The Great Weaver From Kashmir by Halldor Laxness

Author:Halldor Laxness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press

55.

I see, dear sir, that your eyes widen when you behold the images of saints around me, as if you were asking in your heart: Is it possible then that he has not overpowered God?

Indeed he has, dear sir. You are mistaken; I know precisely as well as you that the image of God, or, to put it better, the feebleness of imagination, is the foundational flaw in the soul of man, the chief cause of human suffering. But I collect antiquities and have a proclivity for finding pleasure in things that are older than I am and that can outlast me. Before the gaudy Christs and Buddhas I reverentially burn my candles, because I rejoice to think that some things are able to endure. And when you consider that the Catholic Church is the ancient relic of all ancient relics you will come closer to understanding what religion I actually profess. I love it, to wit, as he alone is able to, who has seen through its ideology, that most peculiar crossword puzzle under the sun; I love it as one who has gazed into all of the phosphorescent phantasmagoria of worthlessness that descended from Heaven and took up its abode in Peter’s bones. Catholicism is as old as God, as me, as the world, dear sir. It is the first and the last illusion of all illusions, the one true lie poured from the breasts of creation, the harp song of the deep, over everything and in everything like Fujiyama in a hundred prints by Hokusai. A thousand years ago I leaned up against the pillars in its forecourt and left. But it stands there and calls out after you as you leave: “Vous vous en allez; moi, je reste.”63 A thousand years later I take my rest under the pillars in its forecourt, and it asks, “Where have you been?” I love it in a sinful way, like an ignorant man who perceives the harp song of the deep in the smile of his lover, love it because it stands unmoving while the world perishes, because it will remain like Fujiyama in the paintings by Hokusai, will remain when I disappear. And I will disappear and it will remain.

Perhaps now you fear, dear sir, that I am preparing to lecture to you on the ascetic life, just as if I saw nothing in the Catholic Church but a divine institution against whoredom, homosexuality, or crimine bestiali,64 but it is not so: I have, since my childhood, investigated its tenets, and although you see saints and the crucified Christ here, I can assure you, after having looked deeply into the ascetic culture of the Church and found nothing there but a very primitive and deficient type of sadism, that the highest wisdom and the sweetest bliss can only be drunk from the breast of jocundity. This is how Signor d’Annunzio put it, our peerless d’Annunzio: “La vita . . . c’insegna che il piacere è il più certo

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