IJ study archive

go to Shattuck and Surrender — "He figures there was some God-involvement…"

quote

He figures there was some God-involvement, sitting there on the floor.

Context

The jumping-off place: sitting on the kitchen tile he doesn't kill himself — he gets up, leaves without a note, and walks four kilometers to a shelter to Surrender. The decision is barely a decision ("he didn't know why but he didn't kill himself"), and he attributes the fork to "some God-involvement," the Higher Power arriving not as revelation but as the inexplicable fact that he went toward help instead of the unopenable window. Surrender here is the whole doctrine in a single unwilled turn on a kitchen floor.

In anthology