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Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
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the Republic.
It cannot be denied that the vision of the luminous Manse, even by partial moonlight, had the force of intimidating Woodrow Wilson, as he made his way up the graveled drive, beneath overarching white oaks; as he approached the side door, to Winslow Slade’s office, the troubled man swallowed hard, and shaped his lips in an inaudible prayer— Have mercy on me, O God: I am Your humble servant seeking only how best to serve You.
— TO THE RESPECTFUL titles in Winslow Slade’s library on the eve of Ash Wednesday, 1905, there should be added others, not alphabetized, but stacked on tables, that failed to capture Woodrow Wilson’s full attention: the unscholarly but much-perused Phrenological Studies of Dr. Phineas Lutz; Beyond the Gates of Consciousness of Stanislav Zahn; Heaven and Hell of Emanuel Swedenborg; and that rare and arresting treatise in quarto Gothic, the manual of a “forgotten church”—the Vigiliae mortuorum secundum chorum ecclesiae maguntinae ; still more, volumes in French, by the controversial Jean-Martin Charcot, and a recent copy of The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research of Cambridge, Mass., in which an essay by a founding member of the Society, Professor William James of Harvard, appeared under the title “Is There a ‘Natural’ Barrier to Consciousness?”
Yes, the reader is correct in wondering why, when Charcot and James were mentioned by Woodrow Wilson, Winslow Slade remained silent and did not suggest in any way that he was familiar with the work of either man.
—WINSLOW SLADE’S PREOCCUPATION on the night in question.
It was Dr. Slade’s custom to dine with his family before eight o’clock, then to retire to the bachelor solitude of his library, which few in the family ever visited; nor did Dr. Slade encourage visits from the children who, when young, would have poked and pried amid his special collections, like the (allegedly) Malaysian jade snuffbox, that had been a gift to Winslow Slade by a woman friend, a world-traveler of decades ago, and, of course, the invaluable Gutenberg Bible, one of but forty-eight copies remaining in all of the world, of that first monumental printing. (That Dr. Slade’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible was not complete scarcely diminished its worth, for very few of the original copies remained undamaged by the incursions of centuries.)
Often, Winslow absorbed himself in fireside reading, of newer books (like those listed above); more recently, in the late winter of 1905, he had taken up the task of revising his sermons for a collection which a Philadelphia publisher of theological texts had pressed him into completing. (“Why would anyone want to read my old sermons?” Winslow asked wryly; and the publisher rejoined, “The mere name ‘Winslow Slade’ will assure quite a sale in New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic states generally.”) When this task proved too boring, Winslow turned with more enthusiasm to his translations of one or another book of the Apocrypha, upon which he’d been laboring for years, with the assistance of a Hebrew scholar at the seminary; his particular interest was “The Epistle of Jeremy” and the Books of Esdra and Tobit, and, in the New Testament, those curious gospels attributed to Thomas, Matthias, and Judas.
“Of all Biblical figures, surely Judas is the most misunderstood, as he is the most condemned!”—so Winslow believed.
For it had always seemed evident to him, Jesus adored his faithless Judas above the other disciples.
As Winslow was frequently plagued by insomnia, but resisted taking the myriad “home remedies” favored in great doses by his young friend Woodrow Wilson, out of a fear of clouding his thoughts, so he reserved for the early hours of the morning his transactions with his journal: not a single volume but more than a dozen eight-by-twelve “scribblers.”
The reader will naturally think that I have had recourse to Dr. Slade’s journals—would that were
It cannot be denied that the vision of the luminous Manse, even by partial moonlight, had the force of intimidating Woodrow Wilson, as he made his way up the graveled drive, beneath overarching white oaks; as he approached the side door, to Winslow Slade’s office, the troubled man swallowed hard, and shaped his lips in an inaudible prayer— Have mercy on me, O God: I am Your humble servant seeking only how best to serve You.
— TO THE RESPECTFUL titles in Winslow Slade’s library on the eve of Ash Wednesday, 1905, there should be added others, not alphabetized, but stacked on tables, that failed to capture Woodrow Wilson’s full attention: the unscholarly but much-perused Phrenological Studies of Dr. Phineas Lutz; Beyond the Gates of Consciousness of Stanislav Zahn; Heaven and Hell of Emanuel Swedenborg; and that rare and arresting treatise in quarto Gothic, the manual of a “forgotten church”—the Vigiliae mortuorum secundum chorum ecclesiae maguntinae ; still more, volumes in French, by the controversial Jean-Martin Charcot, and a recent copy of The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research of Cambridge, Mass., in which an essay by a founding member of the Society, Professor William James of Harvard, appeared under the title “Is There a ‘Natural’ Barrier to Consciousness?”
Yes, the reader is correct in wondering why, when Charcot and James were mentioned by Woodrow Wilson, Winslow Slade remained silent and did not suggest in any way that he was familiar with the work of either man.
—WINSLOW SLADE’S PREOCCUPATION on the night in question.
It was Dr. Slade’s custom to dine with his family before eight o’clock, then to retire to the bachelor solitude of his library, which few in the family ever visited; nor did Dr. Slade encourage visits from the children who, when young, would have poked and pried amid his special collections, like the (allegedly) Malaysian jade snuffbox, that had been a gift to Winslow Slade by a woman friend, a world-traveler of decades ago, and, of course, the invaluable Gutenberg Bible, one of but forty-eight copies remaining in all of the world, of that first monumental printing. (That Dr. Slade’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible was not complete scarcely diminished its worth, for very few of the original copies remained undamaged by the incursions of centuries.)
Often, Winslow absorbed himself in fireside reading, of newer books (like those listed above); more recently, in the late winter of 1905, he had taken up the task of revising his sermons for a collection which a Philadelphia publisher of theological texts had pressed him into completing. (“Why would anyone want to read my old sermons?” Winslow asked wryly; and the publisher rejoined, “The mere name ‘Winslow Slade’ will assure quite a sale in New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic states generally.”) When this task proved too boring, Winslow turned with more enthusiasm to his translations of one or another book of the Apocrypha, upon which he’d been laboring for years, with the assistance of a Hebrew scholar at the seminary; his particular interest was “The Epistle of Jeremy” and the Books of Esdra and Tobit, and, in the New Testament, those curious gospels attributed to Thomas, Matthias, and Judas.
“Of all Biblical figures, surely Judas is the most misunderstood, as he is the most condemned!”—so Winslow believed.
For it had always seemed evident to him, Jesus adored his faithless Judas above the other disciples.
As Winslow was frequently plagued by insomnia, but resisted taking the myriad “home remedies” favored in great doses by his young friend Woodrow Wilson, out of a fear of clouding his thoughts, so he reserved for the early hours of the morning his transactions with his journal: not a single volume but more than a dozen eight-by-twelve “scribblers.”
The reader will naturally think that I have had recourse to Dr. Slade’s journals—would that were
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