A Still Moment, and All the Strange Hours

In Eudora Welty’s story, A Still Moment, the student scientist and artist Audubon shot and killed a white heron so that he could gaze upon it long enough to sketch it, to paint it, to study it. Watching it happen, the evangelist Lorenzo felt depressed by Audubon’s killing of the bird because Lorenzo had felt love for the bird, even though he had only seen the bird for a moment before Audubon killed it. Lorenzo had seen, in the bird feeding in the marsh, a female bird, the love of God.

Audubon had closed his eyes when he pulled the trigger and killed the white heron. When he opened his eyes he saw “horror deep” in Lorenzo’s eyes. It was the first time Audubon had ever seen horror. Welty wrote, “He had never seen horror in its purity and clarity until now…” In this sense, Audubon was innocent.

Riding slowly away on his horse, Lorenzo thought: “He could understand God’s giving Separateness first and then giving Love to follow and heal in its wonder; but God had reversed this, and given Love first and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him which came first. Perhaps it was that God never counted the moments of Time… Time did not occur to God.” Lorenzo tried to assure himself that God was there, but innocent, that God had never thought of time before – he tried to justify cruelty in the world to save God from oblivion.

Murrell, the marauder, the devil in the story, who had planned to kill Lorenzo until Audubon unexpectedly arrived, also watched Audubon kill the innocent bird and he felt a certain pride in what happened – it proved to him the innocence of travelers, the innocence of the people upon whom he preyed, the innocence upon which his livelihood as a marauder depended. Welty wrote, “his faith was in innocence and his knowledge was of ruin.”

Loren Eiseley, in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours, wrote this: “All the sciences are linked by one element, time.” He wrote that he had spoken those words in a speech, that he had spoken them “desperately into the microphone.” Desperately? Had time not occurred to the scientists in his audience? I suppose they were innocent, and knew nothing of ruin or horror.

The Key – Theophany in a Train Station

In Eudora Welty’s story, “The Key,” Albert picked up a key on the floor of the train station and placed it in a pocket by his heart.  Albert associated the key with happiness.  Albert “knew,” Welty wrote, that happiness “is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”

It is hard to sustain that belief, what Albert “knew” about happiness and life, in an age when we “know” that nothing is meant for us, when we know that everything has a cause, but not a purpose, and that where order appears it has not been designed.

A red-haired man accidentally dropped the key that Albert picked up believing it was meant for him.  At the end of the story, the red-haired man placed another key in the hand of Albert’s wife Ellie, and then “did not wait to see any more, but went out abruptly into the night.”

I think the red-haired man is a God-figure in the story, not the God of our ancestors, but a contemporary theologian’s God.  Welty wrote, “you felt a shock in glancing up at him,” and “you felt some apprehension that he would never express whatever might be the desire of his life … in standing apart in compassion, in making any intuitive present or sacrifice, or in any way of action at all – not because there was too much in the world demanding his strength, but because he was too deeply aware.”

The red-haired man is something like God, or, rather, what is left over of God, when what we know is that natural selection is the giver and taker of life, when what we know is that nothing is meant for us.

About the red-haired man, Welty wrote, “You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done.”

Natural Selection and Theodicy in A Curtain of Green

“…the extreme fertility of her garden formed at once a preoccupation and a challenge … she seemed not to seek for order, but to allow an overflowering … she planted every kind of flower that she could … planted thickly and hastily, without stopping to think … if she thought of beauty at all, she certainly did not strive for it in her garden.”

The way Eudora Welty described Mrs. Larkin here in A Curtain of Green resembles the way Darwin described natural selection in The Origin of the Species. In another excerpt the way Eudora Welty described Mrs. Larkin resembles the way some contemporary theologians justify the ways of God, in a way that merges God and natural selection:

“…so helpless was she, too helpless to defy the workings of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability … Life and death, which now meant nothing to her but which she was compelled continually to wield with both her hands, ceaselessly asking, Was it not possible to compensate? to punish? to protest?”

Mrs. Larkin’s garden reminds me of Eden in Genesis and, at the same time, of the old and wild garden of life that Darwin described. An image in the story that blends the two gardens together is the pear tree at the center of the garden in A Curtain of Green. Eudora Welty mentioned it three times, and the one that I cannot forget is:

”The shadow of the pear tree in the center of the garden lay callous on the ground.”

It frightens me to associate that image with the tree of life, the one in Genesis and the one in The Origin of the Species.

Fecundity and mortality are bound together in the intricate molecules of life, bound together in the struggle for life. They are inexhaustible – to exhaust one is to exhaust the other. In A Curtain of Green, the story of Mrs. Larkin, Eudora Welty wrote: “against that which was inexhaustible, there was no defense.”

At the end of A Curtain of Green, the young man in the story “ran out of the garden.”