Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1)

by Neal Shusterman

Sometimes, when the weight of my job becomes overwhelming, I begin to lament all the things lost when we conquered death. I think about religion and how, once we became our own saviors, our own gods, most faiths became irrelevant. What must it have been like to believe in something greater than oneself? To accept imperfection and look to a rising vision of all we could never be? It must have been comforting. It must have been frightening. It must have lifted people from the mundane, but also justified all sorts of evil. I often wonder if the bright benefit of belief outweighed the darkness its abuse could bring. There are the tone cults, of course, dressing in sackcloth and worshiping sonic vibrations—but like so many things in our world, they seek to imitate what once was. Their rituals are not to be taken seriously. They exist merely to make the passing time feel meaningful and profound. Lately I’ve been preoccupied with a tone cult in my neighborhood. I went into their gathering place the other day. I was there to glean one of the cult’s congregants—a man who had not yet turned his first corner. They were intoning what they called “the resonant frequency of the universe.” One of them told me that the sound is alive and that harmonizing with it brings inner peace. I wonder, when they look at the great tuning fork that stands as the symbol of their faith, if they truly believe it to be a symbol of power or are they just joining in a communal joke? —From the gleaning journ...