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When you see the whole thing like that, the whole life of someone you love from beginning to end. That’s what makes it hurt so much.”
I had spied two priests attended by a muscular entourage asking after me at the inn where I had been lodging in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Once again the Vatican’s soldiers had gotten too close for comfort.
seeking a berth on any ship that would soon sail with that evening’s tide. All proved fully manned, save the whaler Acushnet. To my extreme good fortune, she was still lacking several crew members. That was an odd circumstance in such seafaring towns as Fairhaven, New Bedford, and nearby Nantucket,
I realized that the dark themes she wished to explore, obsession, bioethical philosophy, and perilous hubris, all offered astonishing potential for a truly frightening novel.
I quickly realized that the press was a double-edged sword because of what instantly became the world’s most popular book: it was the Bible. With mounting frustration I saw that while some people were eager to absorb history, poetry, science, and philosophy from printed pages, the great majority of unwashed masses wanted only to embrace the biblical writings that validated their lifelong indoctrination of religious dogma. Strident faces passed darkly through my brain, which was now beginning to ache more terribly: the leaders of wars and persecutions boldly quoting scripture, purveyors of
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He declared that ignorance was the parent of fear, that knowledge was power.
I looked at all those people in the midst of their lives, with their individual joys or traumas, their personal triumphs or tragedies, their subjective hopes or fears for their future. But each one of them unknowingly blessed by something long since lost to me: a finite lifetime. An ending. A final rest. A cessation of suffering. Peace. I sighed, knowing that I alone endured beyond imagining.
