A Reader on Reading

The word blasphemy comes from the Greek and means “to offend someone.” In Greek mythology, blasphemy depends on the sensitivity of the blasphemed god. Athena punishes the young Arachne by turning her into a spider because she had boasted of being a better weaver than the goddess. For the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, the notion of blasphemy becomes confused with that of heresy, except that, thanks to a bureaucratic nicety, Muslims and Jews could not be accused of heresy because they had never confessed to being believers. They could, however, be accused of insulting God and His saints, and not only through words and actions (by saying, for instance, that fortune, not God, rules our lives) but also through thought, what was known as “blaspheming with the heart.” An edict of 538, signed by the emperor Justinian, declared that the punishment for blasphemy was death, but the sentence was rarely carried out. In the Judeo-Christian world, the notion of blasphemy is today still legally valid: in the United States, for instance, various religious groups have succeeded in having withdrawn from school libraries books that in their opinion insult their God. This is how writers as diverse as Roald Dahl, J. D. Salinger, and J. K. Rowling have seen themselves included among such banished classics as Jonathan Swift and William Faulkner.

The famous tenth surah of the Qur’an (10:100) reads, “No soul may believe except by the will of God.” In the beginning of the eighth century, the illustrious theologian Hasan Al-Basri understood this to mean that “we cannot desire good without God desiring it for us.” Believers must therefore be content with the conviction that they have been chosen by divine grace and not demand from those whom God has not seen fit to be elected an equal devotion. Let the others mock: that too (if we continue the argument) is due to God’s will (whose reasons are inscrutable). The faithful say that their God demands from them sacrifice and resilience. No doubt, proof of this is that He has decreed the existence of a few court jesters, heirs to Voltaire, to Erasmus, to Rabelais, who, following the advice of Horace (another of God’s creations) advocate teaching through laughter.

At the Mad Hatter’s Table

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter; and in that

direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6

AS MOST PERCEPTIVE READERS will agree, the distinctive characteristic of the human world is its insanity. Ants scuttle in ordered lines, back and forth, with impeccable propriety. Seeds grow into trees that shed their leaves and bud again with conventional circularity. Birds migrate, lions kill, turtles mate, viruses mutate, rocks crumble into dust, clouds shape and reshape mercifully unconscious of what they build and destroy. We alone live consciously knowing that we live and, by means of a half-shared code of words, are able to reflect on our actions, however contradictory or inexplicable. We heal and help, we sacrifice ourselves and show concern and compassion, we create wonderful artifices and miraculous devices to better understand the world and ourselves. And at the same time, we build our lives on superstitions, hoard for no purpose except greed, cause deliberate pain to other creatures, poison the water and the air we need to live, and finally bring our planet to the verge of destruction. We do all this with full awareness of our actions, as if walking through a dream in which we do what we know we should not be doing and refrain from doing what we know we should do. “May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life?” wrote Lewis Carroll in his diary on 9 February 1856.

In the seventh chapter of her travels through the insane world of Wonderland, Alice comes upon a table placed under a tree and laid out with many settings. Though the table is a large one, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse are crowded together at one corner, having tea, the sleeping Dormouse serving as a cushion for the comfort of the others. “No room! No room!” they cry out when they see Alice coming. “There’s plenty of room!” Alice says indignantly and sits down in a large armchair at one end.