She died a few months ago, right around her birthday which, she told us, was the 25th of December. She was Jewish, which is just right; and she cared about the salvation of the world in a way which was humble and just, which was  just right. And she was a woman, which became increasingly right as she became older.

A brilliant mind, but a girl, she had bewailed her fate, and had not yet conceived any notion of a destiny. She fought on behalf of freedom, on behalf of children and futurity, once she invented a notion of destiny.

She began, merely a girl, to edit others’ writing, and gradually began to write her own. Some of it quite beautiful and powerful, may yet see days’ light, in a time when memory can reinvent her as she would be. She was abstract. Her love of humanity was conceived through some veil of community or covenant which being Jewish had taught her. Her love of human beings, also abstract, became more and more remote as she became older.

Her strengths, her gifts of the abstract, turned away from people and toward the kind of martyrdom which the concept of destiny provoked within her.

She thought she was a leader of people, but had constructed them within her notion of destiny; they were her followers…already. And they, and we, were not.

She knew in the depths of her being that she had special powers; perhaps like the oracles at Delphi, or the maiden who could never be spoiled; not like the Mother of us all. She thought, more than once, more often than once in a while, that she was whatever the next Messiah would be…should be.

Good journeying, Miriam!