The Judge Reads Aloud
In court his private diary is read out, and its meaning is confiscated
This morning the court undressed my diary in public, and I watched my private sentences shiver.
The judge, a man with a voice like cold water, read my confessions into the record.
In his mouth my prose curdled; what I had written as philosophy sounded like the boasting of a fiend.
On the fourteenth, he intoned, I resolved to test the limits of permitted action.
The clerk's pen scratched, converting my metaphysics into the flat grammar of an .
Between his and mine lay an that no interpreter in that room could bridge.
has its own dialect, in which a soul becomes a defendant and a deed a charge.
My words had been addressed to no one; now they were exhibits, tagged and passed from hand to hand.
He read the passage where I called conscience a rumour spread by the weak among themselves.
A woman in the gallery gasped, and I felt, absurdly, the vanity of an author overheard.
The law names me , a word that assumes the very moral order my diary denied.
To be found guilty, one must first be enrolled in the fiction that guilt is real.
I had written for the silence of the page, not for this theatre of robes and oaths.
Yet hearing my thoughts in another's mouth, I began to doubt whether they were ever wholly mine.
A sentence, once released, belongs to whoever reads it, and reading is itself a kind of trespass.
The prosecutor underlined each as though sin could be measured in fluid ounces.
He asked the jury to imagine the terror of the victim, and the courtroom obediently shuddered.
I had written of freedom; he translated it, without malice, into the plain word cruelty.
Perhaps both of us were right, and the same act wore two names at once.
The judge closed the notebook with the tenderness one shows a coffin lid.
In that gesture I saw how completely my language had been confiscated by the state.
My most intimate confession had become the property of the people, in whose name I would hang.
When they asked if the words were mine, I said yes, and the yes felt like a second crime.
To disown them would have been a lie; to own them was to hand over the rope.
I sat straighter, determined not to let their reading be the only reading that survived.
But a courtroom is a machine for producing one meaning and grinding the others to dust.
I left the dock feeling not condemned so much as edited, revised into a monster fit for verdict.
That night I understood that a confession spoken by your enemy is no longer a confession at all.