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discarded apple pits. “I have been called a ’secular scholar’ at various times by certain people, and sometimes I’ve
been staked, stoned,mu online zen, and burned for it.”
“Why, you never?a” The priest stopped, frowning sharply. That madness again. Benjamin was peering at
him suspiciously, and his smile had gone cold. Now, thought the abbot, he’s looking at me as if I were one of
Them?awhatever formless “Them” it was that drove him here to solitude. Staked, stoned, and burned? Or did his
“I” mean “We” as in “I, my people”?
“Benjamin?aI am Paulo. Torquemada is dead. I was born seventy-odd years ago, and pretty soon I’ll die. I
have loved you, old man, and when you look at me,cheap metin2 gold, I wish you would see Paulo of Pecos and no other.”
Benjamin wavered for a moment. His eyes became moist.
“I sometimes?aforget?a”
“And sometimes you forget that Benjamin is only Benjamin and not all of Israel.”
“Never!” snapped the hermit, eyes blazing again. “For thirty-two centuries, I?a” He stopped and closed his
mouth tightly.
“Why?” the abbot whispered almost in awe. “Why do you take the burden of a people and its past upon
yourself alone?”
The hermit’s eyes flared a brief warning, but he swallowed a throaty sound and lowered his face into his
hands. “You fish in dark waters.”
“Forgive me.”
“The burden?ait was pressed upon me by others.” He looked up slowly. “Should I refuse to take it?”
The priest sucked in his breath. For a time there was no sound in the shanty but the sound of the wind. There
was a touch of divinity in this madness! Dom Paulo thought The Jewish community was thinly scattered in these
times. Benjamin had perhaps outlived his children, or somehow become an outcast. Such an old Israelite might
wander for years without encountering others of his people. Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent
conviction that he was the last, the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel.
And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of
his own lifetime. His “I” was the converse of the imperial “We.”
But I, too, am a member of a oneness, thought Dom Paulo, a part of a congregation and a continuity. Mine,
too, have been despised by the world. Yet for me the distinction between self and nation is clear. For you, old
friend, it has somehow become obscure. A burden pressed upon you by others? And you accepted it? What must
it weigh? What would it weigh for me? He set his shoulders under it and tried to heave, testing the bulk of it: I
am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every
monk and priest who has breathed and walked the earth since Christ, as well as for the acts of my own.
He shuddered and began shaking his head.
No, no. It crushed the spine, this burden. It was too much for any man to bear,runescape power leveling, save Christ alone. To be
cursed for a faith was burden enough. To bear the curses was possible, but then?ato accept the illogic behind the
curses, the illogic which called one to task not only for himself but also for every member of his race or faith, for
their actions as well as one’s own? To accept that too??aas Benjamin was trying to do?
No, no.
And yet,maple mesos, Dom Paulo’s own Faith told him that the burden was there, had been there since Adam’s time?aand
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