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Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured. The positivism of revelation, as Bonhoeffer described it. All else is mere philosophy, churning the void in the hope of making cheese, as it was put by the junior Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice, he who left all of his worldly goods to the United States government: one of the saddest wills a sane man ever made.
    My neighbor Mrs. Ellicott was tottering toward me in the gloom, her little Lhasa apso on a long red leash. With its flaxen hair falling into its eyes and down its sides so that its legs were entirely covered, the animal seemed to be moving along on tiny rapid wheels as it fussily sniffed at the bases of trees and fence pickets for a spot worthy of its urine. “Good evening, Professor,” the old dame croaked. In her prime she had had a peculiar knack of driving her husbands to suicide; at least two had done away with themselves, leaving her their real estate and furniture, so that her present holdings were like layers of sedimentary rock compacted by the pressure of the years, the shifts of the economy over the last decades all traceable in the composition of her portfolio. “Doesn’t look so good for our side, does it?” she added.
    I slowly deduced she meant the coming election. I had expected a question about the weather. “Not so hot,” I said, still weather-minded. Like most of the neighborhood, she was afighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her. For all her exertions, it never was.
    “Isn’t it terrible?” she called after me, pinned to her spot on the crumpling sidewalk by her pet’s sudden decision to confer its golden tinkle on a certain, already thoroughly browned bit of privet.
    I hoped she would mistake my failure to answer for her own hardness of hearing. But, then, these Brahmins are so thickly armored in their own rudeness as to feel hardly any rudeness produced by others.
    My high house and its warm lights loomed. I turned in at my yew hedge and with a householder’s satisfied grunt stooped and picked up several sales fliers scattered upon my brick walk and semicircular porch, with its four Ionic pillars and the charmingly carved curved fascia just under its copper roof. I loved this house, built early in our elderly century, when the working classes and the work ethic were still hand in hand and skilled labor was cheap, as shown by a quiet outpouring of refined details—the graceful tall many-paned side windows, for instance, through which, bending over to gain light with which to sort my front-door key out of the pound of metal one must carry these crooked days, I glimpsed my wife, her thin petite figure and fluffy upswept head of gingery red hair, moving with a preoccupied slouch, holding a tilting glass of what looked like blood or burgundy, from the living room across the hall to the dining room.
    Secret glimpses, even as innocuous as this, of life proceeding unaware of my watching have always excited me. Of the days of my ministry I remember keenly the lit windows of my unsuspecting parishioners as I stealthily, in my burglarous black garb, approached up their front walks for an unannounced call, pouncing upon them in their evening disarraywith the demands of the Absolute. Like eyes the windows seemed—defenseless, soft, and bright—and like the wadded curves of interior flesh the arcs of sofa back and armchair and lamp base within. Esther, spied upon unawares, looked like prey—someone to sneak up on and rape, another man’s precious wife to defile, as a kind of message to him, scrawled in semen. Her mouth moved indolently, forming words I could not hear but presumed to be addressed to our son, who must be in the kitchen, beyond the dining room, doing his homework at the table where we would later eat. Why, with a living room, a library, and his own good-size bedroom at his disposal, Richie insisted on doing his homework on the