Free Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka Page A

long walk back.
    V
    On Sunday, July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards, last of the great New England Calvinists, preached a sermon at Enfield, Connecticut, less than sixty miles from what was then the thriving fishing community of Bridgeport. A spare, almost delicate man, he waited for the knock and scrape of boot soles to still, for the sawing of insects to rise again, and began. His voice that morning, according to an account left by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, was level, clearly modulated. He held the small sermon book in his left hand, carefully turning the pages with his right.
    The sermon left the audience hysterical. God was angry, Edwards told them, tried beyond all measure. The whirlwind of their destruction would come at any moment, was already overdue; they all—the farmers with the sunburned hands, their stolid wives and frightened children—would be as the chaff on the summer threshing floor.
    And he reminded them of the full ferocity of God’s wrath (“And the people shall be as the burnings of lime, as thorns cut up shall they be burnt in the fire”), of His eagerness, tempered only by His sovereign will, to make the fallen suffer: “I will tread them in mine anger, and will trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.”
    Edwards’s sermon that morning contained the only extended metaphor he would ever use, a tidbit of literary history I find strangely eloquent. “The bow of God’s wrath is bent,” he told the small congregation of weeping sinners, “and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”
    Meaning is made, not discovered, and the materials from which it is cobbled can be very small indeed; a footnote can be the button, the joint, that moves the arm of history. Set in context, made to speak, it can allow the past to touch the present, link the living to the dead. Edwards’s bloody metaphor, its point properly honed, should extend to the turn of the millennium. It doesn’t. Which is precisely what makes it significant to us.
    In 1741, in Enfield, the arrow trembling on the string could both explain our tragedies and terrify us to righteousness. Two and a half centuries later, it can do neither. It is a metaphor, nothing more; a gremlin in a disenchanted world; a spook-house prop. The problem, as always, is the actual blood. It’s real enough. And it requires an explanation. A context, a story.
    Where do we turn? Lacking God, should we reacquaint ourselves perhaps with His fallen Other? The pagan god gone bad, his horn and hoof retained, his marsh reed pipes exchanged for a pitchfork? It won’t do, any more than “fe-fi-fo-fum” or “the better to hear you with, my dear.” No, something older is needed, something darker, nearer to the blood. The Greeks’
dia-bollein
(distant progenitor of all things diabolical), for example, meant “to tear apart, to rend.”
    The force that rends. Perhaps. Something was undeniably torn in Fairfield, a world cut at the root. But it’s not enough. No metaphor today can measure up to the thing in itself: the coloring book on the embankment, paging in the wind; the monsters and fairies, half–crayoned in. Neither God nor demon can bear the smallness of the dolls found scattered along the tracks. And that is our problem.
    VI
    For millennia death stayed close. Life was like a Poussin landscape: tucked to the side, arbored by vines, was a small yellow skull, Virgil’s quaint reminder,
et in Arcadia ego
—I too am in the garden—scrawled across the pigment beneath. The memento mori was redundant, of course, possibly cruel; we needed no reminding. We died like midges in October, of infections and colds and tainted milk, and succored ourselves with God,