Somewhere Over the Sea Read Online Free Page B

you’ve learned to accept, even though you probably think of them as being woefully imprecise. I remember well when you were smaller and I asked you, for example, if you could pass me the milk. “Yes,” you said, but without doing anything with the milk carton, because to your ears all I had done was ask if you were capable of passing it to me.
    Now you are able to understand that certain questions like this can have an implied meaning, and you act accordingly, passing me the milk without requiring a specific request to do so. But you neither understand nor see the point of most linguistic oddities and tools — irony, satire, jokes, double entendres, sarcasm, and metaphor. To your ears they only serve to create distorted meaning, misunderstanding, and disorder. How to explain to you things like faith and sin, resurrection, and redemption? And, moreover, how to explain that these words, which you (and all the rest of us!) have such difficulties in understanding to begin with, have different meanings within different religions, and even for different people within the individual religions? And how to explain to you that for some other people these words don’t mean anything at all, without that necessarily making them stupid or bad?
    Then I choose, as I perhaps too often do, the simplest solution. All people are different, I say. Some believe in God, some in Allah, some in Buddha. Some others don’t believe in any of them, and many people don’t know what to believe. Me, for example. I don’t know whether it was God who created nature, or whether nature created itself. I don’t believe we go to heaven when we die, but I don’t know. Nor do I know whether there is a hell where we will be punished for our sins, but I choose not to believe it.
    THINKING AND KNOWING are two very different things. You have understood that. Often, when you ask me a question that seems difficult to answer, I will say:
    â€” I don’t know.
    You don’t like to hear that, so you immediately follow up:
    â€” But what do you think? Do you think it’s true that the sun will explode?
    â€” Yes, but in a very, very long time.
    â€” Do you think I’ll be in heaven by then?
    â€” Yes.
    â€” Do you think the angels and gods and so on can arrange for heaven not to catch fire?
    â€” . . .
    You want an answer. That’s to say, I suspect you want confirmation of the fact that there is always an answer, regardless of what it might be. The content of the answer is often subordinate; above all you want to know that all questions have their answer. Because if there is not one — and only one — answer to each individual question, then how can the world make sense? How are you supposed to relate to a world that lacks answers?
    You have no choice, son. I don’t want to make things more difficult for you than they already are, but there is no way around it. Just as you have to live with the fact that all people know and believe and think in different ways about different things, and as a result there is no formula you can learn to tell you what a person is and you will have to accept that you will never get answers to everything, that very often there is no answer, no matter how hard you search, and that there will always be more questions than answers. Even for those who believe in God — that’s precisely what they do — they believe.
    To believe can mean several things. It can mean imagining something you cannot know, as when you believe that you’ll be an astronaut when you grow up. It can also mean to trust, as when you say you have been given and not taken a marble at school, and I say that I believe you. And it can mean that something is likely, but not certain, as when I believe that Victoria will be angry if you go rummaging through her things. And then it can mean a mixture of all of these — to trust in something one cannot know but