The Clementine Compendium

Kandiaronk: Come on, my brother. Don’t get up in arms… It’s only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they’ve heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely. However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit, any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I’ve always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly… He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true. [35]

The last passage reflects perhaps Kandiaronk’s most telling point: the extraordinary self-importance of the Jesuit conviction that an all-knowing and all-powerful being would freely choose to entrap himself in flesh and undergo terrible suffering, all for the sake of a single species, designed to be imperfect, only some of which were going to be rescued from damnation anyway. [36]"

[35] 1704: 106–7. Cited references are to the 1735 English edition of Dialogues, but the translation in this instance is a combination of that, Mann’s (2001: 67–8), and our own. Subsequent translations are our own, based on the 1735 edition.

[36] ‘Assuming he is so powerful and great, how likely is it that such an unknowable being would have made himself into a man, dwelt in misery, and died in infamy, just to work off the sin of some ignoble creature who was as far beneath him as a fly is beneath the sun and the stars? Where does that leave his infinite power? What good would it do him, and what use would he make of it? For my part, it seems to me that to believe in a debasement of this nature is to doubt the unimaginable sweep of his omnipotence, while making extravagant presumptions about ourselves.’ (cited in Mann 2001: 66)

"If art is about self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is about self-expression. And it is — but that is not necessarily all it is. It may only be a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is held up as the major source of the need to make art. What gets lost in that interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the world, or something you do about the world, or even something you do for the world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are custodian of issues larger than self.

...

"In Chapter 1, we discussed the work of Baron-Cohen, Ingudomnukul, Bejerot, Auyeung and colleagues, who all suggest that testosterone plays a part in the development and profile of autism. This leads to the conclusion (by some) that women on the autism spectrum present a less feminized profile. This has typically been interpreted as meaning that autistic girls are more masculinized. As previously discussed, Bejerot et al. (2012) suggest that the profile may simply be more androgynous (i.e. non-gender-specific) as opposed to specifically masculine."

Her voice rose. ‘Cass, you’ve got to listen, you’re the only person I know, you’re the only one who’d understand.’

‘Clearly I wouldn’t understand. That seems to me all that’s certain.’

‘No, you must let me talk, this time. We’ve got to clear this up. We’ve got to go on knowing each other all our lives. Cass, being friends with you is more important in the long run than anything Simon can ever mean to me.’

‘There is no good to be done by talking.’

‘Oh, there is, there is. Cassandra, I know – with Simon – you think I – only because you —’

‘Yes,’ said Cassandra. She stood with secateurs dangling and held her face together.

‘But you know that’s unjust. What about him, then? What about him? Isn’t he someone, doesn’t he want things and do things, didn’t he start it? I told him I couldn’t because of you. If only you hadn’t – But he does exist, I can’t just not notice him.’

Cassandra winced.

‘Why must everything always be my fault?’ Because it was, Cassandra had thought. She had thought, too, that Julia needed to tell her the details because whatever they had done was not real or finished until she had been made to be the audience, fully informed. As though they were only acting out her fate, her story; their love, or whatever it was, was simply a function of her own fear. Well, it should stay that way; she would not lose what power she had by becoming involved as an actor, or suffering with Julia. That would be the final constriction, the final limitation. She would keep what freedom detachment, or ignorance, provided.

‘You must let me tell you.’

‘When you’ve learned you can’t have things both ways,’ said Cassandra, ‘you’ll begin to grow up. I don’t want to know.’

She walked round her sister, head up, her arms full of branches and flowers. Behind her she heard Julia running, stumbling, in the other direction. She thought that Julia knew where she was vulnerable but could never really believe it, and so was compelled to go on probing. This was only partly Julia’s fault. She felt – as she often felt when she had just parted from Julia – a kind of useless, accepting affection; an inactive understanding.

And then she had been hurt by the phrase ‘just when you give in’. She had, perhaps, after all, allowed herself to be told too much.