07.24.05

After the storm

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:30 am by falstaff

He woke up and knew instantly that she was dead and it had stopped raining. To his half-awake mind the two facts seemed to merge together, to exist as gestures in the same abstract dance, like feathers falling in the wind. There was a sense of relief, yes, but it was confused by a premonition of dryness, of some terrible emptiness to come. The sky glimpsed blue through his curtains seemed like a negation of memory, a barefaced denial of the night’s lightning. As if the clouds had never been there, as if he had only imagined them. There was a sense of finality that filled the silence of his room this morning, making it seem more exact. Absence, he thought vaguely, should not be so alive.

What had happened? Struggling into his slippers, he tried to unjumble the thoughts in his head. Was it she who had disappeared in the night and the rain that had died? Or the other way around? He went out into the living room, dialed the number of the hospital. The voice of the night nurse as she told him what he already knew was a shaken window. “Don’t worry”, he told her, when he couldn’t find anything else to say, “the storm has passed.”

When he put down the phone he became aware that what had been calling him all along was something else entirely. Distance, perhaps, or merely the opening of doors. So much to do. The tasks of the day like some table to be carefully arranged, in preparation for a feast he understood the dimensions of, but could not taste yet. First, a quick survey of the damage the storm had done. Maybe a climb up the ladder to make sure the roof was alright. Then the rosebushes would need replanting – they always got torn up in a storm. And there would be the endless phone calls, visitors, telegrams – all the little intrusions that the rain leaves behind it, like earthworms squirming into the open.

No, it wouldn’t do to leave the water standing today.

Slipping into his dressing gown he stepped out onto the porch. Instantly the sunlight attacked him, blinded him. He hadn’t expected this. The empty sky, yes – but not the terrible brightness of the sun beating down on him, not the sweet, seductive freshness of a newly indifferent world. He winced, stepped back a little, his progress halted. As he stood there in the doorway, eyes shielded, waiting for his gaze to adjust to the day’s new light, it occured to him, for the first time, that this was going to be a long, bitter summer.

