Scary Book

I am in London, reading The Athenian Murders by Carlos Somoza (also gazing with wonder at the Reading Room in the British Museum, that they let ANYBODY in these days - the parliamentary library in Ottawa - where they don't let anybody in - is something similar, with a wonderful calming golden-browness coming from the predominantly wood shelfing, etc.). It is a good book and includes this passage, which I found fascinating. Martin Amis wrote one time that the problem with modern day pornography is that it is so vast and so extensive and so varied that, eventually, they will hit on the thing that draws you into it: they will find your secret desire, no matter how odd or repulsive. So, my feeling on reading this below was akin to what a secret fetish holder (mine are all, as far as I know, very conventional) must feel when finding a web site devoted to what he thought up until now was his own very secret perversion.

Lit from below by lamps, Crantor's huge face looked like a mysterious mask. 'There's a widely held belief in many places far from Athens,' he said, 'that everything we do and say exists as words written in another language on a huge papyrus scroll. And Someone is reading the scroll right now, deciphering our thoughts and actions, and finding hidden keys to the text of our lives. That Someone is known as the Interpreter or Translator ... Those who believe in Him think that our lives have an ultimate meaning of which we ourselves are unaware, but which the Translator discovers as he reads us. Eventually, the text comes to an end and we die, knowing no more than before. But the Translator, who has read us, discovers at last the ultimate meaning of our existence.' (page 87-88)