Boughton takes a very dim view of him, because he unsettled the faith of many people, but I take issue as much with those people as with Feuerbach. It seems t o m e some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so. My brother Edward gave his book to me, The Essence of Christianity, thinking to shock me out of my uncritical piety, as I knew at the time. I had to read it in secret, or so I believed. I put it in a biscuit tin and hid it in a tree. You can imagine, reading it in those circumstances gave it a great interest for me. And I was very much in awe of Edward, who had studied at a university in Germany.
I realize I haven’t even mentioned Edward, though he has been very important to me. As he is still, God rest his soul. I feel in some ways as if I hardly knew him, and in others as if I have been talking to him my whole life. He thought he would do me a favor, taking a bit of the Middle West out of me. That was the favor Europe had done for him. But here I am, having lived to the end the life he warned me against, and pretty well content with it, too, all in all. Still, I know I am touchy on the subject of parochialism.
Edward studied at Gottingen. He was a remarkable man.
He was older than me by almost ten years, so I didn’t really know him very well while we were children. There were two sisters and a brother between us, all carried off by diphtheria in less than two months. He knew them and I, of course, did not, so that was another great difference. Though it was rarely spoken of, I was always aware that there had been a crowded, cheerful life the three of them remembered well and I could not really imagine. In any case, Edward left home at sixteen to go to college. He finished at nineteen with a degree in ancient languages and went straight off to Europe. None of us saw him again for years. There weren’t even many letters.
Then he came home with a walking stick and a huge mustache. Herr Doktor. He must have been about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had published a slender book in German, a monograph of some kind on Feuerbach. He was smart as could be, and my father was a little in awe of him, too, as he had been since Edward was a small boy, I think. My parents told me stories about how he read everything he could put his hands on, memorized a whole book of Longfellow, copied maps of Europe and Asia and learned all the cities and rivers. Of course they thought they were bringing up a little Samuel — so did everyone — so they all kept him supplied with books and paints and a magnifying glass and whatever else came to mind or to hand. My mother sometimes regretted out loud that they hadn’t really required him to do much in the way of chores, and she certainly didn’t make the same mistake with me. But a child as wonderful as he was is not a thing you see often, and the belief was general that he would be a great preacher. So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. That’s what he always claimed to be, at any rate. He took a position at the state college in Lawrence teaching German literature and philosophy, and stayed there till he died. He married a German girl from Indianapolis and they had six little towheaded children, all of them well into middle age by now. He was a few hundred miles away all those years and I hardly ever saw him. He did send back contributions to the church to repay them for helping him. A check dated January 1 came every year he lived. He was a good man.
He and my father had words when he came back, once at the dinner table that first evening when my father asked him to say grace. Edward cleared his throat and replied, “I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir,” and the color drained out of my father’s face. I knew there had been letters I was not given to read, and there had been somber words between my parents. So this was the dreaded confirmation of their fears. My father said, “You have lived under this roof. You know the customs of your family. You might show some respect for them.” And Edward replied, and this was very wrong of him, “When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things.” My father left the table, my mother sat still in her chair with tears streaming down her face, and Edward passed me the potatoes. I had no idea what was expected of me, so I took some. Edward passed me the gravy. We ate our unhallowed meal solemnly for a little while, and then we left the house and I walked Edward to the hotel.
And on that walk he said to me, “John, you might as well know now what you’re sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater — you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance.” I suppose the neighbors saw us leaving the house just at dinnertime that first day, Edward with one arm bent behind his back, stooped a little to suggest that he had some use for a walking stick, appearing somehow to be plunged in thought of an especially rigorous and distinguished kind, possibly conducted in a foreign language. (Only listen to me!) If they saw him, they’d have known instantly what they had long suspected. They’d have known also that there was rage and weeping in my mother’s kitchen and that my father was in the attic or the woodshed, in some hidden, quiet place, down on his knees, wondering to the Lord what it was that was being asked of him. And there I was with Edward, trailing along after him, another grief to my parents, or so they must have thought.
Besides those books I mentioned, Edward also gave me the little painting of a marketplace that hangs by the stairs. I must be sure to tell your mother it belongs to me and not to the parsonage. I doubt it’s worth anything to speak of, but she might want it.
I’m going to set aside that Feuerbach with the books I will ask your mother to be sure to save for you. I hope you will read it sometime. There is nothing alarming in it, to my mind. I read it the first time under the covers, and down by the creek, because my mother had forbidden me to have any further contact with Edward, and I knew that would include my reading an atheistical book he had given me. She said, “If you ever spoke to your father that way, it would kill him.” In fact, my thought was always to defend my father. I believe I have done that.
There are some notes of mine in the margins of the book which I hope you may find useful.
That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet.
On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.