Providence by Daniel Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

kind of monsters those people were. In fifty years our grandchildren (if any survive) will look back at the
billions
of us who knowingly and wantonly laid the entire world to waste and wonder what kind of monsters
we
were.…
    One day while I was out weeding a tomato patch, an old horse-drawn manure cart went lumbering by. The younger of the two novice-priests was standing on top of the load and throwing out magnificent two-handed kisses to the world, just the way the pope does in St. Peter’s Square. He was clowning, of course, but for whom? Not for us—I doubt if he knew anyone was watching and hecertainly didn’t care. He was clowning for God, displaying his thanks and his joy at being alive.
    Was I happy there? Let’s hold off on that one for a while. All questions of that sort will be answered in their place.
    I should point out that I wasn’t yet in the novitiate. I was a postulant—someone on probation, someone asking for admittance rather than someone admitted. That I was an outsider was plain from the fact that I still wore the clothes I’d arrived in.
    Lightheartedness. That’s what I found there: something almost unknown in today’s world, crushed under leaden burdens of crime, crisis, and hatred.
    As my spiritual director, Father Louis needed to know everything about me, and it wasn’t long before he unearthed my literary ambitions. He wanted to see some of my work, and I wrote out from memory a few of my poems—including, I’m sure, the one I read you a few minutes ago. He looked at them and said, “Well, that’s one thing settled: You’re a poet.”
    From his point of view, this wasn’t something in my favor or something he saw as promising for my vocation. Just the opposite, in fact. As he had experienced it, the Trappist life was not congenial to the life of the mind. (I don’t remember his words; this is what I understood from his words.) From ancient tradition, the Trappists are an order of peasants and laborers just as the Benedictines arean order of scholars and intellectuals. He told me very openly that he’d suffered in this environment—and wasn’t at all convinced that I should go through the same experience.
    I’ll tell you something that may never have appeared in Merton’s published journals. There came a time when, after months of anguish, he told his confessor that he was struggling with a temptation to write his autobiography. If it isn’t already clear from what I’ve said, the writing of autobiographies is decidedly not on among the Trappists. But in this case, much to Father Louis’s surprise, his confessor
ordered
him to write it. Thus, suddenly, it was no longer a temptation to be resisted but rather an obligation to be fulfilled, and time previously spent in more ordinary work was now to be devoted to writing. This was how
The Seven Storey Mountain
came about.…
    Why did he tell me this? I don’t know, I never wondered. I suppose it’s because he was one writer talking to another. It’s certainly something I would’ve done in his place.

S IX
             
Readers of
Ishmael
often
assume that I must be a great lover of nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a great lover of the world, which is something quite different. Nature is a figment of the Romantic imagination, and a very insidious figment at that. There simply is no such thing as nature—in the sense of a realm of being from which humans can distinguish themselves. It just doesn’t exist.
    The nonhuman world? There’s no such thing as a nonhuman world—not here and now at any rate. The world that we have is the world that has humans in it, just as the world that we have is the world that has air and water and insects and birds and reptiles in it. Every aspect of the world was changed by our appearance in it three millionyears ago, just as every aspect of the world was changed by the appearance of plant life three billion years ago. We’ve breathed in and out here for three