Moab Quotes

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t

Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.

Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.

I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it.

And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again. The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

The concept that really gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomachs is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love. That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the world's full octave. Love as Agape, Eros and Philos; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

Well I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles – I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom, abandonment, humiliation, rejection and fear. Those are the pains on which I might and, still sometimes do, dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness. It's not all that bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects.

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing, and horrific.

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

Life, that can shower you with so much slendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

I’m not even tone deaf, that’s the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing. I’M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF. I’m tone DUMB.

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship’.

Late, Fry?’ ‘Really, sir? So am I.’ ‘Don’t try to be clever, boy.’ ‘Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?

Come to think of it I don't know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

Nothing prayed for – it is life’s strictest and least graceful rule – comes to you at the time of praying.

It was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

people who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.

Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion.

Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight.

You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.

I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking through fingers, blood dripping from ears.

Converts leave something of themselves behind when they leave their homeland. Yahweh is not the King of Moab. He’s the King of Israel. Some things still live inside converts that can come back to life, should they re-embrace their former culture. Michael Ben Zehabe, Ruth: a woman’s guide to husband material, pg 30

17 I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.

Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects. ...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making. The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

The tribal belonging, the sexual association, the sense of party – these are what popular music offer, and they have always been exclusion zones for me. Partly because of my musical constipation – can’t dance, can’t join in the chorus – partly because of my sense of physical self, feeling a fool, tall, uncoordinated and gangly.

It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one's own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.

Naomi seems to think “rest” and “husbands” can be found in Moab. “Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as at the time of Massah in the desert, when your ancestors challenged me, put me to the test, and saw what I could do! For forty years that generation sickened me, and I said, ‘Always fickle hearts; they cannot grasp my ways.’ Then in my anger I swore they would never enter my place of rest.” –Ps 95:8-11 Michael Ben Zehabe, Ruth: a woman’s guide to husband material, pg 23

Can this be true? Their own sister-in-faith is sending them back to Moab? We should expect rejection, both inside and outside of God’s organization. Just remember this: no other human has your commission. No other human has your vision. No other human knows where you come from or where you’re going. Don’t expect applause. All such accolades come after success. Every great hero had to, 1st, learn to live with rejection. Michael Ben Zehabe, Ruth: a woman’s guide to husband material, pg 24

What is 'camp'? A much misunderstood word, everyone has their own feel for it. Here is mine: Camp is not in rugby football. Camp is not in the Old Testament. Camp is not in St. Paul. Camp is not in Latin lessons, though it might be in Greek. Camp loves colour. Camp loves light. Camp takes pleasure in the surface of things. Camp loves paint as much as it loves paintings. Camp prefers style to the stylish. Camp is pale. Camp is unhealthy. Camp is not English, damn it. But … Camp is not kitsch. Camp is not drag. Camp is not nearly so superficial as it would have you believe. Camp casts out all fear. Camp is strong. Camp is healthy. And, let’s face it … Camp is queer.

On my drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah, I passed an eighteen-wheeler with mud flaps on the rear tires. The flaps were black and featured the silver silhouette of a very statuesque naked woman. I’m sure you’ve seen this artistic expression in your travels. I wondered: has this ploy ever worked, like some kind of perverted fishing lure?

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up. Thank the gods there is such a thing as redemption, the redemption that comes in the form of other people the moment you are prepared to believe that they exist.

My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.

Get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael … get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael.

Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.

I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that – don’t you? – when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It’s too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then.

His favourite word, one for which I have a great deal of time myself as a matter of fact, was "arse." Everyone was more or less an arse most of the time, but I was arsier than just about everyone else in the school. In fact, in my case he would often go further — I was on many occasions a bumptious arse. Before I learned what bumptious actually meant I assumed that it derived from "bum" and believed therefore with great pride that as a bumptious arse I was doubly arsey — twice the arse of ordinary arses.

I believe that one of Satan’s biggest lies is telling us that it’s too late. We’ve sinned beyond redemption. The mistakes in our past have ruined our future. Too many bad things have happened to us. Wishing and hoping and living in regret doesn’t threaten him because we are still in Moab. It’s when we make the decision to leave the past behind, repent, and go back home to Bethlehem that he gets to trembling.

