Post Script to my last

1. This AMs conversation with Lev
ME: I really liked getting to spend time together, just the two of us.
LEV: What?
ME: I really liked spending time together, you and me, together.
LEV: (Suspicious now) What?!
ME: Benjy and Imma are away and that is a little sad. But I am also happy that we are together just the two of us.
LEV: I want a toilet paper roll for my wrist.
ME: Of course.
LEV: I need weapons (walks away muttering 'weapons' under his breath).

2. I am reading Harry Potter in Hebrew. I am on chapter 3. Reading the book in translation makes me realize something about it and its allure and failings. The book seems to be all story without (or beyond or behind) language. I swear you could take 72 Hebrew speakers and put them in different rooms each with a copy of Harry Potter in Hebrew and have them translate it back into English and get the same book (and one that would be practically identical to the original). It is uncanny. Martin Amis has a hysterical bit in one of his books, I think it is London Fields, where his novelist character complains about how hard it is to get your characters from one place to another. There is a certain dreariness for writers with aspirations to being literary in writing things like "James got on the subway." "Felicia walked across the park to Alice's house." If Faulkner ever wrote a sentence like that I can't remember it. In J.K. Rowling every sentence seems to be like that. And yet they add up to a really good story. Language versus story.

3. I just finished reading "The Swimming-Pool Library" by Alan Hollinghurst. Ariela gave it to me when she'd finished it. It is a great book very beautiful and elegaic and at the same time quite cutting (and takes a tremendous delight in language). It is all about the gay cruising scene in London in the 80's right before the awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Given the subject matter it is no suprise that Ariela gave it to me with the warning (recommendation?) that it is really dirty. And it is. Why I am telling you this is because I took it on the bus the other day when I went to pick up Lev. I was nearly finished and couldn't leave it unfinished in the appartment, so I grabbed it and read it on the 74. I didn't get cruised or gay-bashed by a very well-read homophobe or anything like that. But at one point I looked up and realised that -- and this will be familiar to those of you who have taken the bus in Jerusalem before -- while lots of other people had books on the bus, almost all of them were reciting Psalms.
Which leads me to a reflection I had been meaning to share but hadn't gotten around to; one of the things that Jerusalem does, for good or bad, is it puts "Sin" as a category in your mind. In Montreal or Vancouver or New York you might think about Good and Bad but unless you are a very religiously inclined person, you won't (at least I don't) think about SIN much, which was after all a category that dominated people's thinking for hundreds of years not so long ago. Yesterday, I saw a cute teenage couple necking in the park. No surprise, nothing you don't see a dozen times on a nice day in Montreal, even in Jerusalem. But she was wearing a hijab! I was scandalized by that. SIN! Before my very eyes. How weird is that?! It's not even my religion and I was shouting SIN at them (internally, you understand). While I don't think I would ever want to get to the point where SIN became an unrecognized category of my thinking, which I suppose could happen if you lived here long enough, I do enjoy having it in my face and it makes reading a book like The Swimming-Pool Library, on the bus, amidst all the bus-y passions, political, national, religious and sinful, all the richer.

O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me.
Thou knowest my sitting down and my rising up, thou understandest my thought afar off.
Thou hast measured my going and my lying down, and thou art acquainted with all my ways.
For no word is on my tongue yet, and lo, thou knowest it all.
Thou hast beset me behind and before and laid thy hand on me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high and I cannot attain it.
(from Psalm 139)