From the Gleanings of Dawn

The introduction to the book our late woman of letters had begun to compose, yielding to the insistence of family and friends: a record of the social, cultural, and political events and developments of the last half century...

...Why, why did death hasten to take her, depriving us, after her, of this precious literary treasure?..

At last, at last, Providence has supplied me with the strength to break free of my perplexity and to bow to the will of my children, and of the other friends, women and men, who—whenever the claims of illness pressed hard upon me—pressed hard upon me in their turn with the necessity of setting down my memories and gathering the scattered pieces of what has been published of mine in the papers over the years—even though time, to my eyes, has eaten and drunk over them.

In vain did I try to persuade them that times have changed and will no longer be content with anything but what keeps pace with them in novelty, mastery, and soaring flight—but to no avail. It is as though they—clinging to their opinion in this fashion—sense the nearness of my sun's setting, and wish me to leave them something new of my own self, something to lay their hands upon after I am gone, "for remembrance," even should that remembrance come to them sickly and frail as the hand that is to weave its threads!!

As for outright refusal, that would require a great measure of naked courage, together with a declaration of the private, many-branching reasons calling for it. And this, I have no doubt, would stir up sorrows and grief on both sides...

Yes, my children, and those in close touch with me, know the full extent of the bodily and spiritual pains I endure; and yet they look the other way, and persist untiring in their insistence and their urging...

Oh, their love! and their noble eagerness—whose ardor the passing of the years has not lowered—to cheer me by every way and means that so often captured my affections in days gone by and gladdened my feelings...

Have they not known, ever since they were small, that speaking to the daughters of my country—whether with my pen or with my tongue—has been my one favorite diversion in every stage of my life?!!..

And so, after much give and take—not always free of argument—I carried this idea with me yesterday evening and took it to pillow with me in my permanent abode—my bed—though not to sleep, of course. The idea itself kept visiting me the whole night long, now keeping me company with the true love and overflowing tenderness that ran all through it, now tormenting me with my present state: this unrelenting emaciation, the total weakness of my body, and my mind's unfitness for any intellectual activity worthy of being set down and of enduring!!

Thus I remained in this state, my thought and fancy divided, until the breaking of the deep dawn—that interval which follows the darkness and makes itself ready to receive the sun of day.

It is, upon my life, an interval very dear to me, being the only one left to me in which to collect my thoughts and to draw up a plan of work to follow in the day to come—though it does not exceed twenty or thirty minutes at the very most, depending on the sleeping remedy I may have called to my aid beforehand!!

But on this particular morning my situation changed entirely. I greeted it drained of strength by that night heavy-laden with perplexity and hesitation; and no sooner had the lights of day looked in upon me through the windows than I took hold of myself and sat up straight in my bed, resolved with a firm and final resolve not to greet another such morning without having in hand my final answer on the matter.

Then I rose with my other self toward that higher power, toward God Almighty, seeking from Him the inspiration for the first step I must take to complete the mission I chose for myself from the moment I first felt my own existence. It was but a moment before I seized my pen and took up a stray scrap of paper that had lost its way onto the little bedside table alongside my bed. Upon it I set down—though with the utmost difficulty—the subject that had descended upon me like something akin to revelation: "From the Gleanings of Dawn"; and at once I appended to it the two following sentences, that they might be the prop on which my thinking could lean when thought stumbles and resolve gives way.

The first: Life is far too precious to be crushed by fear and failure before we breathe our last breath at the command of the Being who said to us: "Be"—and we were.

The second: Any work we perform, however lowly, is better than stagnation, or than troubled, wavering perplexity.

And so, from this day forward, I shall go gently on, adding a few lines at the rise of every dawn. I call God and my conscience to witness that the service of "the daughter of my country" accompanies my every breath, and that the love of sincere production, even should it come out frail and wanting, is the pickaxe of my faith. Whether I do wrong or do right by her and by myself, or fail in performance and expression, what my pen traces will without doubt be truthful and frank, expressing with all simplicity what

this grandmother, mother, and sister has endured—she who addresses them at this hour while standing on the threshold of departure—and what their grandmothers and mothers endured through an epoch spanning several generations; many of whom, despite the civilization of this present twentieth century, still trudge, even as these lines are written, under the fetters of enslavement and of shameful ignorance.

There is no disputing it! Certain words have a power like magic upon our souls, if we are inspired with them at the fitting moment, or at the decisive hour when circumstance compels us to settle an important question, or to fix upon a particular aim we wish to achieve!!

This is what happened with me yesterday morning as I suffered an acute crisis of the soul from which I should never have come out in peace had God not willed me good and surprised me with the word that comes from the very core of my life—the word to which belongs the first credit for the forming of my character from the time I was between my sixth and seventh year: "gleaning."

No! By my right! I should never have succeeded, but for God's providence, in finding this title, which pleads for me by its signification and its meaning—or what could be truer in expression, or more faithfully in harmony with my own memories, old and new, the faded of them and the bright, than this title, which points with plain clarity to what I shall suffer in searching out what time has scattered among the folds of the years and their successive events, and what long-drawn illness has shattered within the hollows of my ribs, striking down their clearness and their luster! Scarcely had my eyes fallen upon my new subject—

"From the Gleanings of Dawn"

—which flowed as ink onto paper before me in a sudden automatic motion yesterday morning, than all manner of memories of my childhood and my girlhood opened before me, and in their forefront the operation of "gleaning," in which I engaged with my body and my soul, driven at that time by some measure of awareness and by much spiritual pain, of which I shall recount a part in its proper place!!—after I touch briefly upon the gleaning from which my subject sprang in this sudden, happy fashion: "gleaning."

I do not at all rule out that the greater number of our citified women, who have not lived in the mountains, may not know what "gleaning" is, or grasp anything of its importance to the people of the villages far from the coasts. And here am I—though a daughter of the village by origin, and though "gleaning" touched my life to the quick—it slipped from my mind through all these tens of years of my lifetime, without my mouth once pronouncing it or my giving it mention, even by a passing hint, for all the deep mark it left upon my soul, although it is the firstborn of my memories!!

And no wonder—for "gleaning" is a humble word with which people concern themselves neither much nor little; we seldom use it or read it. It is the operation that village girls have practiced for generations to keep body and soul together. Mention of it appears fifteen hundred years before the coming of Christ, in the Book of Ruth; and the girls still go out, every year, after the harvest of the crops—wheat, chickpeas, broad beans, and the like—as also after the picking of the fruits—apples, olives, and pears. These gleaners, fortunately, meet with no objection from the field watchmen or the owners of the lands; they pick up and gather what remains, lodged among the folds of the earth and the thorns and the brambles, of these crops and fruits—which quench no thirst and satisfy no hunger, but which make it easy for the girls to buy what they fancy of cheap articles of adornment—a kerchief, earrings, a ribbon, a necklace and the like—to store away "for the trousseau," or to wear on feast days—that is, if these escape being added to the family's provisions, to which straitened circumstances so often compel them.