“Oh, papà, do you think so? I’m sure I loved Jason. But he was talking of marriage and I told him I won’t until I have finished my graduate work and see where I’m going. But all the time I’m thinking that while what I say is reasonable, if I really loved him, what would it matter? I’m so confused. Sometimes I stop in the middle of teaching and wonder if I will know love when it comes or if I’ll be so blind as to let it go right by me while I’m busy looking in all directions for it.”

“Have faith in yourself, Tina. Keep in touch with your own sense of truth and pudore. Keep your innocence. You will know it when it comes and you will know if you already have it. It is as in my art, a blend between the eternal and the contingent. That is what life is.”

“Oh, papà.” She loved this gentle, aging man; he was her gentle guide as Virgil was Dante’s. Keep your innocence, he told her; he presumed her innocent, though not, she knew, virginal. But innocence for him had always been of the spirit.

In the dark church interior where they found the ex voto, where she saw the naive expression of her ancestors’ faith in the imprevedibile, the unforeseen, the thing beyond reason and fact that can glide into each life when it is summoned with enough faith and hope, she made her silent pledge: She would know love when it came and she would be strong enough to accept it though it meant ceding some part of her freedom.

“In the meantime, Tina, pursue your studies. Work, do useful things, and don’t worry about false values. They’re there like traps, but don’t fall into them because others entice you that way with talk of money, success, fame, pleasure, or whatever. I know something of daily humiliation and self-discipline. Don’t forget I had to work ten years in a bank to support my mother and sisters, and all the while I knew at bottom that I was not an ordinary man, that I was a poet caught for the moment in another responsibility. That responsibility disciplined me. Keep your life simple. Have faith in Providence as the miracle of your daily adventure; practice Yoga as I do to direct the energies of Providence toward acquiring what you need materially.”