My Library

… Yes, I have the percept three, three hundred, three thousand, three million, three billion, it is the same … common effort, willingly or not, long association, repeated shared experience … this special bonding beyond self can take place without awareness of what it is or its importance … often it can’t be called love because local custom would then attach a physical sexual inference to it, male or female … thus it is covered over and sublimated … (You are learning rapidly. Your human perspective serves you well. Do you wish to move to the next point in your survey?) I understand what is happening, the human portion … if it is still of that value, I am fine … (We will continue, then.) CLICK! I am standing in front of a stone building with a tall spire. Wide steps lead down to the cobbled square, and the square is filled with a flow of people, horse-drawn wagons and carts, and the dusty smell of human sweat, animals, cooking, and excrement from all manner of living things. I am a Priest, and although it is hot, I am wearing my brown-hooded robe that reaches to my ankles. It is cool inside the church, yet I am loath to enter. The Ritual is about to begin, and I must attend and participate as part of the duties of my calling. I am sick in heart at what I must do. It is so different from that which I dreamed those years ago, my life in the service of the Almighty. The glory of the tolling bell in the spire, the rich voices of the choir echoing throughout the arched roof in Holy Harmony, the majesty and mystery of the Processional, the bowed heads of the reverent, kneeling people, they are the same. These are the parts that brought open the rising need in me, and I answered. Now they are the same, but I am not. Where is the need? It has left, unfulfilled. Where is the mystery? It has vanished under the weight of the unfolding years and that which my eyes have seen and my ears have heard … the bell begins its tolling, and that is the signal that I must enter and join the others. I turn and pass through the smaller door to one side and into