I know what I know, says the almanac.
Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina“

The Denial of St. Peter, by Jan van de Venne. Public Domain

Where does responsibility begin? Where can it end? Alasdair MacIntyre observes that we tell our stories in part to account for our actions–which is also to say, to make them intelligible to ourselves in terms of the responsibilities we accept. Of course we must also accept forgiveness, and we must also forgive ourselves. Yet there is responsibility, which in one crucial respect simply means the thing I should say something about, that thing to which I should respond.

Obliged, accountable, responsible. Yes. But also, at its root, “responsible” means “answered, offered in return.” A largely silent blog, the blog this blog has become, suggests no answers, no response, little or nothing to offer in return. Yet not to offer some response seems ungrateful, and especially ungrateful to those whose responses continue, often at great cost, to offer hope: a great gift. I know this blog is my responsibility. I have not responded as I ought. So I write these words for myself, to answer myself, to speak of my own silence–but not to excuse it.

This week, which is Holy Week for Christians, I am particularly haunted by these words from They Thought They Were Free, a book recommended by Timothy Burke, whose recommendations I take very seriously:

A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal conditions, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good…. Responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain. They detach themselves altogether from the consideration of the evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with. Their denial compels their detachment. A good man–even a good American–running to catch a train on an important assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street and concentrate on catching the train and, once on the train, he has to consider the assignment about which he must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough, and his assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice the dog-beating when he passes it by.

Forgiveness may be at hand. In the meantime, there is Peter’s bitter weeping: a response, a measure of responsibility, a dark offering, a key still before him.

Good Friday.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

POSTSCRIPT: And speaking of responsibility, another mea culpa: Mayer’s phrase “good American” is harshly ironic in this context. They Thought They Were Free is about Nazi Germany, and one of Mayer’s throughlines is that no one is immune to the rejection–and even more damning, the denial–of responsibility he describes here. Not even “good Americans.” And Mayer also suggests, hauntingly, that difficult calculations are inevitable, and very painful, and that wrong answers are wrong nonetheless.

I am sorry not to have made this clear in my initial post, and grateful to Stephen for his response in the comments.