The Mountain Shadow полностью

It was a peaceful enough place: an open prison. There was no authority, and no walls but those you had to climb inside. Yet the chains that bound the devotees who lived with Idriss were no less severe.

They loved him, and couldn’t leave him without weeping distress. Mind you, he was an easy man to love.

‘Non-evolutionary knowledge,’ he said, in one of our rare, undisturbed hours, two weeks after I’d arrived on the mountain. ‘Summarise.’

‘Again, Idriss?’

‘Again, impudent intellect,’ he said, leaning close so that I could relight his joint. ‘Knowledge isn’t knowledge, until the truth of it is self-evident in the sharing. Again.’

‘Okay, in a world where apples fall from trees, it’s sufficient evolutionary knowledge to step out of the way from falling apples, or to catch one, or pick one up off the ground and eat it. All the other stuff we know, like the rate at which it falls, and the calculations that allow us to land a craft on Mars, is non-evolutionary. Not required, for evolutionary purposes. So, why do we have it? And what’s it for? Is that a fair summary?’

‘C-plus. You left out that if you extrapolate all the branches of non-evolutionary knowledge, all the sciences, arts and philosophy to their logical extremes, you get knowledge about how everything does everything.’

‘And?’

‘Well, in itself, nothing at all. At the moment, for example, based on our record here on Earth, the sciences and philosophies are giving us the means to annihilate ourselves, and most of the other species with us. So, in itself, all our knowledge means nothing. But, combined with our capacity to override our animal nature, and to express our uniquely human nature, which is a very nice nature, as it happens, it is everything.’

‘I’m not seeing it.’

‘You’re looking right at it, but you’re not seeing it. All animals have an animal nature. We have an animal nature that’s pretty close to that of bonobos, I’m glad to say, but just like bonobos do, we act like chimps when we’re under extreme stress.’

‘And that’s our animal nature?’

‘Pretty much. But unlike chimps and bonobos, we don’t always have to do that. We have the capacity to modify the way we behave. A chimp, is a chimp, is a chimp. But a human being can be anything that he or she wants to be.’

‘How, exactly?’

‘When we express our truly human nature, we create humane-human things that don’t exist in the animal world. Things like democracy, and justice. There’s no Democratic Front of Chimpanzees. There’s no Court of Justice for lions and zebras.’

‘I guess not, but –’

‘We humans, uniquely, can shape our behaviour with ideas, and feelings, and devotion and art. Things that come from nowhere else but our humanity. We make ourselves, don’t you understand?’

‘There’s plenty of animal nature on display, Idriss,’ I said. ‘I’ve put some of it on display myself.’

‘Of course, our animal nature expresses itself very frequently, and not always pleasantly. Most of the bad news, anywhere, caused by man, is our animal nature, expressing itself without constraint. But the stuff in the arts pages and the science pages of the same newspaper, has more to do with our humane-human nature.’

‘I don’t see a lot of good, where I work.’

‘We can be anything we want to be, including angels. The best that we can do, when we’re determined to do well by one another, is unmatched in the natural world. And when our humane-human selves release our minds from vanity, and greed, we will not only achieve miracles, we’ll be the miracles that we’re destined to be.’

It was a long speech, and as with many of his longer speeches, he ended it with a question.

‘What is your understanding of the difference between Fate and Destiny?’

Fate, Karla once said, and Destiny, his Twin Sister.

‘I just can’t live with the notion that we’re not in control of our own destiny, and that Fate can play with us, like so many toy soldiers.’

‘Fate doesn’t play with us,’ Idriss said, finishing a joint. ‘Fate responds to us.’

‘How?’

He laughed.

It was a day so bright, immaculate heaven so blue, that we were both wearing sunglasses. He couldn’t see my eyes, and I couldn’t see his. It helped, because very often, when I stared into his leaf-brown eyes long enough, I fell like a kid into a creek, and had to think fast to catch up, when a question shook me from the stream.

The students and devotees talked and laughed in the shade, all the chores done for the day. The sky seemed to hover much higher than it usually did, as if there was more space and light.

‘You want to know how Fate works, because you want to fight with Fate, isn’t it?’ Idriss asked. ‘Your instinct is to fight, if you feel yourself under threat. You think that Fate is fighting with you, and you want to gain an advantage in the struggle. Am I right?’

‘I’d like to win in a fair fight, but I get the feeling that Fate cheats.’

‘And how does Fate cheat?’

‘I think Fate and Time have a thing going on. They’re partners in crime.’