Doxology: A Novel

by Nell Zink

Plucky little Israel had fended off repeated Arab invasions, and not through the power of prayer.

As a willingly pregnant woman, she would at once be placing a long-shot bet that life on Earth would be idyllic forever and condemning a stranger to have its heart broken by her death.

“I’ll lie. If there’s one thing evangelical Christianity teaches you how to do, it’s lie.”

She never complained of boredom or loneliness. Her friends were always with her, in her smartphone. It reduced a clique of shrieking teenagers to silent speech bubbles in a chat program. For the adults, it was a godsend.

In cases of ethical conflict, she regularly turned to the church. Not to its doctrines or its personnel, but its architecture.

Media and politics seemed to her like departments in Earth’s marketing division, where the planet was advertised, packaged, and sold. She wanted instead to focus on its core business of keeping her alive.

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for one day,” Tibor said. “Teach him how to fish, and he catches all the fish and you starve together.” “Don’t be

All the beauty in the world isn’t going to save us from climate change. It’s going to take idealists like you, all working together.”

Her passion for ecology as a science was fading. It seemed too obvious. Like, if you don’t kill stuff, it’s alive. If you don’t crank up the temperature or dump pollutants on it, it soldiers on. The real issue was whether people subsisting on one meal a day could be expected to give a crap.

It wasn’t a net loss to be smarter, just depressing as fuck. She needed to make her world a better place, to bring it into alignment with a more demanding happiness.

“The better you are at what you do, the more committed you are, the more you specialize, and the fewer options you end up with. It’s like the only way not to get trapped is to be a hobo.”

She still didn’t believe in God, but she had come to believe in many higher powers, such as her employer.

What was at stake—in play, gratuitous and expendable—was beauty. Truth, beauty, power: the tokens in a game of rock, paper, scissors. Truth breaks power. Power cuts beauty. Beauty covers truth. Only truth survives losing. Truth is indestructible, but it’s ugly, inelegant, awkward. Society is not its native element. It can’t ambush power without beauty’s help.

“Donald Trump—you know him, the candidate for president?—he’s an idiot and a racist and a coal fanatic.”

A couple in love can fit a lot of intercourse into ten minutes.

“But that’s exactly it. The parties are Scylla and Charybdis, and we’re sailing our boat of nature on capitalism like we think it’s water. We need to turn it around and get back to dry land. God, that was the metaphor of the century. I should get a prize.”

“There is a bear in the woods, and his name is Beelzebub,” Bull said. “The lord of the flies. The foul fiend.” The group looked blank. The deputy campaign manager looked worried. “I’m talking about the presumptive Republican nominee, Mr. Donald J. Trump. Electing him is not a calculable risk. It’s the end of the world as we know it.”

Well, if it weren’t for Trump, I’d be standing here spouting pleasantries about refining our polling and reaching out to young and minority voters. But he’s the weasel in the tube jammed up our asses. We need to kill the weasel first.”

We know from the primaries that Republicans condone the things he’s been doing. Extramarital affairs. Tax evasion. Racism. Lying. Groping.”

“All I know is democracy is about choosing the lesser of two evils, because three evils is too many. Bernie

With the seismic shift of the 2016 elections, the day when Earth would resemble Pluto shifted from the cosmic timescale to the near-term future. The Plutonian concept of the middle-term “foreseeable future” was unknown among Earthlings.

It’s our Supreme Court that’s the dead, rotting elephant in the room. Fuck them, seriously.”

Trump is going to be hoist with his own petard, but we have to be patient while he fumbles it.”

The personal is not political. It can become political when abstracted and generalized, stripped of identifying markers. The political subject is a depersonalized subject: This could be you. This could be you being lied to, spied on, shot at, searched without warrant, convicted without trial, executed without appeal. Could be, but isn’t. When it turns personal, it’s too late. Accordingly, political people were more cautious with their data than they used to be.

Yet rights trump everything. You can’t do the right thing and violate a right, except—maybe—if you’re punishing a crime.

“Human beings are changeable,” Ginger continued, with emphasis. “God is love, but he’s the only one, believe me. Love is an ideal you don’t attain in this life. That’s why they build churches like this one to last forever, while the people inside them come and go.”

“Did you look at Fox News?” “Why would they tell the truth?” “Because there’s nothing a Republican cares more about than protecting his own family, at least on paper. Look at Fox and tell me what you see.”