Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 62
granting to the truly pure infinite serenity and sentencing the
sinners to fire, ice and sometimes piss and shit. Social custom is
never in force where one finds this vision, and one finds it
everywhere. Even in Egypt the candidates for immortality include
souls who could be bought and sold in the world of the living. The
Divinity is the flame, the heart of this vision. A queue approaches
the Divinity, always from the right; it doesn’t matter what country,
age or century from which the vision is reported. On the left, then,
one sees the forfeits and the rewards. Forfeiture and torment are,
even in the earliest reports, much more passionately painted than
eternal peace. Men thirsted, burned and took it up the ass with
much more force and passion than they played their harps and
flew. The presence of God binds the world together. His force, His
essence, is Judgment.
“Everyone knows that the only sacraments are bread and water.
The hymeneal veil and the golden ring came in only yesterday, and
as an incarnation of the vision of love, Holy Matrimony is only a
taste of the hellish consequences involved in claiming that a vision
can be represented by thought, word and deed. Here, in my cell, is
what one sees in the caves, the tombs of the kings, the temples and
churches all over the planet being performed by men, by any kind
of men the last century might have bred. Stars, dumbbells, hacks
and boobs—it is they who have constructed these caverns of hell
and, with a familiar diminishment of passion, the fields of paradise
on the other side of the wall. This is the obscenity, this is the
unspeakable obscenity, this stupid pageantry of judgment that,
finer than air or gas, fills these cells with the reek of men
slaughtering one another for no real reason to speak of. Denounce
this cardinal blasphemy, Your Grace, from the back of your broadwinged
eagle.”
“Oh, my darling,” he wrote, with no pause at all and to a girl he
had lived with for two months when Marcia had abdicated and
moved to Carmel. “Last night, watching a comedy on TV, I saw a
woman touch a man with familiarity—a light touch on the