A Letter to My Mother ... Beyond Life

Mother:

Yesterday I withdrew into myself, reviewing certain pictures in its depths and certain feelings, when all at once your serene face filled my soul and my feelings, and I wished to speak to you, and to commune with your spirit.

But what talk can I offer you, what communion! What affair of my affairs, or sorrow of my sorrows, or secret of my secrets, or tremor of my heart's tremors, or gleam of my features, or line of my brow, have you not touched with your fingertips, not encircled with your feeling? Can I turn east or west, or take a step forward or backward, without your being with me? Are you not in the eye of the providence that keeps watch over me? Are you not in my fancy and my imagination and my dreams — nay, are you not the blazing ray in which my thoughts and my inspiration bathe? You, my mother, are the perpetual wakefulness in my being. I lie down and rest; but you, from the time I was formed a babe in your womb until eternity carries me off from you — if it can find a way to do so — know neither rest nor stillness nor slumber, because I am the eternal cross you created that you might crucify yourself upon it, until the day when I — or you — lose all sense of material or spiritual life! ...

Woman, mother, is half the universe, but she is the heart of life. She is generosity and the generous. Forever given to sowing and planting and building. She sows and waters, but she does not reap. She plants and prunes, but she does not gather the fruit. She builds and adorns and furnishes, but she does not dwell.

I have followed your traces from the time you became a living being, from the time you began to know your own face, and life began to know its face in it. I saw you a daughter and a sister. Then you walked a few steps along dim windings — despite the beauty of the earth and the radiance of the air and the music of space — and you became a wife. And before long you became a mother ...

In this still, quiet hour I have wished to study you, to unfold your history, to portray your heart, to draw you in lines and colors, a great canvas, that I might be able to say to my imagination and my mind and my heart: I have returned to my mother a drop of her sea, a ray of her sun, and a rose from her field! ...

Your beloved face has vanished from my eyes, and my eyes have no power of sight, nor my memory of printing and picturing, so that no material trace remains to me — only a trace where once there was the thing itself. It may occur to you to ask: why does he write, and to whom, and how does he imagine and feel?

You have the right to ask, and I have the right to remind you that every mother, in every time and place, is my mother. My blood and my spirit, all that I feel and all that I sense, are you — without denying my father's merit. And if I strain my imagination and my heart to reach your all-embracing forebears, in every corner of the universe and beyond it, then this is a message I deliver; and as I write it to you, I write it to all mothers, to all women, to woman, in the unknown wilds of the earth and in its landmarks — the woman who went before man, or the woman who still feels that he is her master. And in writing to you I write to every creature, to everyone possessed of conscience, that perhaps this communion between me and your spirit may become a message to society, and after it society's message to civilization — the civilization of man, who wants to rise into the ranks of the gods! ...

A little girl you were in the days when you carried the cares of your father and mother and your small brothers. Yes — no sooner had you reached your sixth year than responsibility was laid upon your shoulders. You felt that your father and mother were the cause of your existence, more than your elder brother or your younger brother did, so you hastened to create joy out of nothing — teasing, playing, chattering — to lighten the heaviness of the air upon your father's shoulders, and to coax life gently, in the fervor of your good, tender, serviceable childhood. And scarcely had you climbed a little way up the ladder of growth than your responsibilities swelled. Your mother and father would leave the house upon your shoulders, and you grumbled a little — and what little you grumbled was only by stealth and in whispers — because your keenness of feeling and your daughterly love made you the ram of the burnt offering: yours the responsibility, yours the care, and in you "the breadth of character."

And as a sister — how much of yourself you gave to your younger brother or sister, indeed to everyone younger than you among the children of the quarter, the neighbors, the relatives, and the acquaintances. You are the companion who gives and does not take, who loses and does not gain. You are forever staking your capital, be it great or small, for the sake of others — but for the sake of their good, first and last.

And now you have begun to understand. You now have ambitions and desires. You too are a human being like any other, with man's virtues and his failings. Yet your deeds in the years of girlhood are no less lofty than the deeds of your childhood. Fate, too, has its ambitions and desires — in tormenting you and denying you. How many harsh commands and unjust laws were handed down, now from your mother, now from your father, and again from the schoolmistress or the uncle on your father's side or the uncle on your mother's side or the elder brother or even the younger: sometimes you resisted, but every time you submitted. The law willed that you should not win people's favor unless you yielded and bowed and were broken! Yours, always, the defeat, and another's the victory.

And when your heart opened to love, and you loved my father — how many stumbling blocks and obstacles rose in your path: the neighbors all gossip, the relatives all gossip, and people all envy and jealousy. With criminal, black hands they hoed up those pictures of lily and jasmine which you painted from the inspiration of love, in its tenderness and its dominion.

