Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It’s the end.
I gave up trying to find out. Any knowledge I might gain was useless. I had no means of controlling where I was going – no rudder, no sails, no motor, some oars, but insufficient brawn.
Then normal sank.
But religion is more than rite and ritual. There is what the rite and ritual stand for.
It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important thing in the world, the thing that would save my life. This happened time and again.
They would emerge a short distance away, sometimes three or four of them, a short lived archipelago of volcanic islands.
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation.
His father had been his sole supporter, telling him to live for his love for Dora, in precise opposition to his uncle’s silent opprobrium. Dora was relegated to invisible duties deep within the kitchen. Gaspar lived equally invisibly in the Lobo household, invisibly loved by his father, who invisibly loved his mother.
The moon distresses you by silently reminding you of your solitude; you open your eyes wide to escape your loneliness.
Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting – that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art – and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives.
If it happened, it happened. Why should it have to mean anything?
We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more-there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels.
I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me.
My fingers, which a second before had been taste buds savouring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze.
Swimming instruction, which in time became swimming practice, was gruelling, but there was the deep pleasure of doing a stroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over, till hypnosis practically, the water turning from molten lead to liquid light.
High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering, I should turn to God.
He smiled. “You already are, Piscine – in your heart. Whoever meets Christ in good faith is a Christian. Here in Munnar you met Christ.
I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
What you don’t realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible. It took centuries to still the fear in some pliable animals – domestication it’s called – but most cannot get over their fear, and I doubt they ever will.
They never look very big on the table, the bodies. It’s built to accommodate the largest frames, there’s that. And they’re naked. But it’s something else. That parcel of the being called the soul-weighing twenty-one grams, according to the experiments of the American doctor Duncan MacDougall-takes up a surprising amount of space, like aloud voice. In its absence, the body seems to shrink.