Getting and Spending

Isabella Whitney , The maner of her Wyll, 1573 1 We’re told it was mostly the soul at stake, its formal setting-forth, as over water, where, against all odds, the words-on-paper make a sort of currency, which heaven, against all odds, accepts. So Will, which is to say,May what I purpose, please, this once, and what will happen coincide. To which the worldly dispositions were mere after-thought: your mother’s ring and so forth. What the law considered yours to give. Which in the case of women was restricted—this was long ago, and elsewhere—so that one confessedly “weak of purse” might all the more emphatically be thought of as having little to say. Except about the soul. The late disturbance in religion having done that much, the each for each responsible, even a servant, even the poor. Wild, then—quite beyond the pale—to hustle the soul-part so hastily off the page. And turn, our Isabella Whitney, to the city and its faithlessness. Whose smells and sounds—the hawker’s cry, the drainage ditch in Smithfield—all the thick-laid, lovely, in-your-face-and-nostrils stuff of getting-by no woman of even the slightest affectation would profess to know, much less to know so well. As one would know the special places on his body, were the passion merely personal. 2 Wattle and brickwork. Marble and mud. The city’s vast tautology. No city without people and no people but will long for what the city says they lack: high ceilings, gloves and laces, news, the hearth-lit circle of friendship, space for solitude, enough to eat. And something like a foothold in the whole-of-it, some without-which-not, some little but needful part in all the passing- from-hand-to-hand of it, so every time the bondsman racks his debtor or the shoemaker hammers a nail or one un- practiced girl imagines she has prompted a look of wistfulness, a piece of it is yours because your seeing it has made it that much slower to rejoin the blank oblivion of never-having- been. The year was fifteen hundred seventy- three. The year of our Redeemer, as they used to say. That other circuit of always-in-your- debt. From which she wrested, in her open I-am-writing-not-for-fun-but-for-the-money way of authorship, a world not just of plenty but—and here’s the part of that’s legacy—of love.