07.23.05

The Justice of Thy Plea

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:06 am by falstaff

Why are we so willing to judge other people? Where does this urge come from – this need to sit in judgement over our fellow beings – to sum them up in a phrase, a word, a life sentence. If I gave you a gun and said you could shoot anyone you wanted to at point blank range would you do it? Yet everyday, we press the barrel of our judgements against the beating heart of total strangers and have no compulsion in pulling the trigger.
Understand that this is not a screed against personal judgements. I do not believe in the naive notion that all people are equal or essentially the same, I am quite happy to make snap judgements about people. All I object to is the elevation of these judgements to a moral plane – an elevation that leads inexorably to intolerance and prejudice. Oscar Wilde once said “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” (very few people realise this, but under all that sparkling wit, Wilde was both a very serious thinker and a truly moving poet). I believe the same should apply to people. People are either interesting, or they are not (or put differently, since all judgements are subjective anyway, people either interest you or they don’t). You’re welcome to decide that you have no desire to interact with another person, without having to prove that he’s somehow wrong / evil.
What, you may ask, is the difference between personal judgements and moral ones? First, personal judgements are less emotional – you do not hate someone because he’s uninteresting or annoying – you may avoid him, but you wouldn’t kill him*. The danger of moral judgements is precisely that they give sanction to actions that would otherwise be unjustifiable, as the bombings of the recent weeks will testify (most people miss the point about these bombings, btw, the real issue is not whose moral judgements are right – who’s good, who’s evil – the real issue is that people should not be allowed to kill others in the name of moral judgement – this applies as much to the US invasion of Iraq as it does to the bombings in London**). Second, moral judgements are more static and absolute – you can like this or that about a person (and you can change your point of view the minute new information comes to light), but you don’t necessarily make a judgement about his / her character as a whole. Third, personal judgements are judgements of the individual and as such are seen as being opinions, while moral judgements take the form of universal truths, so that we feel compelled to get others to agree with us.
(Ghalib writes:
“Haan, voh nahin khuda parast, jaao voh bewafa sahi;
Jisko ho din-o-dil aziz, uski gali mein jaye kyon?”
Roughly:
“Yes, he (she) is not god-fearing, Yes, he (she) is faithless;
But if you care so much for faith and honour, why do you go to visit him (her)?”
Sorry. He doesn’t translate well.)
An Error of Judgement
Why do I think that moral judgements are wrong?
First, because I feel that they take too dispositional a view of human beings. We are all creatures of circumstance, all products of an infinite combination of social forces and individual events in our past. This does not mean, of course, that we should be allowed to evade responsibility for our acts; only that even as we condemn the act we must recognise that it is not the result of some ‘character flaw’ but merely the logical outcome of a sequence of situations stretching way into the distant past. This is one reason why personal judgements are easier to change – we are willing to make room for the possibility that under different conditions the person might behave differently***.
Second, as I mentioned earlier, moral judgements see the individual as a single entity, rather than as the vector of different qualities that I believe people truly are. Suppose, for instance, that someone you’re close to and whose company you enjoy hurts or betrays you in some way. This is good reason not to trust that person again (assuming of course that there were no extenuating circumstances) but it’s hardly good reason not to continue to enjoy that person’s company. Yet a moral view of the world would instantly condemn this person as being immoral (or a jerk) and would suggest that you have nothing more to do with him / her.
Third, I feel that many moral judgements arise out of a confusion between causes and consequences; between intentions and outcomes. Moral judgements tend to focus on a person’s intent rather than on the effect of his actions. In the absence of the ability to read human minds, however, the intent itself can only be inferred from action (or from statements, which are ultimately a form of action themselves)****, and such inferences are merely a way of obfuscating the truth of what we see / experience and introduce considerable opportunity for subjective manipulation and error. More critically, however, the use of intention rather than outcome as the relevant metric seems illogical – what do I care why the person is doing something as long as I know how it makes me feel and am reasonably certain of being able to maintain it? So on the one hand people will continue to carry on with unhappy relationships because they feel that he / she means well. On the other hand, there’s this person I was having a discussion with the other day who said that he really enjoyed poetry but had stopped reading it because he felt that it was all just egoism on the part of the poet. Both of these points of view are just stupid.
Fourth, implicit in all moral judgements is the incredibly arrogant idea that there is one single answer to the universe, one ‘right’ moral code and that it happens to be the one that you believe in. To begin with, it’s not clear that there is such a thing as a moral code at all – whether life has any meaning whatsoever. Even if there is a solution to the system of equations that life represents, it’s not clear why that solution is unique – there may be many paths to salvation. And finally, even assuming that there is one path, what are the odds that you happen to be the one person among some 6 billion who understands it? I’m quite willing to live with the possibility that everything I believe (including everything I’ve said in this post) is error – but since I have no way to prove / disprove this (or any other assumptions I were to make) I figure I may as well carry on with these assumptions as long as they make me happy. I’m quite willing, therefore, to let other people have their own lifestyles, as long as they don’t inflict them on me. I’m never going to have any respect for people who listen to hip-hop or spend time watching football on TV, but I’m willing to make room for the possibility that they’re the ones going to Heaven (assuming there is such a place) and I’m the one on my way to Hell (although, of course, you could question why I would want to go to heaven where everyone sits around drinking Budweiser and discussing the latest score).
My final argument against moral judgement comes straight out of the Bible – remember that bit about ‘he among you who is without sin casting the first stone’? Only if we are willing to have moral judgement passed against us, should we be ready to judge others the same way. Or, as Shakespeare puts it (Merchant of Venice, IV.1 – the source that the title of this post comes from) “Though justice be thy plea, consider this, / That in the course of justice none of us / should see salvation.” You could argue, of course, (and rightly at that) that one may be willing to live with the absence of salvation, may be willing to condemn and to be condemned (I’ve always wished someone had done that in the Bible – said, “let me stone this woman to death and afterwards you can do the same to me. I don’t mind”) but that’s not usually the point of view of those who make moral judgements.
Why do we do it?
Why then do people make moral judgements so readily?
First, moral judgements are a logical consequence of a bad habit of sense-making that we are all afflicted with. Because we need to believe in a) human agency / free will and b) a coherent universe, we have no choice but to ascribe meaning to everything and classify the world into categories – of which good and evil, right and wrong are merely a subset (Nietszche argues in the introduction to Beyond Good and Evil that the history of philosophy is the history of the search for the answer to the question what is right or wrong, without ever questioning why the distinction matters). We need to believe in a consistent, unequivocal world; and discrediting other people’s certainties is the surest way of becoming more certain of our own.
Second, I believe (conveniently enough) that moral judgements are a sign of insecurity – they are both a way of seeking external validation for our ideas by breaking them down to crude values that allow us to connect to other people, and a means to lash out at other people and thereby express our superiority over them. In other words, they are a means to self-justification; the more we judge others the more we cry out to be judged and accepted, the more we cry out to connect to those around us, even as we withdraw (ironically) further and further away from them.
Third, moral judgements may arise out of sheer reciprocity. Not passing moral judgements is hard because even once you recognise that they’re meaningless, it’s still difficult for you to always be the bigger person and let others judge you without judging them. Sooner or later, like a child who’s been pushed around too much on the playground, you push back.
Finally, moral judgements are easier to integrate into the larger social system. Society recognises moral judgements, provides templates for them (this is virtually the entire point of religion, for instance). To shy away from such judgements is to require a concentration of imagination and intelligence that few (if any) of us are capable of. Moral judgements are easier because they numb us, make us animals who will docilely follow the herd. To forge our way out alone into the world, without the mob to steer us, is more than our courage is usually capable of.
Not, of course, that I’m anyone to judge. :-) .
Notes:
* Of course, Durkheim would argue that it’s precisely this emotional nature of moral judgements that brings society together – human collaboration is made possible not by love or by rational benefit but by the outrage we hold in common between us.
** Amos Oz writes (I misquote, but whatever) “In a conflict between the right and the right, the only value that matters is life itself”.
*** This links closely to the notion of fundamental attribution error – the idea that people will blame their own faults on circumstances and the faults of others on their dispositions – he’s always late for meetings; I just happened to get stuck in traffic.
****Always assuming that there is such a thing as intent at all. Behaviourist theory would argue that we are all merely emitters of conditioned, unthinking responses; Karl Weick argues that rationality is retrospective – that we act and then make sense of our actions, rather than the other way around.

