My Name is Asher Lev

"Then I looked a very long time at the painting and knew it was incomplete. It was a good painting but it was incomplete. The telephone poles were only distant reminders of the brutal reality of a crucifix. The painting did not say fully what I had wanted to say; it did not reflect fully the anguish and torment I had wanted to put into it. Within myself, a warning voice spoke soundlessly of fraud.

I had brought something incomplete into the world. Now I felt its incompleteness. "Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete?" my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.

I turned away from the painting and walked to the yeshiva. I had supper and prayed the evening service. I returned to the apartment. Children played on the cobblestone street below my window. I stared at the painting and felt cold with dread. Then I went to bed and lay awake in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the street through my open window: a quarrel, a distant cough, a passing car, the cry of a child-all of it filtered through my feeling of cold dread. I slept very little. In the morning, I woke and prayed and knew what had to be done.

Yes, I could have decided not to do it. Who would have known? Would it have made a difference to anyone in the world that I had felt a sense of incompleteness about a painting? Who would have cared about my silent cry of fraud? Only Jacob Khan, and perhaps one or two others, might have sensed its incompleteness. And even they could never have known how incomplete it truly was, for by itself it was a good painting. Only I would have known.

But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in created work. I would not be a whore to my own exsitence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence."

Notice how both our initials are A.L.
I shall finally walk to the lakeside and ponder the futility of my life today.