By that time, of course, the chaplain had met Yossarian somewhere before, in that odd, unorthodox ward in which every patient seemed delinquent but the unfortunate patient covered from head to toe in white bandages and plaster who was found dead one day with a thermometer in his mouth. But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him. Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain's lean, suffering frame insatiably.
Но к тому-то времени он уже действительно встречал Йоссариана - в палатке госпиталя. Сомнения неотвязно грызли душу капеллана, мечущуюся в бренной хрупкой телесной оболочке.
Was there a single true faith, or a life after death?
Существуют ли единая, истинная вера и загробная жизнь?
How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God occupy himself in all the infinite aeons before the Creation? Why was it necessary to put a protective seal on the brow of Cain if there were no other people to protect him from?
Сколько ангелов или чертей могут усесться на острие булавки? Чем занимался господь бог в безбрежном океане вечности, до того как сотворил мир?
Did Adam and Eve produce daughters?
Производили Адам и Ева на свет дочерей или нет?
These were the great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him.
Словом, множество вопросов мучило капеллана.
Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners.
И все же ни один из них не был для него столь тяжким крестом, как вопрос доброты и умения держаться с людьми.
He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable.
До седьмого пота он бился в тисках труднейшей дилеммы: с одной стороны, он был не в состоянии разрешить свои проблемы; с другой - он не желал отбросить их как неразрешимые.
