Love, Etc by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes [Barnes, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 1407066366
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 1995-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

I could see from your expression at the time—sceptical to the point of faroucheness—that you judged this the landscape of invention, as verisimilitudinous as operetta. Yet was I not as far-seeing as St Simeon the Stylite atop his pillar at Telanissus? Hath not it come to pass just as I spake, O ye of little faith?

It was said of the ascetic and eremitic Simeon that ‘despairing of escaping the world horizontally, he tried to escape it vertically.’ The pillar on which he dwelt was at first no higher than a bird table, but over the years he built it ever more heavenwards, until this upwardly mobile home was sixty feet tall, equipped with both platform and balustrade. Now, the seeming paradox of his life was that the further he distanced himself from terra firma, the greater his wisdom grew, so that petitioners for counsel and solace arrived in ever greater numbers. A pretty parable of sagacity and its attainment, n’est-ce pas? Only by distancing yourself from the world do you see it clearly. The ivory tower has been much maligned, no doubt because of its luxury cladding. You leave the world in order to understand the world. You escape into knowledge.

Au fond, this is why I have for decades been a resilient opponent of what those of a parental or admonitory nature have termed a regular job. And now—Lordy, Lordy—St Simeon the Van Driver.

I told Stuart I wanted to be paid in cash. He was obviously impressed that I had the makings of a Man with a Plan. He smiled and extended his paw. He might have said, ‘Put it there, pal.’ He might have winked in a horribly complicit manner. At any rate, he made me feel like a freemason. Or, more exactly, like a person trying to pass himself off as a freemason.

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