07.22.05

Words to love by

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:11 am by falstaff

“I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature – as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.

But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love – all love – love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am.”

- Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

My apologies for the soppiness – hangover from evening spent drowning in Winterson (which is the only way you can read her – see review of the novel on Considerable Speck) followed by two and a half hours of Tristan und Isolde. Like taking an emotional sauna, only with all your clothes (thoughts) still on.

the world just keeps getting stupider

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:03 am by falstaff

This just in – more evidence of the world’s fundamental stupidity:

The administration of my office building have decided to re-do all the rest-rooms in the building. Since they can’t do them all at once (that would be too much work), they came up with a really neat way of dividing the work – they’ll first do all the women’s rest rooms and then all the men’s!

Is there a test you have to fail somewhere to be a building administrator?

07.21.05

Geek Pride

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:12 am by falstaff

The other day a friend put a post on her blog, claiming that, contrary to popular belief, she wasn’t really a geek, and providing some fairly lame arguments to ‘prove’ this fact. The post saddened me – it was an excellent example of how societal pressure can force us to deny our natural inclinations, making us pretend to be other than who we are. It’s shocking that in a world that prides itself on its liberated and inclusive attitude to alternative lifestyles, being a geek should still carry the social stigma that it does, causing young people to be confused about their own intelligence, trying desperately to repress their most normal and natural needs[1]. This friend of mine is quite clearly a geek, so it’s painful to see her in denial about it.
Personally, I think geek is the new gay. Think about it. They are a secret sub-culture of people who have lived hidden away from society’s eyes for centuries (historical accounts show evidence of geekiness in many ancient cultures – in ancient Greece for example, being a geek was considered a sign of nobility and some of the greatest philosophers of the day – Plato, Aristotle – were confirmed geeks; there are even people who claim that even here in America, President Lincoln was secretly a geek), forcing themselves to appear ‘normal’ – getting married, showing enthusiasm for sports, pretending that the computer is just a little black box they use to check e-mail, rather than the pulsing heart of their very existence. And all the while a secret yearning has been hidden away in their eyes, that tiny spark of connection when they meet a fellow geek (geeks have extremely sensitive radar for other geeks – a geek sitting in a bar will recognise another geek instantly, no matter how well disguised he is), the sense of being somehow unfulfilled by the ‘good’ life, the longing that takes over them every time they pass by another geek’s cubicle and see his spreadsheet lying open. Then there are the little tell-tale signs that give them away: the way they dress, their tendency to talk in equations, their fondness for math and computer languages, their horror for anything physical. And if you think having sex with someone of the same gender is unnatural, how about having sex exclusively with yourself?
Recent years, have seen a heartening tendency towards openness about geekiness. More and more people are coming forward and openly declaring that they are, in fact, geeks. Geeks are finding increasing acceptance in the popular media, spurred no doubt by the number of prominent geeks in the real world (such as Bill Gates) who serve as role models to young people coming to terms with their geekiness. There is finally a sense that the geek lifestyle, though inexplicably alien to the average person, is a valid personal choice and that society needs to embrace its geeks, not shun them. Geekiness is even starting to become cool – just check out the popularity of the Matrix movies.
As geeks everywhere continue to fight for greater integration into the larger social structure, I foresee (and call for) an increasing solidarity among geeks. There will be geek pride parades and geek bars (these already exist, of course, but more as an open secret than as an explicit fact). Women will increasingly turn to geek men for friendship – appreciating the twin benefits of being with someone who’s never going to get around to making a pass at them and who can help load programs onto their laptops and understands wireless networks. You’ll see more openly geek couples in the parks, at shopping malls. Eventually geek rights will become an important political issue. Advocates of geek marriage will propose the setting up of large national database along with a compulsory dating draft so that geeks can hook up with other geeks, while the Republican party will wax eloquent about the threat such a move comprises to life, liberty and the American way of playing football.
Bottomline, sister: don’t be ashamed of your geekiness, embrace it.
As a first step, towards this better, more open society, let me start by freely admitting (for the benefit of those of you who haven’t figured this out yet) to my own geekiness. Yes, Mom and Dad, I’m a geek. Don’t tell me you never suspected this. Didn’t you ever wonder why I never dated any women in college? Why, when all of my friends were out playing cricket on the society lawn, I was indoors reading a book or messing about on the computer? Haven’t you ever noticed how every time I go shopping I come back with four exactly identical shirts because I needed four shirts but couldn’t be bothered with making more than one decision about something as trivial as clothes? Don’t you know me at all?
