THE BASS SAXOPHONE Read Online Free PDF Page B

against which understanding shatters. I did what I could to explain to her that significance and meaning, and the sense of design which people attribute to the blind activity of nature, are merely human concepts, that that was what I’d been trying to say, that meaning is an anthropomorphic idea born of the awareness that every human activity has “meaning” of one sort or another: we cook so that we may eat, go on vacation to relax, brush our teeth so they won’t decay — and then we carry over this idea of purpose to nature where we feel that it is lacking; but she just smiled at all my logic and my rationale and my helpless fury (it wasn’t an angry fury, just a desperate fury at the fact that I couldn’t convince her of such obvious truths, that there was something in her, an ability or an inability, something beyond logic, that proudly resisted reason) and she replied to it all with a mild, calm, almost sublime smile and the words, You are simply a physical person. You are still imperfect. So Iasked her whether she didn’t feel hatred for me or contempt that I was an atheist, and she shook her head and said, I pity you. Why? Because you may have to live many lives before you become perfect. And before you find the truth. Many lives? I asked. Yes, replied Emöke. Because you must become a spiritual person before you see the truth. “You mean you believe in reincarnation, miss?” asked the schoolteacher. It doesn’t matter what it is called, she said. You needn’t even use the name God. Words don’t matter. But you must know the Truth.
    We entered the forest valley of Mariatal where the little white pilgrims’ church stood deserted, the broad lane of deserted booths leading up to it, smelling of rotting wood. The plank-top counters where gingerbread hearts were once stacked in piles beside holy pictures and mirrors with pictures of the shrine, and the decaying beams from which black, white, and pink rosaries had hung alongside silver and gold madonnas on chains, miniature fonts for holy water with pictures of the Mother of God, tin crucifixes, wooden ones with tin Christs, carved ones and plain ones, blessings for cottage parlor walls, pictures of the Virgin of Mariatal, pictures of saints and wax figurines, and beside them a booth where a fellow in a white apron with a fez on his head would chop slabs of Turkish honey-nougat into sticky sweet flakes, and a little farther on, a stand with chenille scarves, cottonstockings and glass jewelry, and a stand for sausages and another booth with holy pictures; and peasants in black suits and black hats wiping their sweaty faces with red bandannas, their black, laced boots dusty from the long trek, and little old ladies in white Sunday kerchiefs, and tired children, and weary couples who had come here to say a prayer for the success of their young marriage or the conception that was long in coming, and old people for a happy final hour, the sound of organ music coming from the church, and the sound of singing, the path curving up the hillside through the woods, bordered by little white chapels with wooden altars displaying hand-painted scenes from the lives of the saints, now long faded and peeling, aged by many rains and the hard heat of summer; and the Cultural Guide, his hairy, spindly legs protruding from his shorts, climbed up on to the steps of one of the chapel pavilions (that first evening he would expound on his plans for our recreation, but the second night he got drunk and the third day he was sleeping it off and the last evening at the farewell party he drank himself speechless and rolled under the platform where the musicians tipped the spit out of their saxophones onto him) and began to lecture us about the pilgrimages that used to come here — it was immediately apparent that he was totally ignorant not only of the Catholic Church, its dogma, liturgy, tradition, and catechism, and of Biblicalhistory, but of everything in general; he made a joke about