The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one’s attitude. Of course, everybody on earth had the power to reshape reality. It was one of the things Peter and Beatrice talked about a lot. The challenge of getting people to grasp that life was only as grim and confining as you perceived it to be.

“Hi.” In Peter’s experience, it was better to speak in one’s own idiom than echo the idioms and accents of others. Rastafarians and cockney Pakistanis did not come to Christ through being patronized by evangelists making clownish attempts to talk like them, so there was no reason to suppose that black Americans might.

“Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment. Simple truths with complicated clothes on. The only purpose of the linguistic dressing-up is so people won’t look at the contents of our naked hearts and minds and say ‘How naff.’ ” She frowned. “ ‘Naff’?” “It’s a British slang term, meaning trite or banal, but with an extra overtone of … uh … nerdishness. Uncoolness. Dorkishness.”

The human brain was like that, unfortunately: it sifted intimacies and perceptions, allowed them to trickle through the sieve of memory, until only a token few remained, perhaps not even the most significant ones.

He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.

You cannot create a thriving community, let alone a new civilization, by putting together a bunch of people who are no fucking trouble! Scuzi, pardon me mama, but it cannot be done. You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed. The people who build it have got to be egomaniacs and lunatics, they’ve gotta want it so damn bad they’ll trample you underfoot, they’ve got to be charismatic and charming and they’ve got to steal your wife from under your nose and then sting you for a loan of ten bucks.