Not convinced? Here is the list of ten things that prove I’m a geek:
1. At the age of 8, when other kids would happily lend their toys / books to each other, I had a detailed cataloging system for all my books – they were divided into six categories and within each category a book had a single letter identifier followed by a unique numerical identifier (remember I was 8, I’d never heard of the Dewey Decimal system, I came up with this all on my own). Kids who wanted to borrow books from me had to enter the code number of the book they were borrowing (they were on the inside back cover of the book, in blue felt pen) in a register I kept for this purpose and then sign their names against it. They were given a receipt.
2. Possibly my favourite way to relax is to arrange bookshelves. I will go from house to house, surreptitiously changing the order of people’s books. If someone actually lets me arrange their bookshelf for them I’m happy for days. Back home, I have a bookshelf with literally hundreds upon hundreds of books, but I can tell with a single glance if even a single book is out of sequence. If I ever need a book from the bookshelf I can tell you, sitting halfway across the world, its exact location among my myriad bookshelves. (By contrast, it takes me an average of 6.5 minutes every morning to find a matching pair of socks – just in case you thought this was just about being neat and organised)
3. I use Excel for everything. Recently, I got a brochure from the Philadelphia Orchestra listing the different subscription series for their 2005-06 season. I fed all of this information into an excel sheet, then built a spreadsheet model to help me find the optimal portfolio of subscriptions that would give me the maximum benefit (I put in ratings for each concert on a 7 point scale) per unit cost
4. Check out the July 15th post about the contents of my iPod. Can you imagine anything more geeky?
5. I used to write my (now) ex-girlfriend love-letters in Microsoft Word, Times New Roman 10 pt 1.5 paragraph spacing. With footnotes. And, if required, a list of references at the end [2] (you begin to see why ex-girlfriend, right). In order to make these letters more intelligible, I also had a system of brackets – basically different types of brackets I would use for different types of comments: say [] for random witticisms, {} for sentimental / soppy asides, () for general comments, etc.
6. I must be the only person in the world who’s disappointed with the new Harry Potter book before he’s even read it. The reason? It doesn’t confirm to my regression equation of the length of Harry Potter novels [3] – based on that model, the book should have been around 1050 pages long (give or take 50 pages), instead it’s only some 650 pages. What a letdown!
7. Before I start a book, I will sneak a quick look to see how many pages the book is. At any given point in the book then, I can tell you exactly what % of the book I’ve read so far, to the closest 5%. If it’s a long book and I don’t plan to read it all in one go, then I will have a schedule for reading it – say it’s a 1000 pages and I don’t feel I can manage more than 250 pages a day (assuming 70 pages an hour, 3.5 hours a day) then I will keep track of when I’m sneaking up to the 25% mark and stop as soon as I get to it (or sometimes, if it’s really gripping, at the next section / chapter break)
8. My walking route to office is optimised to minimise time on a probabilistic basis. This means that I’ve studied the time for which each traffic signal on the way (there are four of them) stays green in every direction and worked out what is the best route to take so that the expected waiting time at a traffic signal is minimised. The only way I will swerve from this route is if I hit a red light and calculate that the conditional probability from that point onwards makes some other route optimal.
9. The other day I took a survey of consumer preferences sent to readers of the New Yorker. The first section was men’s apparel and included a list of some three dozen clothing brands. I didn’t recognise a single one. The second section was the same type of thing for men’s toiletries and personal care items. Ditto. The third section was electronics and tech products. I ticked every second box.[4]
10. I’m obsessed with putting things in lists of 10. For instance, I don’t have any other evidence of my geekiness to offer[5]. But I can’t stop at nine, because that would be a violation of the order of my life. So I’m typing this in. If I had 11 points to make (see comment to[5]) I would drop one just because I can’t go over ten.
Notes
[1] While there is little research on whether geekiness is genetic or is a result of the way a child is brought up, it is clear that being a geek is an integral part of the person’s life by the time he is an adult, a fundamental tendency that cannot and should not be changed.
[2] Like this.
[3] 5 data points: 309, 352, 448, 734, 870; time series model fit (no constant) R-squared: 0.985, F-test 269 (sig.
[4] There was also a question about Internet usage. “On an average, how often do you surf the Net?” The highest bracket here was Daily. I laughed.
[5] I’m skipping all the obvious things here – the fact that I spend inordinate hours in front of my computer, my complete lack of interest in any sport, (well maybe F1, but that’s only for the thrill of figuring out the combinations of results that would ensure that Ferrari lost and the probabilities involved), my inability to drive and my preference for sitting at home reading a book rather than going out or (shudder! shudder!) meeting people, my tendency to talk in bullet points (I habitually start conversations by saying “Three things”)

