woolfean

[woolfean]

The Atheist

”I no longer believe in God”, a release from his voice, administered with trepidation. Only this very moment dallying courage triumphed over his hesitation and fear of declaring his belief. The room was quiet, saints erected with divine power; he there felt confined, airless. He felt his sanity stretched, thinking of God; thinking of Hell: that the Forces of Heaven shall purge this city, the world: he thinks of London and Big Ben; the streets and their beauty compared to Italy and its blue and green hills; he thinks of Rome and its rusty Earth and now life in Bacolod, here in its very moment: life continues; the motors flows and think we are all smoke evaporated after our fragile life. He always felt the intensity of his life; he felt all the strokes, the pound like he came to listen to Beethoven and Brahms. The life he shepherded felt spoilt; Bacolod is no compensation for the life of writers, artists and intellectuals living in Paris and London; then never did he feel it was enough compensation for the beauty of Rome, Italy, and London, too. Life gets thickens all the time. Spoilt. Greasy. All moments that seem perpetually moving are exacerbated. He felt the dull weight of his atheism. He simply cannot believe in God anymore. “There’s hell”, he said, yet stupefied by his inability to believe God. The room was no English; he could not sit in the fire, reading Milton. Exhausted dropped in the bed like a mummy wrapped by the thick veil of darkness. The mahogany burgundy table, the windows open, dead was the air, insipid. The book was dropped weightless on the table. Schubert is playing on his laptop. “He is divine”, he said lacking of technicality to describe Schubert. He had his hand the book of Flannery O’Connor and Diary of Virginia Woolf. He had loved reading; it was a dear occupation to him. A regret occupied him: memory slipped through. He still lay there, obnoxiously controlling his sanity. How many years did he think of not reading a book because he knew for he will analyse his belief and knew that he'll abandon God? The failed transition to atheism was the greatest madness he’d ever known. A rotten respite coming back like a worm to dig up his mind that he cannot never rid. “Stoic apple” he said mockingly, “so receptive and enduring”  He carried his religious burden like a cross. “I must read Irish. I must not alone read James Joyce - there’s Mary Lavin and there is Elizabeth Bowen - but I think Bowen wrote of London, of life in the war, of marriage. London survive as an organism, a civilization she observed it. How about Frank O’Connor? Seán Ó Faoláin. But they want to liberate, I think, Ireland from Christianity. I must still read Irish.”

A complication that he had to refresh his mind He had a satisfactory of writers that reflect his biases. More than that: the feeling of having the same life and struggle for the restoration of his faith. Then, who shall we run into Greene, Updike, and Eliot? It is the insistence of his comfort to read them. The renewable literature for his decayed, rotten religious belief. Annie Ernaux's books look modest on the table covered in white, tantalizing as cream. He looked at it; then his eyes jumped from one another and saw the multitudinous of his books. There, is the book of many writers that have cast their voices into us. His breathing is continuous yet short and he knows his anxiety corrupting him again. The chest look pumping and waiting for a rescue. He can feel the dashing of air on his throat - then stopped; continuous swirling on his neck down to his chest. “Oh God. Don’t! I have not lived yet.” But one thing we know is he cannot die because he is afraid of hell. He was afraid that he could not afford to sacrifice for that. He loved his life, and if he denounced his atheism, he’d lose himself: his whole life. Thinking is what makes him. He is his own thinking. Bacolod is nothing but the remains of Sodom, a city of Sin, of false light: an impious city full of celebrations. Will he condemn the life he lived he had said? Then he was a Sodom of himself, deprived of love, lavishes the life of the flesh. “Should I read books?” he uttered. Thinking made him insane. All thinking men are mad, he said. He fled away from God for his incessant desire to anchor himself to his whole belief and found himself in the immensity of his boat in the rainstorm. “Crane, yes, Stephen Crane,” How envied the freedom of bird; never feared of immensity: yet we are in this small ship. How long we can tolerate these: these changing scenes of life: increase the volume of madness: never ceasing?” The mind seems to settle in like a pear drop on the soft air. He rose; then, he strode and strode like a pendulum in the room. “What should I read? Then he thinks of Philosophers. Then, who he thought to read? The books of Jose Saramago, Par Lagerkvist, and Nikos Kazantzakis lay flat there. He opened the book of Par Lagerkvist, “Barabbas” the man who cannot believe in God but he cannot pray nor affirm his faith. He can only say, “I want to believe.” The windows opened, and seems moths rushes to him to infect the reflection, "Am I still him?Now, he felt distance to his past belief. Doggedly, he flings on his belief. “I shall read yet what I ought to read? Theology. Not this time.” But what seems to matter with him about the man relationship of God and Man when finished Woolf’s diary: he can only think of its beauty. Now, there is no going back. Yet what a faint feeling of religious crisis still attached to him. The tightening grip of the dominant church on his ideology made him apolitical. No one can change his belief now. “I can finally read Milton, now!”. He can now read English Literature without holding back. In the cabinet he stacked the multitudinous and voluminous works of English Literature: the voluptuousness of poetry: its meditation. “To lay ground, the soft bluish sky and white clouds flew like a white dove and will read Keats or Shelley.” The struggle is over. He felt no longer shackled by religious dogma. Hell was no longer his concern. He felt it over. “To crouch in the ground like a bird. To immensity of the world.” Now he felt his courage. For he thought that everything was over: the moment was revealed to him: God had left him, the air was dead, and the world lay flat and motionless. He thought of hell. The vivid fire struck him. God is unreachable, and he cannot restore his faith. He whispers to stricken air with disquietude “Oh God!”

[woolfean]