To-day I saw Louise. She was walking up Alameda with the air of an angel, possessing the ideal teutonic characteristics. I became teary-eyed, lost in the moment. I wanted to rush up to her, as if she and I had always had a special friendship. And I’d tell her that she was no longer contemptuous under my eyes; the intellectual setting under which I came to know her was no longer there and therefore I needn’t possess such negative opinions of her ideas, of her mind. No, I would no longer chuckle with the rest of like-minded individuals in our Seminar-from-hell. Then I’d tell her that I admired her as a person, and that I sympathized with her human suffering. That I understood why she had opted to abandon ship, motivated under the scrupulous sentiment of Love. She’d see everything in my vatic eyes, entrance to my soul; in their pool of darkness she’d see my past, my present and my future. And under her sweetness she’d take me and offer her comfort.
To-day, the Pope has died. It saddens me. Yes, he was ostensibly homophobic, forgetting the cardinal point of Christianity, i.e., Love, yet it saddens me none-the-less. I renounced Christianity, never being able to swallow the myth of the Word that became flesh in a Jew. Never-the-less a Papist I remained. The Pope took possession of the Holy See prior to my birth and he occupied it for what has been the whole of my life, until now. It is natural, almost necessary to have him as the Pope. I cannot imagine anyone else occupying this role. Somehow I had forgotten, as intelligent and pessimistic as I may be in the eyes of those that know me, that he too was susceptible to humanity’s excellence: death. Perhaps I imagined that he would survive the actualization of his raison d’être – to be a human being entailing birth, life and death. Now the Holy See is vacant and the Princes of the Church shall engage in electing a new Shepherd. There is something ironic in the fact that men will ultimately elect he who is the purported representative of god on earth. Then again I accept it because I know that the Pope is foremost, the representative of a tradition.