Novelties & Souvenirs Read Free Page B

difficulty. It seems hardly worth all the effort to end up in a white robe singing praises; like an infinity of choir practice. Of course, there’s to be an ineffable, indescribable bliss; but it’s damn hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
    “I suppose really religious people sense it,” Phillippa said, feeling odd to be defending heaven.
    “I don’t know. I think people who really believe it invest the ordinary things they love with the idea of heaven; so that when they say ‘This is heavenly,’ they really mean it.” Phillippa noticed his shapely hands, mobile now where they had been meekly folded before. They too reminded her of someone; yet how could so changeful a thing as hands, so markable by time, retain a reminder of him as a boy?
    “Mother—Amy—always said,” he went on, “that she didn’t care about heaven if she couldn’t have around her all the people and places and times she loved most, in their characters—I mean not abstracted; not in white robes; not on clouds. I think I believe that. Heaven is where you are—or will be, or have been, there being no time in heaven—most happy.”
    Where for her, Phillippa wondered; and knew, without assenting to the possibility: the farm, in high summer, years ago. If thatwere so…But it wasn’t. If there was one thing Phillippa knew, it was that happiness is something you lose, fast or slow. “I wouldn’t think,” she said, “your church would go along with those ideas.”
    He laughed, pleased. “No, well. All that is up in the air, now, you know. I’m something of a heresiarch anyway, really. In fact, I’ve recently worked up a new heresy, or refurbished an old one. Would you like to hear it?”
    “If you can promise we won’t be punished for it,” Phillippa said. To the north, a vast, curdled darkness was advancing across their path. “I mean look at that sky.”
    “It goes like this,” he said, crossing one sharp-kneed leg over the other. “I’ve decided that not all men have immortal souls. Immortality is what Adam and Eve forfeited in the garden. From then on it was dust to dust. What Jesus promised to those who believed in him was eternal life—the possibility of not dying eternally. So that the believer, if his faith and hope and charity are strong, creates his own immortality through Jesus—the first immortal man since Adam: the new Adam.”
    “What about the outer darkness, and the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth?”
    “A metaphor for death. I think it’s easier to explain those few references to fires and so on as metaphors for death than to explain all the many references to death as metaphors for eternal punishment. Jesus said, He who believes in me shall not die; that seems clearly to mean that everybody else will.”
    “No hell?”
    “No. A great problem solved there. Those who don’t care about salvation merely go under the ground, utterly extinguished, having failed to accomplish their immortality.”
    “Comforting.”
    “Isn’t it. Also clears up the problems of infant damnation and the Good Pagan. More than that, though: it makes the choice harder. The choice for Jesus. When the alternative doesn’t seem so terrible.”
    “In fact—I’m sorry—preferable. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me.”
    “Well, there you are. Perhaps it isn’t an unalloyed good. Perhaps it’s quite difficult—as difficult as any kind of life.”
    “Dear me.”
    “Maybe some have no choice. The God-possessed, the saintly.” He had grown more still, more inward. She wondered if he were still joking. “In fact, I would think the population of heaven would be small.”
    Phillippa thought of medieval pictures of the court of heaven, the winged saints in rows intended to suggest great numbers but really absurdly few. But that wasn’t the heaven he envisioned, was it? Where ripe fruit never falls. If it were to be a heaven composed of the things one loved most, it would have to include (as far as Phillippa was concerned)