The Devil's Pleasure Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

and a more affecting evocation of day turning to night has never been written.
    The situation becomes even more complex when the two languages are not members of the same family of tongues. Obviously, it is possible to switch smoothly between, say, English and Chinese, but that does not mean it is easy, and much imagery will inevitably be lost in translation. No matter how much or how often the egalitarian Left tries to argue in favor of its one-size-fits-all ideology, empirical evidence and experience tell us that this is simply wishful thinking, advanced for a political purpose. Not all languages or cultures are the same; nor do they have the same value. But despite the plain evidence of your senses, the Left has ways of making you toe the line.
    â€œWho is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him,” ventured the Nobel Prize–winning author Saul Bellow in 1988, thus setting off a firestorm of feigned outrage among the bien-pensant readers of the New Yorker— an early violation of the repressive strictures we have come to know as political correctness.
    â€œThe scandal is entirely journalistic in origin,” Bellow later explained in a 1994 piece for the New York Times , defending himself. “Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see. . . . My critics, many of whom could not locate Papua New Guinea on the map, want to convict me of contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the third world. I am an elderly white male—a Jew, to boot. Ideal for their purposes.”
    Bellow concluded with this remarkably prescient passage:
    Righteousness and rage threaten the independence of our souls. Rage is now brilliantly prestigious. Rage is distinguished, it is a patrician passion. The rage of rappers and rioters takes as its premise the majority’s admission of guilt for past and present injustices, and counts on the admiration of the repressed for the emotional power of the uninhibited and “justly” angry. Rage can also be manipulative; it can be an instrument of censorship and despotism. As a one-time anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists, or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
    In other words, celebration of diversity stops where any possible cultural superiority or inferiority might begin. But, to use leftist cant, isn’t diversity our strength? And if so, where did that diversity begin?
    Seen in this light, the incident in the Garden takes on a new meaning: Eve is not the cause of the Fall of Man, but its enabler. The Serpent’s Temptation of Eve is not only the first great satanic crime—although, to be sure, Adam and Eve had free will before the First Mother encountered the Snake—it is also the liberating act, the felix culpa , or happy fault that freed Man to fulfill his destiny as something other than God’s humble, obedient servant. As St. Augustine wrote in the Enchiridion , “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”
    Paradise may have been lost, but what was gained may have been something far more valuable, something, when you stop to think about it, that more closely comports with God’s stated plan for humanity: creatures endowed with free will and thus potentially superior to the angels. Eve’s first bite of the apple is not, then, simply Original Sin—it is the inciting incident of mankind’s own drama. Something was lost, to be sure, but something was gained as well, implanted in our breasts from the beginning: a sense of where we are going. Evil, sin, change, flux, drama,