Abuse is exploitation of trust and exploitation of authority and I was lucky enough never to suffer from that or from any violation or cruelty, real or imagined. It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

Alexander Graham Bell was said to have made the following entirely endearing remark soon after he had invented the telephone: ‘I do not think I am exaggerating the possibilities of this invention,’ he said, ‘when I tell you that it is my firm belief that one day there will be a telephone in every major town in America.

The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing and horrific.

But one day he said to me: ‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’ ‘I’m sorry?’ ‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’ The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.

LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry "Wow!" all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

If you wouldn’t mind coming with us, sir? I am arresting you now and will shortly make a formal charge at the station.’ I was so happy, so blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy that if I could have sung I would have sung. If I could have danced I would have danced. I was free. At last I was free. I was going on a journey now where every decision would be taken for me, every thought would be thought for me and every day planned for me. I was going back to school.

The class erupted into noisy laughter and, since I was always, and have always been, determined that merriment should never be seen to be at my expense, I joined in and accepted my star with as much pleased dignity as I could muster.

We crunched over the gravel in front of my house. It was dark and empty, my dad long gone on his way to Moab and the beckoning Book Cliffs. “Would you like to come in for a minute? You could check the house for bad guys, and I could make us something yummy to eat. I think I have ice cream in the freezer and I could make us some hot fudge topping to put on top?” I waggled my eyebrows at him in the dim interior of the truck, and he smiled a little. “Bad guys?” “Oh you know, I’m here all alone, the house is dark. Just look under the beds and make sure no one is hiding in my closet.” “Are you afraid to be alone at night?” His brows were lowered with concern over his black eyes. “Nope. I just wanted to give you a reason to come inside.” His expression cleared, and his voice lowered even further. “Aren’t you reason enough?” I felt the heat rise in my face. “Hmmm,” was all I said. “Josie.” “Yes?” “I would love to come in.

But, I fear I spend far too little time apologising for or feeling ashamed about things which really do merit sincere apology and outright contrition. • Failing to imagine what it is like to be someone else. • Pissing my life away. • Dishonesty with self and others. • Neglecting to pick up the phone or write letters. • Not connecting made or processed objects • with their provenance. • Judging without facts. • Using influence over others for my own ends. • Causing pain.

It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness.

by the time your offspring have reached four and five it is far too late to be looking for schools: demand for private education is so high that children must be put down for admission not at birth but in utero, ideally before their first cells have divided.

None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness. It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing – they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

I was in Christopher Columbus, and sported its blue badge with great pride. It took me many years to understand or truly believe that Columbus was actually Italian. Even to this day I can’t fully accept it. Why would a school in the heart of England choose a foreign hero? Perhaps they were unaware of his nationality themselves. It was common knowledge that the British discovered everything – trains, democracy, television, printing, jets, hover-crafts, the telephone, penicillin, the flush lavatory and Australia, so it was reasonable to assume Christopher Columbus must have been a Briton.

Dale's father edited an English-language newspaper in Bombay and Dale always shouted "Aiee!" when he was in pain. It had amazed me greatly when I first heard him stubbing his toe against the foot of the bed in the dormitory, since I had never imagined that expressions of pain could vary. I had thought "Ouch!" and "Ow!" were the same all over the world. I had suffered a hot and bothered exchange in my first French lesson, for example, when I was told that the French for "Oh!" was "Ah!" "Then how do they say 'Oh,' sir?" "They say 'Ah.'" "Well then, how do they say 'Ah'?" "Don't be stupid, Fry." I had sulked for the rest of the lesson.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when  bI will punish all those who are circumcised merely in the flesh— 26 cEgypt, Judah, Edom, the sons of Ammon, Moab, and  dall who dwell in the desert who cut the corners of their hair, for all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are  euncircumcised in heart.

I suppose people were trying to be kind and protect me from the humiliation of discovering that, even after an operation to straighten my ridiculous nose, I would still look a mess. The trauma of finding out that a straight-nosed Stephen looked every bit as unappetising as a bent-nosed Stephen might have tipped me completely over the edge.