Anybody home?

Posted in Uncategorized at 8:49 am by falstaff

Yet more evidence of the innate stupidity of the world:

The management of the building I live in came up with the bright idea of printing a one page flyer exhorting residents to be especially security conscious in these summer months when building occupancy is low and incidence of break-ins is known to be high. They then slipped these little missives under each residents doorstep, with the result that all you have to do now to figure out which residents are away is to walk down the corridor and look for the telltale sign of a white sheet peeking out from under the door.

Smart, huh?

07.20.05

Losing one’s head

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:09 am by falstaff

When you cut someone’s head off, what happens to their brain? Does it shut down instantly, the minute the neck is severed? Or does it go on working for a while (not long, you understand, but maybe a minute or so) feeding off the blood that’s still in the head, its last thoughts like the twitching of a squashed cockroach?

And assuming that it does go on, what is passing through it in that last minute? Does it simply flood with a blind, numbing pain so that any last thoughts it might have had are lost in a final orgasm of suffering? Or is there no pain at all, just the acute numbness you feel after you cut your finger with a knife, but before it starts bleeding? Perhaps the brain doesn’t even realise what has happened, and simply goes on pretending that the blow is still to come; perhaps the subconscious is smart enough to prevent it from recognising the truth; perhaps the mind simply cannot adjust to this most outrageous of absences, and continues to experience, like an amputee, the sensations of its missing body. (How ironic if the victims last thoughts should be an illusion! And how apt).

