“This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful.”

“Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.”

“Though he slay me, yet I will praise him," he began softly, his voice a little tremulous at first. "I will rise up in the morning with the dew and praise his name. He has given me a place to serve him, a name with which to be known. He has called me forth and made my heart race with the wind on the Downs, made me soar with the blackbird in the evening. So though he slay me, yet I will praise him. Though sorrows be my lot, yet I will sing. When my last tear has fallen I will take up my song again, I will praise his most glorious exalted name.”

“His eyes darted over the surface of my face. Like a moth to a blaze he was hesitant, seeming to crave my warmth but not its inevitable burn. He explored me from a distance with his unspoken desire, with the fear that touching me would set him to flame. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to prove very much the opposite.”

“I want him to kiss me, even though my heart squeezes with wrongness. I want to feel the victory of being desired by someone I once found desirable.”

“And suddenly it seemed utterly right to me that resistance had been his wish, his intention. It made a kind of emotional sense that caused me to feel, instantly, how little sense my earlier more or less unframed assumptions had made. Of course! I thought. And with that thought it was as though my father stepped forward to meet me as he had been in 1940: twenty-five years old, newly married, teaching literature and history and religion as his first real job, as an assistant professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. That stage of his life – and he in it – had always been indistinct to me, as the lives of parents before their children exist always are to those children; but now, holding this letter in my hands, I remembered anew and vividly the numerous photographs in our family albums of him then – a slender young man, intense-looking and handsome, with a shock of dark hair swept back from his high forehead. A radical young man, it would seem. More radical in many ways than my own son was now. A young man, ready, perhaps even eager to embrace the fate his powerful beliefs were calling him to. Sitting there, I felt a rush of love and pity for him in his youth, in his passionate convictions – really, the same feelings I often had for my son when he argued his heartfelt positions. Abruptly, they seemed alike to me and equally dear: my father, my son. I felt as though my father had been waiting for this moment to be born to me as the young man he’d been, so touchingly willing to bear witness to his conscience; and the surprise of this new sense of him, this birth, was a gift to me, a sudden balm in those days of my most intense grief.”