The allegorical meaning of the death of Moses and the appointment of Joshua has been touched upon above;1 therefore it is to be repeated here but briefly. Moses is the minister of the Law, which does not lead to fulfillment, that is, to righteousness, but shows sin and demands grace, which it does not confer. Therefore he dies and stays on this side of Jordan in the land of Moab, that is, in the righteousness of works. Joshua succeeds him as leader; this is the ministry of grace. He leads the people into the Land of Promise, that is, to true righteousness in Christ; and the Israelites cross over the Jordan dry-shod, that is, as both sin and death draw back and yield to grace.

Ничто из того, о чем ты молишься – таков непреложнейший и неприятнейший закон жизни, – не приходит к тебе во время молитвы. Хорошее неизменно запаздывает. Теперь я плавать умею.

Прошлое – заграница, там все делают иначе. Лесли Поулс Хартли "Посредник

Я полагал, что актерство есть просто выставление себя напоказ, а писательство – это укромный личный бассейн, в котором можно смывать все свои грехи.

Жизнь, способная осыпать человека великолепными дарами, с неослабной жестокостью относится к тем, у кого опускаются руки.

И сколько еще времени я буду спрашивать себя, что мне делать дальше, как будто я – это не я, а кто-то еще, посторонний человек, вглядывающийся в меня с недоумением и любопытством?

They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That old curse again. How to smile. If I smiled too broadly it might look like triumphalism; if I smiled too weakly it might look like a feeble bid for sympathy. If I smiled somewhere in between it would, I knew, look, as always, like plain smugness. Somehow I managed to bare my teeth in a manner that expressed, I hope, sorrow, gratitude, determination, shame, remorse and resolve.

Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.

And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text — or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, or ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

We talk of the callousness of the young. ‘Children can be so cruel,’ we say. But only those who are concerned with others can be cruel. Children are both careless and carefree in their connections with others. For one nine-year-old to think passingly about the non-swimming agonies of another would be ridiculous. There were contemporaries of mine at prep school who laboured and tortured themselves over their absolute failure to understand the rudiments of sentence structure: the nominative and accusative in Latin and Greek, the concept of an indirect object, the ablative absolute and the sequence of tenses – these things kept them awake at night. There were others who tossed in insomniac misery because of their fatness, freckledness or squintedness. I don’t remember, I don’t remember because I didn’t care. Only my own agony mattered.

Я вечно буду все той же приводящей людей в исступление смесью педантства, себялюбия, вежливости, эгоизма, мягкосердечия, трусливости, общительности, одиночества, честолюбия, размеренного спокойствия и тайного неистовства.

Fawcett also shared with me a passion for words and we would trawl the dictionary together and simply howl and wriggle with delight at the existence of such splendours as ‘strobile’ and ‘magniloquent’, daring and double-daring each other to use them to masters in lessons without giggling. ‘Strobile’ was a tricky one to insert naturally into conversation, since it means a kind of fir-cone, but magniloquent I did manage. I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn’t when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, however, an English teacher, nor was he necessarily the brightest man in the world. ‘So, Fry. “A lemon yellow colour” is precipitated in your test tube is it? I think you will find, Fry, that we all know that lemons are yellow and that yellow is a colour. Try not to use thee words where one will do. Hm?’ I smarted under this, but got my revenge a week or so later. ‘Well, Fry? It’s a simple enough question. What is titration?’ ‘Well, sir…, it’s a process whereby…’ ‘Come on, come on. Either you know or you don’t.’ ‘Sorry sir, I am anxious to avoid pleonasm, but I think…’ ‘Anxious to avoid what?’ ‘Pleonasm, sir.’ ‘And what do you mean by that?’ ‘I’m sorry, sir. I meant that I had no wish to be sesquipedalian.’ ‘What?’ ‘Sesquipedalian, sir.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ I allowed a note of confusion and bewilderment to enter my voice. ‘I didn’t want to be sesquipedalian, sir! You know, pleonastic.’ ‘Look, if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. What is this pleonastic nonsense?’ ‘It means sir, using more words in a sentence than are necessary. I was anxious to avoid being tautologous, repetitive or superfluous.’ ‘Well why on earth didn’t you say so?’ ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll remember in future, sir.’ I stood up and turned round to face the whole form, my hand on my heart. ‘I solemnly promise in future to help sir out by using seven words where one will do. I solemnly promise to be as pleonastic, prolix and sesquipedalian as he could possibly wish.’ It is a mark of the man’s fundamental good nature that he didn’t whip out a knife there and then, slit my throat from ear to ear and trample on my body in hobnailed boots. The look he gave me showed that he came damned close to considering the idea.

