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.
Zoë HellerMeir, 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.
Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch.
Zoë HellerIt 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 mistery.
Zoë HellerMots clés atheism rationality failure-of-imagination
But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.
Zoë HellerMots clés life fate ill-fortune
I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
Zoë HellerMots clés on-unlikeable-characters
In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.
Zoë HellerI mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.
Zoë HellerThere it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.
Zoë HellerThe conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly.
Zoë HellerMots clés introduction
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