At last you became a wife. You compelled your family — it was the first time and the last — to bow to your will and grant your request; and my father was handsome and rich, and money and beauty helped you to prevail. But quickly you woke from the heedless daze of enchanting love — that greatest of factories of flight and mirage and rainbow colors ... beautiful things the eye sees and the fingertips cannot touch. And there you were, a wife in an age when a man boasts to his fellows that his wife is docile, pliant, soft, skilled at keeping to her corner and refusing to be seen. For her the house is a spacious world; for him the world, wide as it is, is narrow and pale. My father was jealous and rough, and you were noble; your nature was gentleness, kindness, and forgiveness. How often did he turn away and you drew near, how often was he harsh and you were tender, how often did he curse and you blessed? How much misery did he give you, and how much happiness did you give him? You were an embodiment of goodness, a proof in flesh and blood that woman is an angel in the form of a human being!

And from a wife of these virtues and qualities and traits, you became a mother, adding to those virtues and qualities and traits a virtue that surpasses them all together: motherhood. You were a brook and became a sea; you were earth and became sky; you were an ordinary creature — and there came to be, in your human nature, a wondrous measure of divinity! Springs burst forth in your heart that until then had been sealed, unknown ... You were a garden of blossoms, and the blossom became fruit, and blossom sprang up around the fruit, and the birds sang, and the stars sang in your gardens, and the fingers of the prophets pointed to you!

Yes. Graces and blessings flooded over you on the day you bore me in pangs and pains and torment. Do you not remember how my father fired off the glad tidings from a rifle that he kept loading with fire? Do you not remember how the village answered the echo of the shots from every side — not because I had come into the world, for the world takes no glory in a child and takes no child in earnest, but because you had become a mother. Because you gave your life its meaning — and you are not, yourself, your own true, eternal, undying, great meaning.

In my imagination I see your eyes flashing; in them is a silvery trace of tears you were shedding a few moments ago, like drops of blood. They have turned into drops of light; they glitter like fireflies. And this pale face of yours ... it has beamed and shone, as though a thousand dawns and suns had risen in it! You have no past left. Your past was blotted out in my first cry, when I set to wailing like one gone mad. And your happiness at my madness was greater than any happiness, greater than any gift, greater than any treasure! ...

God, how great you are, mother! How mighty your power, how deep your roots, how lofty your virtues and your merit! I say again that you are the heart of life — nay, that life is gathered whole into a single fold of your bosom. You carried me and launched me into the light, and you set out after me, and you follow still. Still, from the world of the unseen, you watch over my steps, and inspire my heart, and shine in whatever of me spreads out among people, whether poetry or creed!

What thing, from the moment I came into your hands, have you not lavished upon me? You denied yourself everything for the sake of motherhood, for my sake, for the sake of this great and noble meaning of your existence! In every stage of your life you were preparing to receive me. I was your toy when you were a child, your tenderness when you were a young girl, your love when you were a maiden, your dreams when you were a wife. I am the axis on which you have turned ever since existence began to whisper in your ears words you heeded! ...

But I — I, your son — what have I done for you? You died, and I shed not a tear over you, for I did not understand the meaning of tears; indeed I did not understand your meaning. And I grew, and came to grasp my mission in life — but did I set your picture in my house? Did I teach your name to my children? Did I raise you a tomb and a statue? Did I visit the corner overlooking the sea where your bones lie at rest?

What have people done for you? Your brothers? Your husband? Your parents? None of us has done anything ... And with all this, and above all this, people, O mother — O every mother on every land — want you to remain a captive, to be a pleasure, to stay a plaything, to be bound with fetters and laws and veils, and to be a machine with no life in it, no faith, no ideal!

I bow before you, mother, in reverence. I have finished my communion. I glimpse the tears welling generously in the corners of your eyes. You have rejoiced, and augured well of me. Your children have begun to know your merit and to feel your kindness. The future is yours. The future is glory for you, and pride. The nearer humanity draws to its own self, the nearer it draws to you. Let your nature suffice you, always and forever: forgiveness. Your forgiveness is a portion of your tenderness. And your tenderness is a sky, raining down mercy and compassion and humanity!

If I have wronged you, if I have neglected you, if I have not paid you the debt I owe, forgive me, mother — I am of this hard generation. My children, and my children's children, will atone for my sins. And if I have done nothing, I have at least grasped — with my sense, with my feeling, with my heart — I have grasped your worth and your greatness. You are the ladder on whose steps I climbed up to ... God.