Читать книгу The Orchid Nursery - Louise Katz - Страница 8

I have never been certain, or at least I cannot remember having been so. I know what it’s for though, certainty. It’s to give you a sense of purpose of course. It’s to direct your energy towards an end that is of benefit not only to the female body corporate and thereby the rest of the State, but ultimately to Civilisation itself. Is this not right, is this not good? Yes it is. I know this to be so for it is what I have always known because I was taught well, so that even if I did not always attend to my lessons as I should, those drills still worked into my brain carrying their messages, and the messages settled there like – what? I have been told, and it is true, that a child’s brain is an empty bucket and must be filled with information and knowledge of duties. This is how it is. Yet now an image comes to mind of silt caking the bottom of that bucket, bright green slime lining its sides.

And another image comes to meet it from some odd corner of my mind, based on pictures I have seen, I suppose, in the Museum of Iniquities. Behind my eyes I invent a street filled with energetic people talking to each other, Men and (wo)Men both, engaged in daily commerce, buying and selling, and conversing together about their work and their plans as if no-one was watching them, as if it was perfectly legal and correct. And there are children too. In dreams I walk down this street in this town although I know this dream world is haraamasur. I know. It is a corruption of reality, of righteousness, of the truth of how things are and must be. Isn’t it? Yes, of course it is.

Oh, here in my mind, something has gone wrong, wrong, wrong. Some poison – no, worse – some entity – no, entities plural, masses plural, have entered my mind bearing poisonous notions that breed and spread like a green disease, so that now there is a great deal more material in my head than what was gifted me by my teachers. My mind still retains all my lessons, all the wisdom of the Men of Right-Sight, but they are getting rammed by the new notions, battered and cut by my mind’s new population, my toxic invaders, my demons.

My demons debate among themselves the value of my learning, posing daring questions about the wisdoms achieved through effortful study, and I listen to them, and they lead me into temptation. They lead me into transgression. I follow, willingly.