Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane

Author:Cheikh Hamidou Kane [Kane, Cheikh Hamidou]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-055-6
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2012-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

* The griots are, in certain African countries, a special class of musicians, poets, historians, sorcerers, and the like. Tr.

9

THE KNIGHT TOOK OFF HIS EYEGLASSES, closed his Koran, and for some time remained motionless, with his face to the east. His countenance was at once grave and serene. Samba Diallo, lying on a rug near him, slipped the pencil from his right hand between the pages of the book he was reading, and looked at his father.

“The Word must continue to echo within him,” the boy said to himself. “He is one of those who do not cease to pray when they have closed their prayer book. To him, God is a constant Presence—constant and indispensable. It is this Presence, I believe, which stretches the skin tight across the bones of his forehead, and sets that luminous and profound expression within the deep-cut orbits of his eyes. His mouth holds no smile, nor does it hold any bitterness. All the profane exuberance of life must certainly be burned out of this man by his profound prayers. My father does not live, he prays …

“But wait a minute! Why did I think that?” he caught himself up. “Why did I think of prayer and life in terms of opposition? He prays, he does not live.… Certainly no one else in this house would have thought that way. I am the only one who could have this bizarre idea of a life which could be lived, in some fashion, outside the presence of God.… Curious. Bizarre idea. Then where could I have got it? This idea is foreign to me. The astonishment into which it plunges me is proof of that. It is, in any case, an idea that has evolved. I mean to say, an idea that marks a progress in precision over my previous state of mind: it distinguishes; it specifies. There is God and there is life, two things not necessarily intermingled. There is prayer and there is combat. Is this idea right? If I listened to that man sleeping more and more profoundly within me, I should reply, No, this idea is even mad; life is only of a secondary order: it is from time to time. God alone is, continually, uninterruptedly. Life is only in the measure and of the fashioning of the being of God.

“So this man within me would say; would he be right? Evil is of life; is evil of God? There is something even more simple and prosaic; let us take work. I cannot struggle, work, to live and support my family, and at the same time be fully with God. My teacher at the Glowing Hearth prays all the time, except when he is busy cultivating the soil—and even then, to be sure, he is still chanting litanies. But he does not pray in the same way as when he is before the hearth, on his prayer rug. So it is with my father. With him, the case is even more clear. When he is in his office, he is less close to God than the teacher is in the fields.

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