Loss of
faith.
“It was a long time ago,” Uncle Albert
was saying, “probably in the early fifties, I read Orwell; so I don’t remember
any of it very well. Animal Farm first,
I think, then 1984, then Down and Out and Burmese Days, Homage to Catalonia, Wigan Pier. But I went to bed last night
and I woke up this morning thinking about A
Clergyman’s Daughter. Did you ever read that?”
“No,” I said.
“I was going to ask you what you remembered.”
“Oh,” I said. “What were you thinking about it?”
“That you should read it if you hadn’t, so we could talk about it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
“A loss of faith, if I remember right - a loss of faith that just steals
up on the main character, the daughter. I was trying to remember her name this
morning,” he said. “I think it was Dorothy,” he said. “She’s the dutiful
daughter of her rector father, doing half his work now her mother’s dead. Then,
something happens. She blacks out while working late at night on some church
project, sewing costumes for a pageant or something like that. And she comes to
in back-alley London, dressed in rags and completely unaware of who she was.
Not who she is because she’s someone
else now. She joins a ‘gang’ of sorts, and they go on the road. They’re on
their way to Kent, I think it is, where they’re harvesting hops and they hope
to get work. They do. It’s all very rough.
“Then, somehow, her memory comes back to her. She writes her father, but
he doesn’t answer directly. She somehow gets connected with an uncle that has
connections, and he gets her a job teaching in a girls’ school, a horrid place.
Schools are always horrid places in Orwell, even more horrid than hops fields
or London streets.
“Eventually, I don’t remember how, she gets back to wherever she began -
Suffolk? - her father’s drudge again. But somehow in there, I think it’s when
she’s in the school, she realizes she’s lost her faith. It’s not because of
anything that’s happened to her; maybe it’s not so much that she’s lost it - it’s
just gone. Something has changed in the chemistry of her brain, in the climate
her thoughts live in, and it’s extirpated.”
I looked at him. “Extirpated?” I said.
“Like birds, when all of a sudden they’re no longer in a habitat they’ve
always been in before.”
“Oh,” I said. Then: “So why does she go back to her father?”
“That’s what I was trying to remember,” Uncle Albert said. “She has
another option. There’s an old roué of
sorts that has had his eye on her for a while; and he’s willing even to marry
her if he can take her away. But it’s not really an option, because she can’t
stand to be touched.
“Besides, I was remembering this morning - I couldn’t last night, but it
came to me this morning, and I think I have it right. Besides, she thinks that ‘the
Christian way of life’ is really what she knows, whatever she believes. And
besides, she realizes, she can be helpful to the poor, miserable people of her
father’s parish, who need their faith, however confused, even misguided, it is.
She realizes that atheism is for the privileged, the exceptionally fortunate.”
“Those that fly first-class,” I said.
“What?”
“I was thinking the other day,” I said. “Why do I listen to pundits and
politicians, Talkers, that fly first-class or ride in the business car on the
train? They know nothing about me. Why do I pay any attention to people that
went to Harvard or Yale and have lived in the Northeast ever since? They live in a different climate altogether. They don’t
think the way I do, and they have no idea about the way I think.”
“I went to Yale,” Uncle Albert said.
But I don’t think he did. He didn’t, I decided. He
was only saying he did to see what I’d say.
10.12.18
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