Why am I breaking off at this point? Is it because the teachings of B are now complete and nothing more needs to added? Hardly. The idea is laughable. As a culture, we’ve grown up with the obscuring lenses of the Great Forgetting glued to our eyes. From the beginning, our intellectual growth has been stunted and warped by this angel dust of amnesia. This isn’t something that will be undone by any one author—or by any ten authors. Nor will it be undone by any one teacher or by any ten teachers. If it’s undone, it will be undone by a whole new generation of authors and teachers.
One of which is you.
There’s no one in reach of these words who is incapable (at the very least) of handing them to another and saying, “Here, read this.”
Parents, teach your children. Children, teach your parents. Teachers, teach your pupils. Pupils, teach your teachers.
Vision is the river, and we who have been changed are the flood.
I supposed people will ask you to summarize what it’s all about. I offer you this, knowing how inadequate it is: The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs.
They won’t like the sound of that, especially that last part. If it seems worth pursuing, remember the sticks in the river. Remember the Industrial Revolution, that great river of vision that needed not a single program to make it flow, even to the extent of engulfing the world.
Who is B?
Charles Atterley was B. Shirin has said she’s B. I’ve said I’m B. This is what’s made us targets. I have to change Fr. Lulfre’s mind about this. That’s what I’m doing here. I’ve lost the tape that was my safe-conduct, and I can only replace it with you. Because, believe me, if you’ve read these words, the damage is already done, and Fr. Lulfre will know that.
I’m not putting this very coherently. The fact is, I’m being rushed. Shirin is packed, and Michael is waiting to take us to the airport in Hamburg—and I must leave this manuscript with him. That’s settled. The steps that must be taken with it can’t be taken by someone on the run, someone with no address or phone number.
• • •
To resume: If we’re not here, Michael will be safe, because Fr. Lulfre thinks that Shirin and I are B.
What does it mean for me to say that I’m B? It doesn’t mean I can match the knowledge or the abilities of Charles and Shirin. It means I’ve been changed, fundamentally and permanently. It means I cannot be put back to what I was.
That’s why I’m B: I cannot be put back to what I was.
Shirin just stuck her head into the room to tell me that if we don’t leave in the next three minutes, we’ll miss our plane.
So—in terrible haste …
I’ve written the words, and they’ve found their way to you—I don’t know how, exactly. Michael says he has connections who know how to handle that part of it. I won’t worry about that.
The words have found their way to you even if, having read them, you hate them—even if you hide them from your children’s eyes and consign them to the flames.
They’ve found their way to you, so it’s already too late. Even if, in the meantime, Fr. Lulfre tracks us down and sends his assassins to us, he’ll be too late—because of what you’ve read here.
The contagion has been spread.
You are B.
The Great Forgetting
16 May, Der Bau, Munich
I wonder if you’ve ever consi
dered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? Perhaps even more to the point, why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day?
I’ll wager that, if there are physicists listening to me here tonight, you do not keep a copy of Newton’s Principia on your bedside table. I’ll wager that the astronomers among you do not reach on waking for a copy of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, that the geneticists among you do not spend a daily hour in reverential communion with The Double Helix, that the anatomists among you do not make a point of reading a passage a night from De humani corporis fabrica, that the sociologists among you do not carry with you everywhere a treasured copy of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. But you know very well that hundreds of millions of people thumb daily through holy books that will be read from cover to cover not a dozen times during a lifetime but a dozen dozen.
Have you ever wondered why it is the duty of the clergy of so many sects to read the Divine Office—daily? Why the same affirmations of faith are repeated word for word in so many religious communities around the world—daily? Is it so difficult to remember that Allah is One or that Christ died for our sins that it must be reiterated at least once every day throughout life? Of course we know that these things aren’t in the least difficult to remember. And we know that the pious don’t go to church every Sunday because they’ve forgotten that Jesus loves them but rather because they’ve not forgotten that Jesus loves them. They want to hear it again and again and again and again. In some sense or other, they need to hear it again and again and again and again. They can live without hearing the laws of thermodynamics ten thousand times, but for some reason, they cannot live without hearing the laws of their gods ten thousand times.
Verily I say unto you … again and again and again
A few years ago, when I began speaking to audiences, I had the rather naive idea that it would be sufficient—indeed entirely sufficient—to say each thing exactly once. Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to saying it not at all. It is indeed sufficient for people to hear the laws of thermodynamics once, and to understand that they’re written down somewhere, should they ever be needed again, but there are other truths, of a different human order, that must be enunciated again and again and again—in the same words and in different words: again and again and again.
As you know, I’ve not spoken at Der Bau before this night. Yet some of you may have heard me speak elsewhere, and you may say to yourselves, “Haven’t I heard him say these things in Salzburg or Dresden or Stuttgart or Prague or Wiesbaden?” The answer to that question is yes. And when Jesus spoke in Galilee, there were those who asked: “Didn’t I hear him say these things in Capernaum or Jerusalem or Judaea or Gennesaret or Caesarea Phillippi?” Of course they heard him say them in all these places. All the public statements attributed to Jesus in the gospels could be delivered in three hours or less, and if he didn’t repeat himself everywhere he went, then he was silent during ninety-nine percent of his public life.