Agnon's House

Agnon's house in Talpiot. It's on an old hill in Jerusalem that overlooks something neither city nor desert. Agnon's house has a space in the back for us to assemble and as we do, we're quoted his Nobel Prize Speech:

As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile.

But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem. In a dream, in a vision of the night, I saw myself standing with my brother-Levites in the Holy Temple, singing with them the songs of David, King of Israel, melodies such as no ear has heard since the day our city was destroyed and its people went into exile. I suspect that the angels in charge of the Shrine of Music, fearful lest I sing in wakefulness what I had sung in dream, made me forget by day what I had sung at night; for if my brethren, the sons of my people, were to hear, they would be unable to bear their grief over the happiness they have lost. To console me for having prevented me from singing with my mouth, they enable me to compose songs in writing.

There's that. The songs and the shadows in back of Agnon's house; on a patch of grass which is well kempt. Agnon is long dead now and so I imagine his garden is now manicured by people who love order. And love orderly things. Martinets.

People who made Agnon the man on the back of the fifty-shek bill--head down, hand on brow, glasses on, pixelated before a case of books.

It's not a simple story but when the writer lived, I, with the luxury of imagination and the hatred of order, can see the brush growing out with verdure like history does over memory. Like Agnon's house resting on the street named for his rival, twisting the land of permanent summer slyly into fall.