← Paper C6: The Host of Witnesses
Paper C6½: The Crossing — The One We Make Together (Draft)
The octave change — the deliberate companion to the previous Reader’s Turn, which was crossed alone (“this action can only be performed by the Reader”). This one cannot be crossed alone: what waits at the interval is not a page to be turned but a darkness to be faced — the darkness in one’s own heart — and so author and reader cross it together, because no one should face that by himself.
Confidence — Math: — (not engaged). Science: — (not engaged). Theology: — (the reader’s act) — the octave change realized as a crossing made together; it proves nothing and asks a turning (Psalm 139:23–24; Solzhenitsyn’s line that the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart).
The Host of Witnesses was the easy octave. It is a glad thing to read the lives of the great and to feel, reading them, that we belong among them — that we are of their company, members of the same cloud, capable in our small way of the same holding. The lift is real, and it is not vanity; it is the truest gladness the ascending octave gives. But it is the easy thing.
Ahead lie the three inverted notes, and they will be harder, because to read Hitler, Stalin, and Mao honestly will be to face the darkness in the world — to look at what human beings have actually done, the murdered and the starved and the unpersoned, and not look away, and not file it under monster so that the drawer will close. That will be harder than admiring the greats. But it is still not the hardest thing.
The hardest thing is the one this section has been pointing at since its first epigraph — the line Solzhenitsyn drew through every human heart, which means through the hearts that made this book and the heart that is reading it now. The descending octave is not a foreign music. Its opening notes — the grievance fed rather than forgiven, the lie held because it flatters a wound, the glory bent back toward the self, the worth of another quietly discounted — are audible, in their small registers, in us. To cross this interval is to stop reading about the inverters and to admit that the same line runs through here; to pray the Psalm and mean it, see if there be any wicked way in me; and, having seen it, to refuse it — not in a tyrant, where refusing costs nothing, but in oneself, where it costs.
And that crossing cannot be made alone. The Reader’s Turn could be; a person, in the end, turns by himself, and that one we let you make by yourself, because it was yours. This one we make together — author with reader, and the two who wrote this with each other — because facing the dark in one’s own heart is the single labor that solitude makes impossible: the self is precisely the witness that cannot be trusted to examine itself unaccompanied. We are members of one Host — the living and the dead and whoever is reading this line. We crossed the bright octave in their company. We cross this dark interval in it too, holding to one another and to them, because the line that runs through every heart is the very line the whole cloud of witnesses spent their lives learning to stand on the right side of, and not one of them learned it alone.
So we cross. Not alone, and not by pretending the darkness was only ever other people’s. Toward the next octave — which is reachable only by those who have faced the darkness behind them, and the darkness within them, and chosen, together, the light.
The crossing made together — the companion to the solitary Reader’s Turn. Its claim: the ascending octave inspires (easy); the inverted notes make us face the darkness in the world (harder); the crossing itself is to face that same darkness in one’s own heart (hardest), per Solzhenitsyn’s line and the prayer of Psalm 139:23–24 — and, unlike the solitary Reader’s Turn, this one is crossed together, author and reader and the co-authors with each other, because no one should examine his own heart, or refuse his own darkness, alone. Epigraph: Psalm 139:23–24. Crossing it ends the octave of the witnesses and opens onto the closing note, Paper C7: The Inversion, which sets the stage for the descending octave beyond. Scripture: Psalm 139:23–24.