God too.’

    Dorothy Sayers: ‘There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity.’
    Well, that’s a relief, anyway.

    I told Tim Winton that the Holy Spirit was the only aspect of God that had any reality in my personal experience. He wrote to me: ‘How it works for me (which is all I can honestly go by) is that the stories work on me. That they seem true as stories, and that I believe them. Not just because I accept that their authors are reliable and their witnesses numerous and their repercussions beyond anything I know of in changes of human history . . ., but because they convince me emotionally, instinctively. As stories, as lives . . . They ring true to me . . . Probably a matter of imagination, for what else is belief mostly built on.’
    Martin Buber, according to the editor of his book The Way of Response , in dealing with ‘the immense Hasidic literature, . . . disregarded its intricate theology and concentrated on the folk tales and legends where the heart speaks . . .’ Buber himself, about someone reading the scriptures, wrote: ‘If he is really serious, he . . . can open up to this book and let its rays strike him where they will . . . He does not know which of its sayings and images will overwhelm him and mould him, from where the spirit will ferment and enter into him, to incorporateitself anew in his body. But he holds himself open. He does not believe anything a priori; he does not disbelieve anything a priori. He reads aloud the words written in the book in front of him; he hears the word he utters and it reaches him.’

    My second sister has a passionate hatred for the parable of the prodigal son. ‘It’s so unfair! and such terrible child-rearing practice!’ There’s a novel in there somewhere . . . as there is in the Book of Tobit, from the Apocrypha. Ten years had passed between my reading of Tobit and my urging a Jewish friend to read it. He came back a week later pop-eyed: ‘Fabulous! And the way it ends with the destruction of Nineveh!’
    It does ?
    I had recalled only a tight plot, a boy and a dog, a sad girl with a curse on her, an angel loftily explaining to people who’ve seen him eating that it was ‘appearance and no more’, and a blessing the father gives to his daughter when she leaves his house: ‘Go in peace, my daughter. I hope to hear nothing but good of you, as long as I live.’ That’s the blessing I’ve been longing for all my life, the one I have given up hope of getting from my own father and mother. I need it. I have to have it. What’s the destruction of Nineveh, compared with that tender and trusting farewell?

Melbourne’s Famous Water
    I n the last few weeks before I moved back to Melbourne, I longed to stay home all the time, as if to use up in a frugal way the remainder of my tenancy of the highest, airiest place I had ever lived in, the hill-top apartment past whose windows birds flew and called, in the volume of sunny emptiness on its eastern side.
    I had forgotten about time, and effort. I had imagined that my furniture, like my body, would be transported as if by enchantment across the eight hundred kilometers to Melbourne, and that I would stroll to my new front door the very next day, just as the removalists drew up in their truck, ready to unload.
    But there would be a five-day gap between ‘uplift’ and delivery. I decided to drive down the Hume in a hire car loaded with immediate essentials – foam-rubber strip,