I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fi in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.

And in the days of the coming of the Son of Man, there will be two in the field, and it says that one shall be taken and the other left. Only two men. One represents Adam and the other represents Christ. The real Christians are the ones who are going to be left because the meek shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). And those who are taken will be the sons of Adam. In Numbers 24 it says, there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel and shall smite all the corners of Moab and destroy all the sons of Seth (Seth is the heir of Adam; see Genesis 5:3).

У меня имеется теория, которая в последнее время все вертится и вертится в моей голове, – согласно этой теории большая часть бед нашего глупого и упоительного мира проистекает из того, что мы то и дело извиняемся за то, за что извиняться ничуть не следует, а вот за то, за что следует, извиняться считаем не обязательным.

PSALM 83 O God, do not keep silence;    do not hold your peace or be still, O God! 2For behold, your enemies make an uproar;    those who hate you have raised their heads. 3They lay crafty plans against your people;    they consult together against your treasured ones. 4They say, “Come, let us wipe them out as a nation;    let the name of Israel be remembered no more!” 5For they conspire with one accord;    against you they make a covenant— 6the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,    Moab and the Hagrites, 7Gebal and Ammon and Amalek,    Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre; 8Asshur also has joined them;    they are the strong arm of the children of Lot.

It’s not her ability to give birth—whether one son or seven—that has earned their respect. It’s Ruth’s love for Naomi. This translation gets to the heart of it: “she loves you more than seven sons of your own would love you” (CEV). These women know hesed when they see it. They recognize loyalty and compassion and loving-kindness. They’re applauding Ruth for her deep commitment to Naomi, her lengthy trek from Moab, her weeks of gleaning, her willingness to marry an older man, her eagerness to bear an heir for Naomi’s family, her hours of labor to bring this redeemer into the world, and, above all, her faith in the God of Israel. Those are seven solid reasons; we could probably come up with seventy more.

No end of blessings from heaven and earth. As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs—crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune—glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. At the same time I see a mountain peak rising clear of the clouds, old Tukuhnikivats fierce as the Matterhorn, snowy as Everest, invincible. “Ferris, stop this car. Let’s go back.” But he only steps harder on the gas. “No,” he says, “you’ve got a train to catch.” He sees me craning my neck to stare backward. “Don’t worry,” he adds, “it’ll all still be here next spring.” The

March 10 MORNING “In my prosperity I said I shall never be moved.” — Psalm 30:6 “MOAB is settled on his lees, he hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel.” Give a man wealth; let his ships bring home continually rich freights; let the winds and waves appear to be his servants to bear his vessels across the bosom of the mighty deep; let his lands yield abundantly: let the weather be propitious to his crops; let uninterrupted success attend him; let him stand among men as a successful merchant; let him enjoy continued health; allow him with braced nerve and brilliant eye to march through the world, and live happily; give him the buoyant spirit; let him have the song perpetually on his lips; let his eye be ever sparkling with joy — and the natural consequence of such an easy state to any man, let him be the best Christian who ever breathed, will be presumption; even David said, “I shall never be moved;” and we are not better than David, nor half so good. Brother, beware of the smooth places of the way; if you are treading them, or if the way be rough, thank God for it. If God should always rock us in the cradle of prosperity; if we were always dandled on the knees of fortune; if we had not some stain on the alabaster pillar; if there were not a few clouds in the sky; if we had not some bitter drops in the wine of this life, we should become intoxicated with pleasure, we should dream “we stand;” and stand we should, but it would be upon a pinnacle; like the man asleep upon the mast, each moment we should be in jeopardy. We bless God, then, for our afflictions; we thank Him for our changes; we extol His name for losses of property; for we feel that had He not chastened us thus, we might have become too secure. Continued worldly prosperity is a fiery trial. “Afflictions, though they seem severe, In mercy oft are sent.

