You don't seem to realize, father, what a grave crime you have committed. You've freed a galley-slave.Once again the random order of books is not so random; and of course this plays into the distinction (or lack) between fact and fiction--which leads me, like a nose in a book I read just before, but differently, also like the nose of an old hound dog, searching, sniffing, crawling the ground with my nose to smell out...
Poor fellow. All he got was my shoes and they were not much better than his own. He was doomed to failure. I always feel that those who always fail--he even ran out of petrol--are nearer to God than we are. Of course I shall pray to my ancestor for him. How often the Don knew failure. Even with windmills.
Man has learned many important things from the beasts: from storks the enema, from elephants chastity, and loyalty from the horse.
By this hopping you can recognize love.
Fact and fiction again, Father Leopoldo was saying, one can't distinguish with any certainty.
How wrong you were, Sancho. I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God, but doubt is not treachery as you Communists seem to think. Doubt is human. Oh, I want to believe that it is all true--and that want is the only certain thing I feel. I want others to believe too--perhaps some of their belief might rub off on me. I think the baker believes.
I think, you know, professor, that when one has to jump, it's so much safer to jump into deep water.
I'll try and start again: how is it possible that one book read because a teacher said to, because its author wrote another book about another myth, that I should find questions asked out of the misery of my at-the-moment life that are answered in the form of yet another myth-inspired book by some unrelated author I had never yet heard of?
And once more: I think I am beginning to understand the meaning of my name. All the writing and storytelling I have ever done (I think I've done a fairly copious amount of bad storytelling by this point) has taught me that names always mean things. And yet I have always felt that my name didn't quite fit. I have always wondered why my name, with its soft phonetic beginning and harder end--why this name, why such a soft name? And in truth, a part of me has despised it. Well, maybe despised is a hard word. Disliked? Yes, I have at times truly disliked my name. And horses? Until today I had never thought I should have anything to do with them.
And once more: The myth of Chiron. Having read it numerous times, in numerous forms, why should it appeal to me today? Why should all-of-a-sudden Chiron loom up? I thought he was dead--he died for Prometheus' sin, right? So what is he doing here and now telling me about...
...loyalty from the horse.
I am interested, because of my close personal association, in failure. Failure and foolery, fiction, fact, and of course philip. But it's the letter before 'f' that is important here: Graham Greene. Never read him before, found this first venture absolutely fabulous.
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