Do the organs still work – the eyes, the ears – does the severed head see the stain of its own blood spreading slowly towards it, hear the sudden intake of the crowd’s breath and, afterwards, the sound of someone beginning to cry? Does it feel the first fly settling on its cheek? Or, most frightening of all, is the mind truly clear in those last seconds, apprehending the whole truth of its situation? How does the consciousness deal with the reality of its own extinction when it is no longer possible to escape into hope? How does something alive accept that it is already dead?

If we could understand what the severed head is thinking in that last minute, we would, I think, be much closer to understanding the meaning of life.

Disclaimer: This post is inspired by reading brilliant, brilliant Nabokov novel called ‘Invitation to a Beheading’ (for a review of which see Considerable Speck: http://considerablespeck.blogspot.com/2005/07/off-with-his-head.html). I have not been going around cutting people’s heads off.

More Walcott

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:04 am by falstaff

Narrative originates in the heart, time’s
pendulum and apostrophe, until the heart’s scales
are swung to a standstill, to a breathing balance,
a light meridian of the hemispheres -
saying to the sea and Europe, “Here I am,”
division swayed by justice, poetry
unbiased to an absolute pivot, that is my sword’s
surrendering victory over myself, my better halves.

– Derek Walcott ‘The Prodigal’

Sigh. You can think you can write and then you come across something this achingly beautifully, so breathtakingly perfect and you think “Who am I kidding? I could never, ever write this. Not if I lived to be 200 years old.”

Mediocrity is a very hard thing to deal with at all times, but it’s especially difficult when it’s your own.

07.19.05

Messiah

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:22 am by falstaff

Everyone in the village really loved Father Bloom. It wasn’t just that he was a diligent priest, dedicated to helping others, always there when you needed him. It was also the dignity of his presence – his shoulders firm but gentle, his eyes liquid with kindness, his voice as soft as the wind over autumn fields. Strolling through the village on his morning walk he would stop to greet every passerby, and always with a smile, or a kind word, or (if the situation demanded it) a look of quiet concern. And yet, let tragedy strike and Father Bloom would be among the first on the spot, using his calm manner, his delicate touch to bring solace and grace to the bereaved.

He never interfered, did Father Bloom, he gave you his sympathy without judging you. Judgement, he said, was in God’s hands – he was only here to help. Yet for all that he was a source of good, practical advice. A combination of mature temperament and many years of experience with human ills had given him shrewd judgement – and he was one of those few priests who would think of what was best for you before he would think about what was fitting for God. It follows that his advice was much sought, and the refrain “Have you spoken with Father Bloom about it? What did he have to say?” became a common one for anyone with troubles in the village.

If there was one fault that Father Bloom had, though, it was a tendency to optimism. Usually a sober and somewhat resigned man, the good Father could be moved by fortunate events to a frenzy of unjustifiable hope, of almost ecstatic belief. It was almost as though at the first sight of great good fortune, the Father saw his way clear to all the promised miracles of the world, and believed with all his singing heart that things would turn out right because God would make them so. At such times, his advice, usually so sage and sound, took on an altogether naive quality. In the fit of religious passion, he would exhort people to trust in the Almighty, leave it all to Jesus and other such meaningless platitudes.

The villagers soon grew to be wary of these moods. After all, they didn’t go to Father Bloom with their troubles only to be fobbed off with a few lines from the Bible and a vision of future happiness that they could see no way to achieve. They went to him seeking practical suggestions on everyday matters, trusting his judgement and his intellect. If it was simply a matter of praying for their loved ones they could manage quite well by themselves, thank you, it was in the hope of finding some more effective way of dealing with the world that they went to Father Bloom.

At first the villager’s distrust of the Father in his happy moods extended only to avoiding him at such times. People seeking an audience with the Father would first consult with his housekeeper to make sure that he wasn’t in a good mood that day. On mornings when the Father rose singing from his bed, his eyes shining, the word would go out and the villagers would studiously avoid the path that the priest would take, for fear of meeting him.