And please, whatever you do, don’t tell us that what we do, either in love or lust, is unnatural. For one thing if what you mean by that is that animals don’t do it, then you are quite simply in factual error. There are plenty of activities or qualities we could list that are most certainly unnatural if you are so mad as to think that humans are not part of nature, or so dull-witted as to believe that ‘natural’ means ‘all natures but human nature’: mercy, for example, is un¬natural, an altruistic, non-selfish care and love for other species is unnatural; charity is unnatural, justice is unnatural, virtue is unnatural, indeed — and this surely is the point — the idea of virtue is unnatural, within such a foolish, useless meaning of the word ‘natural’. Animals, poor things, eat in order to survive: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have Abbey Crunch biscuits, Armagnac, selle d’agneau, tortilla chips, sauce béarnaise, Vimto, hot buttered crumpets, Chateau Margaux, ginger-snaps, risotto nero and peanut-butter sandwiches — these things have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old greed. Animals, poor things, copulate in order to reproduce: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have kinky boots, wank-mags, leather thongs, peep-shows, statuettes by Degas, bedshows, Tom of Finland, escort agencies and the Journals of Anaïs Nin — these things have nothing to do with reproduction and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old lust. We humans have opened up a wide choice of literal and metaphorical haute cuisine and junk food in many areas of our lives, and as a punishment, for daring to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, we were expelled from the Eden the animals still inhabit and we were sent away with the two great Jewish afflictions to bear as our penance: indigestion and guilt.

No one in life, not the wartiest old dame in Aries, not the wrinkledest, stoopingest Cossack, not the pony-tailedest, venerablest old Mandarin in China, not Methuselah himself, will ever be older than a group of seniors at school. They are like Victorian photographs of sporting teams. No matter how much more advanced in years you are now than the age of those in the photograph, they will always look a world older, always seem more capable of growing a bigger moustache and holding more alcohol. The sophistication with which they sit and the air of maturity they give off is unmatchable by you. Ever.

We all know that there are harsh passages toward others in the Bible as well: dispossess the Canaanites, destroy Jericho, etc. But, as I said earlier, the evidence on the ground indicates that most of that (the Conquest) never happened. Likewise in the case of the destruction of the Midianites, as I described in Chapter 4, this was a story in the Priestly (P) source written as a polemic against any connection between Moses and Midian. It is a polemical story in literature, not a history of anything that actually happened. At the time that the Priestly author wrote the instruction to kill the Midianites, there were not any Midianites in the region. The Midianite league had disappeared at least four hundred years earlier. As we saw in Chapter 2, it was an attested practice in that ancient world to claim to have wiped out one's enemies when no such massacre had actually occurred. King Merneptah of Egypt did it. King Mesha of Moab did it. And, so there is no misunderstanding, the purpose of bringing up those parallels is not to say that it was all right to do so. It is rather to recognize that, even in what are possibly the worst passages about warfare in the Bible, those stories do not correspond to any facts of history. They are the words of an author writing about imagined events of a period centuries before his own time. And, even then, they are laws of war only against specific peoples: Canaanites, Amalekites, and Midianites, none of whom exist anymore. So they do not apply to anyone on earth. The biblical laws concerning war in general, against all other nations, for all the usual political and economic reasons that nations go to war, such as wars of defense or territory, do not include the elements that we find shocking about those specific cases. ... Now one can respond that even if these are just fictional stories they are still in the Bible, after all, and can therefore be regarded as approving of such devastating warfare. That is a fair point to raise. I would just add this caution: when people cherry-pick the most offensive passages in the Bible in order to show that it is bad, they have every right to point to those passages, but they should acknowledge that they are cherry-picking, and they should pay due recognition to the larger--vastly larger--ongoing attitude to aliens and foreigners. In far more laws and cases, the principle of treatment of aliens is positive.

