The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Read Free Book Online Page B

Burlingame:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Burlingame showed more irritation by the minute. “What is the difference ‘twixt innocence and ignorance, pray, save that the one is Latin and the other Greek? In substance they are the same: innocence is ignorance.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  “By which you mean,” Ebenezer retorted at once, “that innocence of the world is ignorance oft; no man can quarrel with that. Yet the surest thing about Justice, Truth, and Beauty is that they live not in the world, but as transcendent entities, noumenal and pure. Tis everywhere remarked how children oft perceive the truth at once, where their elders have been led astray by sophistication. What doth this evidence, if not that innocence hath eyes to see what experience cannot?”
    Ebenezer is, of course, a fool who overvalues his unworldliness. And when I read his story, in my hot little room atop the Lucy Hotel, I was equally the fool for failing to see how it applied to me. Or—and let’s be generous here—I was perhaps slightly less of a fool, for Barth’s musings on innocence and ignorance resonated with me. It made sense, as Barth (through Ebenezer) explains, that Adam and Eve were punished not for violating God’s laws but for being innocent of sin in the first place; it’s only when one knows and understands sin that one can consciously choose to commit or abstain from it. In other words, you have to lose your innocence to begin to come to terms with your ignorance. Unfortunately, innocence, unlike virginity, is not lost in a flash, nor ever fully expunged.
    One night in late 2007, I even tried, somewhat tipsily, to make this argument to a couple of strangers I met on a boardwalk on the island of St. Martin—who were not at all amused to hear their beloved Adam and Eve described as “ignorant,” a word that in the Caribbean implies not lack of knowledge but roughness, anger, internalizedstupidity. In the English-speaking Caribbean, you do not call someone ignorant lightly—it’s a fighting word—and once I’d realized this I quickly backed down and apologized. An innocent mistake, right?
    Or perhaps just lingering ignorance, for I really should have known better—this had all actually happened before, in the fall of 2006, a few months after I survived Kyrgyzstan. I’d gone on assignment with my friend Michael Park to Jost Van Dyke, a tiny island in the British Virgin Islands, and within minutes of arriving, we’d settled into a rickety beachside bar for a late lunch, a beer, and a cup or two of local rum. As happens in the Caribbean, we soon wound up participating in a bar-wide argument—they called it a “discussion”—that ranged from who was worse, Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin (“Idi Amin ate children,” I declared), to one man’s rant about, as Michael later put it, “how violence against all white people was justified because of the area’s history of institutionalized anti-black racism or something.”
    I don’t recall the precise details of Michael’s response to this, but apparently it included the word ignorant . The gentleman’s response was predictable—or would have been predictable, had Michael or I known what we were doing. He was angry—rum-drunk and fighting angry—and things might have escalated to actual fisticuffs had not someone stepped in and calmed things down on both sides. (Michael, too, has temper issues.)
    That peacemaker, oddly enough, was me. Why don’t I remember this—what I did, what I said? Why is that not as vivid to me as the mistakes I made? Why do the memories of failure, pain, and humiliation nag with undying ferocity, while the successes—my successes, the moments when I performed admirably—fade into oblivion?
    I can only imagine that this is some self-preservation protocol, a subconscious subroutine