It wasn’t long, though, before someone came up with the idea of not telling the Father about the good things that happened to them. It started innocently enough – perhaps there was a patient who recovered miraculously, and though his family went to the church to thank God, they didn’t mention the reason to the priest for fear of exciting him; perhaps a farmer walking in his fields had a sudden epiphany of contentment, feeling himself bathed in the warm sunlight of grace, but he didn’t tell Father Bloom about it. Soon the whole village was drawn into the conspiracy. Couples madly in love with each other would marry, but would pretend to be indifferent to each other in front of the Father. Reformed drunks would stagger in the street when the priest passed, so he would mutter a prayer under his breath for them. Once when a young boy recovered from childhood lukemia, his family packed him off to boarding school rather than have him stay and be a constant reminder of God’s miracles to the Father. On the other hand, even the smallest misfortune was immediately related to the priest, usually with exaggerated accounts of the pain suffered or sorrow borne.

In a year or two the light of joy faded out of Father Bloom’s life. He began to stay up nights, wondering at the misery of the world around him. In the morning, his eyes would be bloodshot and he would walk through the town with his shoulders stooped, afraid to meet the eyes of passersby and see the pain that was sure to be there. As time passed he raised his voice louder and louder against the injustice of the world, until his funeral services sounded as if they were shouted directly at heaven; but the more insistent his voice grew, the emptier his heart felt. Surely, he thought, there must be some relief, some sign of God’s mercy – but none ever reached him.

Eventually, the long hours spent thinking on the sorrows of the common people, doling out advice with the desperate dedication of a hunted man, praying for a hope that never came, took their toll on the Father’s health. He weakened, grew sickly. A fever of despair raged through his body. He spent weeks trying to fight it off, but in the end it was too much for him, and he died in his bed one silent summer afternoon, still thinking of the world’s hardships.

When he finally came face to face with God, he bowed his head in shame, and said, “Forgive me, Lord, for I have failed you. There on earth, I had long ceased to believe in you with my heart, though your name never left my lips. I have not kept faith; I have proved unworthy. But tell me, Lord, why do you foist such misery on the people? Why will you not let them see the slightest hint of your greatness, your compassion? It was this that undid me – I did not think even you could be so heartless”.

It was then that God told him the truth – how it was not God who had been heartless but the very people who he had showered his love on, who he had sought to advice and protect. It was they who had tortured him, they who had hidden from him all signs of God’s presence. “But never fear”, said God, “I have seen and judged you; your way to Heaven lies clear.”

Father Bloom looked up through the tears that were streaming from his eyes “And what of my people?” he asked.

“For what they have done to you, they will naturally be damned”, God replied.

Hearing this, Father Bloom got slowly to his feet. “No”, he said, shaking his head, “I cannot let that happen. It is my place to suffer. It is theirs to enjoy happiness at my expense. That is the bargain we have made. I cannot go back on that now.”

“It’s not your decision”, God told him, “it is I who must judge them. You know that.”

“Yes,” the priest replied, “but even if you send them to Hell I can at least be there to comfort them, to help them as best I can.”

“But what can a man of God do in Hell?”, God asked. “They will remember the trick they have played on you and make fun of you. You will be a laughing stock”

“I will be their jester”, said Father Bloom. “So be it. Is that not what I have been all my life?” And he walked slowly away.

07.18.05

The hole truth

Posted in Uncategorized at 8:57 am by falstaff

Have you ever wondered what the deal is with bagel sandwiches?*

I mean why would someone go to all the trouble of making a one-inch hole in a perfectly respectable piece of bread (and rounding it off along the edges) if all they were going to do was use it to make a sandwich with a square slice of cheese and a flat, square meat patty of some sort? Didn’t someone tell these people that the round peg, square hole problem works the other way around as well? Or is it just a way of making sure that the cheese has enough room to breathe (because otherwise they’d have a mob of angry protestors from the Society for Prevention of Unusual Cruelty to Dairy Products outside their door)? And if they really want to use bagels to make sandwiches (to use up old stock or whatever), why not just get the cheese companies to make ring-shaped slices and the poultry farms to grow circular chickens? That way in a couple of hundred years or so we wouldn’t need our two front teeth at all (they’d have nothing to bite down on) and evolution could take its course.

Personally I think the guys who designed the bagel sandwich are the same guys who designed the Death Star – you know, the ones who always leave a neat little opening that goes straight to the heart of the ship’s reactor so that enemy fighters don’t actually have to bother with all that heavy armour.

*I’m not entirely sure how mainstream bagel sandwiches actually are – though I know of at least two places around my school that serve them. In case you haven’t ever eaten a bagel sandwich, it’s basically a sandwich made with a bagel (you’d never have guessed would you?).

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