extendió Moisés su mano sobre el mar, e hizo Jehová que el mar se retirase por recio viento oriental toda aquella noche; y volvió el mar en seco, y las aguas quedaron divididas. 22 Entonces los hijos de Israel entraron por en medio del mar, en seco, teniendo las aguas como muro a su derecha y a su izquierda. 23 Y siguiéndolos los egipcios, entraron tras ellos hasta la mitad del mar, toda la caballería de Faraón, sus carros y su gente de a caballo. 24 Aconteció a la vigilia de la mañana, que Jehová miró el campamento de los egipcios desde la columna de fuego y nube, y trastornó el campamento de los egipcios, 25 y quitó las ruedas de sus carros, y los trastornó gravemente. Entonces los egipcios dijeron: Huyamos de delante de Israel, porque Jehová pelea por ellos contra los egipcios. 26 Y Jehová dijo a Moisés: Extiende tu mano sobre el mar, para que las aguas vuelvan sobre los egipcios, sobre sus carros, y sobre su caballería. 27 Entonces Moisés extendió su mano sobre el mar, y cuando amanecía, el mar se volvió en toda su fuerza, y los egipcios al huir se encontraban con el mar; y Jehová derribó a los egipcios en medio del mar. 28 Y volvieron las aguas, y cubrieron los carros y la caballería, y todo el ejército de Faraón que había entrado tras ellos en el mar; no quedó de ellos ni uno. 29 Y los hijos de Israel fueron por en medio del mar, en seco, teniendo las aguas por muro a su derecha y a su izquierda. 30 Así salvó Jehová aquel día a Israel de mano de los egipcios; e Israel vio a los egipcios muertos a la orilla del mar. 31 Y vio Israel aquel grande hecho que Jehová ejecutó contra los egipcios; y el pueblo temió a Jehová, y creyeron a Jehová y a Moisés su siervo. Capítulo 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Cántico de Moisés y de María 1 Entonces cantó Moisés y los hijos de Israel este cántico a Jehová, y dijeron: Cantaré yo a Jehová, porque se ha magnificado grandemente; Ha echado en el mar al caballo y al jinete. 2 Jehová es mi fortaleza y mi cántico, Y ha sido mi salvación. éste es mi Dios, y lo alabaré; Dios de mi padre, y lo enalteceré. 3 Jehová es varón de guerra; Jehová es su nombre. 4 Echó en el mar los carros de Faraón y su ejército; Y sus capitanes escogidos fueron hundidos en el Mar Rojo. 5 Los abismos los cubrieron; Descendieron a las profundidades como piedra. 6 Tu diestra, oh Jehová, ha sido magnificada en poder; Tu diestra, oh Jehová, ha quebrantado al enemigo. 7 Y con la grandeza de tu poder has derribado a los que se levantaron contra ti. Enviaste tu ira; los consumió como a hojarasca. 8 Al soplo de tu aliento se amontonaron las aguas; Se juntaron las corrientes como en un montón; Los abismos se cuajaron en medio del mar. 9 El enemigo dijo: Perseguiré, apresaré, repartiré despojos; Mi alma se saciará de ellos; Sacaré mi espada, los destruirá mi mano. 10 Soplaste con tu viento; los cubrió el mar; Se hundieron como plomo en las impetuosas aguas. 11 ¿Quién como tú, oh Jehová, entre los dioses? ¿Quién como tú, magnífico en santidad, Terrible en maravillosas hazañas, hacedor de prodigios? 12 Extendiste tu diestra; La tierra los tragó. 13 Condujiste en tu misericordia a este pueblo que redimiste; Lo llevaste con tu poder a tu santa morada. 14 Lo oirán los pueblos, y temblarán; Se apoderará dolor de la tierra de los filisteos. 15 Entonces los caudillos de Edom se turbarán; A los valientes de Moab les sobrecogerá temblor; Se acobardarán todos los moradores de Canaán. 16 Caiga sobre ellos temblor y espanto; A la grandeza de tu brazo enmudezcan como una piedra; Hasta que haya pasado tu pueblo, oh Jehová, Hasta que haya pasado este pueblo que tú rescataste. 17 Tú los introducirás y los plantarás en el monte de tu heredad, En el lugar de tu morada, que tú has preparado, oh Jehová, En el santuario que tus manos, oh Jehová, han afirmado. 18 Jehová reinará eternamente y para siempre.