[b]Zoe Heller
I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my mother’s deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, ‘You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’ approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn’t.[/b]
This either sinks in [eventually] or it doesn’t.
Meir, let me ask you something, I said after a while.
Sure.
Do you think I’m a bad person?
Only God knows that for sure, Willy.
So you don’t have an opinion at all?
Not one that really matters.
Okay, let me ask you something else. If the Polish peasant who hid Jews from the Nazis is a hero, what is the Polish peasant who turned the Jews away? Is he a coward?
Meir smiled, Of course.
Really? A coward? A bad man?
A coward isn’t a bad man, necessarily. You can’t know if you’re a bad man until you die.
You’ve got to wait until you hear god’s decision?
Well, yes, that’s true. But I meant something else. Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good. Until then, there is always the possibility of turning yourself around.
Religion in a nutshell. If not your nutshell.
I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.
Of course she says this everyday.
It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.
If not outright embarrassing.
One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they’re simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren’t they?
So, when did you stop pretending?
I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
And she means it.