Chapter Fourteen

After several months, I moved back home. We decided to try it again. Almost a quarter of a century of a "good marriage" was hard to put aside.

I was putting the books I had taken back on the shelves. Tom wandered into the room. It was hard for me to handle books, because I wanted to sit down and read each one.

"I was interested to see what books you left," Tom said, watching me from a chair. "You left the Fix-It-Yourself Manual and the Bible."

"You were covered in any case."

"Now, I won't be able to find anything."

"The next time you want to read Robert Frost let me know. I'll find him for you."

"I like books. Not that I read many of them. I just like having them around,” he said.

“Does it make you feel more knowledgeable, just having them here? Maybe you pick up something just by being in the room with these volumes? Soon you'll know all of these poems. I've been meaning to read this Outline of History ever since I was 20. Figured then I would understand everything."

Earlier, when I had packed, I hadn't thought about what books to leave, but what I needed to take. I had to have Adrienne Rich's "The Dream of a Common Language," another book by a woman whose opening sentence was "a whole new language is a temptation."  W.H. Auden’s Horae Canonicae, or the Canonical Hours, which opened a new way of thinking for me. An ordinary day in which a fallen world is offered redemption.

Fallen. That’s the crux of the matter. I suppose theologians have many ways to explain the fall. Imperfect, no doubt we are. If we are what we are by way of evolution, there has to be a big dose of self-preservation in us. Evolution seems a more natural way to explain us and all our characteristics than does the eating of an apple by Eve. Millions of people have been told they are sinners and they accept it as fact. Why don’t I? I recognize good and bad instincts in myself, but nothing so bad as to warrant burning in hell forever. No way.