Read Online The Cult of Loving Kindness by Paul Park, Cory, Catska Ench - Free Book Online Page B
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translation of the manuscript was already half complete. It lay around him on the desk, almost a thousand verses, or, as he called them, “paradigms.” He searched for the first page. There it was: “Oh my beloved, let me pleasure you and kiss you, for you are like a God to me, that I may worship with my body, and your kisses help me, and heal me, and give me comfort, and illuminate my life. In your presence my heart is full of a new sensation, which is partly joy… .”
His was a race that was gifted with languages. Always they had lived as foreigners in other people’s countries. Whatever place had been their home was lost, its location forgotten in the cryptic past. Myths and stories that referred to it tended to lack interior logic; anyway, the myths had changed over the generations, so that they no longer represented clues to a real place, a real culture, a real past. Instead the stories had been cast forward to a future where their inconsistencies would matter less: a vision of some ideal future in their own country, and they would be welcome like lost friends.
But in the meantime they had lived in other people’s cities, and they had adopted other people’s habits. And most of what distinguished them, beyond the physical differences of their bodies, had been in some way forced upon them—their limited employment opportunities, their long gauze robes and masks, the bells that in some southern cities they had been obliged to wear, sewn into their sleeves. They had taken these restrictions and made a culture out of them. They had spoken a dozen dialects of other people’s languages.
When the master had come out from Caladon, and with a handful of refugees he had founded in the deepest woods his little town, and he had said, “This is the place; the time is now,” it had been part of his dream that they should form one people, speak one tongue. Nevertheless, Sarnath had learned snatches of many languages when he was growing up. And in the world he had learned more, when he was teaching the precepts of the master to his clients at the Caladon frontier. He had taught them humility, and detachment, and the futility of all human enterprise, the counterproductive nature of desire. In return he had learned patience, and thoughtfulness, and wisdom, and obscenities and supplications in another fifty tongues, all of which were useful when, in solitude on his veranda in the evening of his life, he bent his mind to his translation of the Song of Angkhdt, from the original Bekata manuscript—an unknown alphabet but not completely unfamiliar—into his own Treganu dialect.
During the day he meditated in his room. In the evening he worked on his translation. In the endless litany of love that makes up the first part of the Holy Song, he had searched in vain for clues to what the master meant. “Burn these papers!”—why on earth? What was the harm? Now, waiting for Cassia, holding up the skull in his starved hands, he thought he understood. For only in the past day had he finally recognized what he was doing. It is not until the 940th verse that the prophet’s name is actually mentioned in the text; at ten o’clock the night before, when he had sounded out for the first time that crabbed, mysterious syllable, he had sat back with a strange lurching in his heart.
All winter and long into spring, the citizens of Charn and Caladon had been obliged by law to memorize large portions of the Holy Song. But by midsummer, so thoroughly had the questioners performed their work, all that learning was forgotten, broken, rooted out, persisting only among covens of witches, Starbridge renegades, and followers of the Cult of Loving Kindness. It was possible for an educated man like Mr. Sarnath, a man whose work had actually involved from time to time the persecution and exposure of the Cult, never to have known any of the old words. It was not until he had deciphered the 940th verse, working close to midnight by the light of his
His was a race that was gifted with languages. Always they had lived as foreigners in other people’s countries. Whatever place had been their home was lost, its location forgotten in the cryptic past. Myths and stories that referred to it tended to lack interior logic; anyway, the myths had changed over the generations, so that they no longer represented clues to a real place, a real culture, a real past. Instead the stories had been cast forward to a future where their inconsistencies would matter less: a vision of some ideal future in their own country, and they would be welcome like lost friends.
But in the meantime they had lived in other people’s cities, and they had adopted other people’s habits. And most of what distinguished them, beyond the physical differences of their bodies, had been in some way forced upon them—their limited employment opportunities, their long gauze robes and masks, the bells that in some southern cities they had been obliged to wear, sewn into their sleeves. They had taken these restrictions and made a culture out of them. They had spoken a dozen dialects of other people’s languages.
When the master had come out from Caladon, and with a handful of refugees he had founded in the deepest woods his little town, and he had said, “This is the place; the time is now,” it had been part of his dream that they should form one people, speak one tongue. Nevertheless, Sarnath had learned snatches of many languages when he was growing up. And in the world he had learned more, when he was teaching the precepts of the master to his clients at the Caladon frontier. He had taught them humility, and detachment, and the futility of all human enterprise, the counterproductive nature of desire. In return he had learned patience, and thoughtfulness, and wisdom, and obscenities and supplications in another fifty tongues, all of which were useful when, in solitude on his veranda in the evening of his life, he bent his mind to his translation of the Song of Angkhdt, from the original Bekata manuscript—an unknown alphabet but not completely unfamiliar—into his own Treganu dialect.
During the day he meditated in his room. In the evening he worked on his translation. In the endless litany of love that makes up the first part of the Holy Song, he had searched in vain for clues to what the master meant. “Burn these papers!”—why on earth? What was the harm? Now, waiting for Cassia, holding up the skull in his starved hands, he thought he understood. For only in the past day had he finally recognized what he was doing. It is not until the 940th verse that the prophet’s name is actually mentioned in the text; at ten o’clock the night before, when he had sounded out for the first time that crabbed, mysterious syllable, he had sat back with a strange lurching in his heart.
All winter and long into spring, the citizens of Charn and Caladon had been obliged by law to memorize large portions of the Holy Song. But by midsummer, so thoroughly had the questioners performed their work, all that learning was forgotten, broken, rooted out, persisting only among covens of witches, Starbridge renegades, and followers of the Cult of Loving Kindness. It was possible for an educated man like Mr. Sarnath, a man whose work had actually involved from time to time the persecution and exposure of the Cult, never to have known any of the old words. It was not until he had deciphered the 940th verse, working close to midnight by the light of his
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