Fear and Trembling

Temple Cone

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We want to leap with Abraham and believe a ram will be provided.
Isaac is so beautiful—his curly hair, his wide trusting eyes.
How heartrending to find that faith has nothing to do with happiness.

Pain comes from darkness, writes Jarrell, and though we call it wisdom,
It is pain. Yet darkness let Jarrell master a cadence as beautiful and terrifying
As Lear’s lament for Cordelia, the never, never, never, never, never

Of unremitting death, before it ran him down one humid Carolina night.
So what if we’re ravaged by Scofield’s desolate performance of that foolish king?
The community theatre, all false beards and miscues, feels the sorrow, too.

University of Virginia Virginia Quarterly Review
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