The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

It gave him a preternaturally youthful look – this unconsummated expectation of tragic event. The look which people born again into their faith sometimes acquire.

Treslove couldn’t bear the thought. Why did anyone want a defence against pathos?

Judaism is essentially an ethical religion, he said. Which made it fundamentally contradictory at heart, pace Kierkegaard, because it is impossible to be ethical and religious.

T. S. Eliot told Auden that the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.