Skip to main content

The Accursed


His hobby was watching spiders chase flies. Spiders wove their webs and waited. Sooner than later some fly was sure to be trapped in the treacherously gossamer web. There’s a preordained affinity between flies and spider webs, he thought as he watched the spider rush with the glee of a conqueror to devour the trapped fly.

‘I’m like this fly,’ he muttered to himself. His religion was the spider web and its priests were the spiders.

The Lords of the Ma’amad, having known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, have endeavoured by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways...

(1632-1677)
He remembered the verdict passed on him by the Ma’amad, the Council of Elders, when he was just 23 years old. His crime was that he had questioned their truths. Their truths were falsehoods for him. Their truths were illusions. Their truths were fabricated gossamer webs. He showed them the real truths. Truths, naked and unembellished, which would set them free from the webs. Set the people free too.

But they did not want such freedom. They wanted power.

They created angels as the sentinels of their truths. Their God was already trapped in their webs.

By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Spinoza, with the consent of God...

He wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in...

The Council of Elders cursed him.  The people repeated the curse like a mantra.

Am I the really damned one? He asked himself. Am I damned because I see the light clearly?

He pondered and pondered. Over the years. Then he wrote Ethics.  The book of Light.

They cursed him again.

The Catholic Church banned his Ethics describing it as “forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil.”

What is good and what is evil is a matter of perception, he had written in Ethics. The less you are able to perceive and understand, the more the gap between the good and the evil in your mind. Real blessedness is clear perception and understanding of reality. The noblest virtue is intellectual love, untainted by emotions. Intellectual love is nothing but knowledge of reality. Understanding of truth.

I am the accursed one, he chuckled. How limited is your perception, my friends! How constricted is your understanding! I pity you.


Labels:

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniAugust 3, 2016 at 7:28 PM

    Brilliant. Sheer brilliance of your writing :) But the question on morality still remains to be understood well, by me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 3, 2016 at 9:31 PM

      Morality is complex unless we choose to see the reality in black and white, good and evil polarities. Writer Francois Mauriac said that God is able to tolerate us because He can see everything. That's the kind of morality which Spinoza advocated though he didn't believe in God in the traditional sense.

      Truths assume so many contrasting forms for people simply because they look at them from limited perspectives.

      Delete
  2. Kritika SharmaAugust 3, 2016 at 11:32 PM

    Very nicely written.
    Cheers
    Kritika

    http://kritisharmacreations.blogspot.in/

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownAugust 4, 2016 at 8:21 PM

    Grt I am becoming a great fan of urs

    ReplyDelete
  4. ArjunaUbachaAugust 5, 2016 at 11:26 AM

    Our frames of reference are different. Our life experiences, upbringing, education and religion directly or indirectly shapes our thoughts. Ancient India was famous for "tarka" or debates. Great men debate. Lesser mortals engage in fisticuffs.

    Once I heard an interesting definition of lies. This industry executive said that if someone doesn't have the right to know something, and still if he/she asks a question, and if you give an incorrect answer then it would not be construed as lies.

    So in one stroke the tenet "lying is a sin" is circumvented and the person won't face pangs of guilt. Morality is a complex subject. If during times of religious riots, gangs are chasing a person and he/she seeks your shelter. And if the gangs ask you whether you have seen that person and you answer it as NO, then have you committed the sin of lying? One can say that you have ensured the greater good ie saved the life of a person by uttering a lie.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 5, 2016 at 6:23 PM

    Of course, there is something called situational ethics and its foundations are in tune with traditional morality. But we live in a world whose morality is like what your example illustrates. Lie becomes truth! and vice versa.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...
62 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

To an Old Friend

Image by Copilot Designer Dear S, I don’t know if you’d even remember me after all these decades, but I find myself writing to you as if it were only yesterday that we parted ways. You were one of the few friends I had at school. You may be amused to know that a drawing of yours that you gifted me stayed with me until I left Kerala after school. Half a century later, I still remember that beautiful pencil drawing, the picture of a vallam (Kerala’s canoe) resting on a shore beneath a coconut tree that slanted over a serene river on whose other bank was an undulating hilly landscape. A few birds flew happily in the sky. Though it was all done in pencil, absolutely black and white, my memories of it carry countless colours. I wonder where you are now. A few years later, when I returned to Kerala on holiday, I did visit your village to enquire about you. But the village had changed much and your hut on the hill wasn’t seen anymore. Maybe, you moved on. Maybe, you took up your father’s...
8 comments
Read more

I'll Take These With Me

  Annanya Gulia Annanya Gulia is a grade 12 student of Army Public School, Noida. A former colleague of mine in Delhi, who is now Annanya’s English teacher, drew my attention to the remarkable poetic gift of the young girl. I would like to present one of the poems here. Coming from a teenager who lives in the heartless National Capital Region of India, this poem deserves a deep look. The central theme is the value of lived experience over conventional success. The young poet emphasises that marks and certificates, often seen as measures of achievement, are not what endure. Instead, intangible qualities such as kindness, resilience, curiosity, patience, courage, and the lessons from scars, form the true wealth that she will carry forward. Superficial recognition is not what she hankers after but a celebration of inner growth. What struck me particularly is the rich and vivid imagery employed in the poem. “No rolled-up mark sheets like battle flags” underscores the exaggerated im...
7 comments
Read more