For the past three months, I have been nesting. Or, rather, I have been making a nest out of anything I could find, pulling bits of ideas from here, strings of words there, fine feathery thoughts and the discarded cores of used-up conclusions. I have been making a nest because I am homeless-mentally, ideologically, spiritually-and a home is all I can hope to have. I am considering, for the first time, the radical possibility that everything I see might contain the truth, and so I have to take it all home with me; no matter how pathetic, I must not just take it home but make it my home-a habitation of thoughts.

I have been nesting, too, because the words I want to say seem too dangerous to say. I have been seized upon by a desire to revive an old conservatism that has never released me; I have been compelled to ask questions and then to ask for help-a dangerous proposition; I have wanted to let loose with a thorough agnosticism, with stifling doubt, and then with joy in the stifling doubt, a phrase that says: Rejoice! For doubt is all there is; I have known a great shrinking at the content and the sound of my own voice; a great silence before I speak words that are my own to speak, and all the terror of that silence; a feeling of preparation, great despair, foolishness, and above all, fear that I am about to be utterly myself and that this ‘myself’ will be utterly incomprehensible to others. I have sat, wooden, unable to write. But under the wood, a secret fungal decomposition, dreadful and dark, remaking the inside and moving out.

In short, I have never had such a cacophony of contradiction to offer before, never had so much good to say about the Institution, never so much forgiveness, never so much disbelief in God but never so much delight in the metaphor.

I have been drawn, in this great racket, to the lamentation of old stories and the spells they cast far beyond their happenings. I have been drawn to the stories of Beats everywhere, of the explosive, prophetic, misunderstood human wherever he or she has appeared. I am learning the meaning of Jack Kerouac’s confession: “I am not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.”

This is why I finally opened Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. I guess I was finally ready for it. After reading the flat ethical histories of the flatly ethical, and the exposes of the expositors, and all the dear and necessary versions of the truth, and after, finally, re-reading Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and falling in love again with the problem of history-of ever knowing what really happened-and after considering for months the real function of history as narrative, as a window on the narrator and the present: after all that good blood and fine sweat I realized I was ready for the compassionate historian, the kind that sees men and women as they saw themselves, beyond all ethics and exposes, as stories-as characters in some wondrous unfolding, characters who fought darkness and detractors, whose secret braveries were never visible, whose lives cried out for a loving explanation. In other words, I was ready for characters who would could never be understood as they were without the deliberate falsehood of writing-of something that brought their disparate parts and their secrets and their reasons together into something much larger than what the events actually afforded, of a fiction that got closer to the truth than living. I was finally ready to see Joseph and others as narrators who were compelled to tell and retell old stories and who themselves would be told and retold as long as they were useful to their readers. And so it was not surprising that I was ready for a historian who understood both the danger and the necessity of history as fiction, of the historian as interpreter and storyteller, of the historian who knew, above all, that the Joseph we believe in is not and could never be the Joseph who lived-that Joseph is true precisely because he gave us a story that could be endlessly revised, because he gave birth to a truthful fiction. Above all, I saw that Joseph Smith, to put it crassly, was of enormous and beautiful use to me because he contained, both as original and apocrypha, the content for all questions I could hope to ask. And I was ready not just for criticism, but for the whole study of a human being in the grip of the fantasy that he could mean something beyond death.

All this can be contained in Joseph’s most tragic condemnation of his friends: “You never knew my heart.” Bushman included that line in the introduction, probably to break the machine in people’s hearts-to make them capable of good reading. It broke the machine in mine. In five words, Joseph provided the whole lament of religion. Is it possible, after all the ecstasy, all the seeking and all the blessings, to escape the fundamental alienation, the cosmic loneliness, of being a living human being-a living human being who will die? Does the discovery of truth and the love it breeds compel you to draw close to others while widening the distance between you and them? Does anyone-even a prophet or a God-escape the writer’s desire to be loved, cherished and understood? Or is that what God- and prophet-hood is: the willingness to remain in that need forever? Can anyone, even in scripture, give a proper accounting of another person, or even their own ecstasy? Is friendship a fumbling through the noise of history and fallibility to find a person inside all of it, noising back? Is learning how to read the scriptures or write an honest history the same as being saved? As saving others? Are we saved, not in the content of our reading, but in learning how to read-how to approach the fundamental mystery of another? Does acknowledging this mystery combine with our knowledge of time to radically revise our notions of truth? Are the scriptures history books because coming to know God is the same as writing a history of both him and you-not a biography, or an autobiography, but an amicography: the history of a friendship?

After reading my friend Jake Wilhelmsen’s piece on the Beats, I cannot stop wishing I could have given Kerouac a copy of Rough Stone Rolling. I think he could have cried. More than anything, I am driven to consider the mysterious crossroads where friendship, ecstasy and writing meet to make the only fiction worth reading. I am even more distracted by Dean Moriarty’s idea that a good beatnik “knows time”-that they know that the mystery of understanding any person is compounded by understanding them across time, and that the act of writing-especially the act of writing scripture-means that people will have to understand your ecstasy from the other side of time, and that this is the double reason why they will never “know [your] heart.” So if you are a beat-if you have let your desire for overmuchness take you into ecstasy, and if the loneliness of that ecstasy left you with the impossible need for true friends-then you will hope your posterity are historians who will forgive you for your time and save themselves in their own through forgiveness.

I am indebted to Jake for his insights, and for this quote by George Dardess, a compassionate reader if I have ever known one and someone who inadvertently condensed my thoughts on scripture, religion, Joseph Smith, history and the process of knowing as a friendship with time-in other words, the historian’s salvation:

To have responsibility for your friend means not only providing him with companionship or with money, not only defending him before a jury of his peers; it means also-and painfully-maintaining a sense of how your friend sees himself apart from the way you see him.  But, perhaps more painfully, it means maintaining a sense of how the friend sees you apart from the way you see yourself.  Maintaining such difficult senses is an act of generosity few people care to perform unless they are in love.  And if they are in love, they are people-like Sal Paradise-susceptible to the wild contradictory splendors of human behavior.

History saves.

More next time…