The Green Pearl

I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapours rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.

“If ambush I must, then ambush I will,” Aillas muttered to himself. “A fig for chivalry, at least until the war is won.”

“Are you yourself a Christian?”

The young man made a negative sign. “The concepts of religion baffle me.”

“This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional,” said the ex-priest. “It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.”

Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.

“I would define ‘avarice’ as a consequence of the human estate: a condition arising from turbulence and inequality. In none of the paradises, where conditions are no doubt optimum, does ‘avarice’ exert force. Here, we are men struggling toward perfection and ‘avarice’ is a station along the way.”

Aillas replied that while King Audry cited several points of technical interest, and used the resources of abstract logic in an adroit manner, he had actually made no connection with reality.

Sir, my life, drab and insipid though it may seem to others, is the only life given me to live.

“Why not alter the habits of a lifetime and speak with candour?” asked Shimrod. “Truth, after all, need not be only the tactic of last resort.”

A single question remained, the age-old cry of anguish: “How could one so beautiful be so base?”

They call me a renegade.

The epithet is inaccurate and undeserved. I cannot be faithless to a cause which I never have endorsed. Indeed, I am absolutely faithful to the only cause I espouse, which is my own welfare. I take pride in this unswerving loyalty!

Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.