Mr. Baum made an effort to come up with a quick response. He did not immediately succeed. “Probably the sea,” he said at last, and then added dryly, “it does, after all, make quite an impression,” thereby showing himself to be particularly enlightened, a person in the know.

I quickly took my leave, but could not resist calling after him, “Don’t forget to recount this to your children.”

He thought about this. “To my children? You know, this young nobleman Antonio, or whatever his name was, is a rather unsavory character. And then, the child, this child! We shouldn’t really . . . for children—”

“Oh, dear sir,” I soothed him, “you’ve forgotten that children come from God! Why should the children have any doubts about Esther having one, since she lived so close to heaven?”

The children ended up hearing this story too. And when you ask them what they think about what the old Jew Melchizedek might have seen in his rapture, they reply without a moment’s thought, “Oh, the sea, too!”

The Man Who Listened to Stones

Once again I am at the house of my crippled friend. He smiles in his own special way and says, “But you never told me any stories about Italy.”

“I suppose that means I ought to make up for that as soon as possible?” Ewald nodded and at once closed his eyes to listen. So I began.

What we experience as spring, God sees as a fleeting little smile passing over the earth. The Earth seems to be remembering something, which then in the summer she tells to everyone; until at last she becomes wiser in the great stillness of autumn, which is how she confides in the lonely. All the springs that you and I have lived through, taken all together, do not add up to one of God’s seconds. A spring that is to be noticed by God cannot be confined only to the trees and fields; its power must also enter into human beings. For then it continues to happen, not in time, but rather in eternity, so to speak, and in the presence of God.

Once upon a time, when this was happening, God’s gaze, in its dark movement back and forth, had to halt over Italy. The land beneath was bright, the time shone like gold; but across this, like a dark road, lay the shadow of a robust man, heavy and black, and far in front of it, the shadow of his hands at work, unquiet, moving spasmodically now over Pisa, now over Naples, now melting into the uncertain motion of the sea. God could not take His eyes off these hands, which first appeared to Him to be joined as in prayer—but the prayer that welled up from them was driving them far apart. There was a silence in the heavens. All the saints followed God’s gaze and contemplated, as He was doing, the shadows that veiled half of Italy, and the hymns of angels froze on their faces, and the stars trembled, for they were afraid they had been guilty of some fault, and they waited humbly for God’s word of wrath. But nothing of the sort came to pass. The heavens had opened in their full breadth over Italy, so that Raphael was on his knees in Rome, and the holy Fra Angelico of Fiesole stood in a cloud and rejoiced over him. At this time, many prayers were on their way up from the earth. But God took heed of only one; the force of Michelangelo rose up to Him like a fragrance from the vineyards. And He allowed it to fill His thoughts. He leaned lower, found the man at work, looked over his shoulders on down to the hands lying attentively on stone, and was startled: Might there be souls in stones too? Why was this man listening to the stones? And now the hands awakened and pulled on the stone as though digging up a grave in which a weak, dying voice is quavering.