by Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-III
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This is a re-write of a story I did for my high school literary journal (though I haven't actually read it since then; I just wrote it over from memory, keeping the title and a few other bits I remembered).
All my fellow students at the all-male prep school thought this was "deep" -- and I, for my part, probably wrote it this way, so it'd be "right up their alley," even if I wasn't all that conscious of it at the time -- but what interested me about it later on, thinking about it more recently, was the fact that it's all internal impression: it really doesn't matter so much whether the shopkeeper guy is "right" or not, so much that HE think so (or he MIGHT be!).
It felt "wrong" to try to write out some of the adolescent presumptions that made the story come to be in the first place, however, so if it feels a bit awkward, sorry!
"'Everything, they say, 'has been handed over by you to the pope, therefore everything now belongs to the pope, and you may as well not come at all now, or at least don't interfere with us for the time being. They not only speak this way, they also write this way, at least the Jesuits do. I've read it in their theologians myself. 'Have you the right to proclaim to us even one of the mysteries of that world from which you have come?' my old man asks him, and answers the question himself: 'No, you have not, so as not to add to what has already been said once, and so as not to deprive people of freedom, for which you stood so firmly when you were on earth. Anything you proclaim anew will encroach upon the freedom of men's faith, for it will come as a miracle, and the freedom of their faith was the dearest of all things to you. even then, one and a half thousand years ago. Was it not you who so often said then: "I want to make you free"? But now you have seen these "free" men,' the old man suddenly adds with a pensive smile. 'Yes, this work has cost us dearly,' he goes on, looking sternly at him, 'but we have finally finished this work in your name. For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished, and well finished. You do not believe that it is well finished? You look at me meekly and do not deign even to be indignant with me. Know, then, that now, precisely now, these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet. It is our doing, but is it what you wanted? This sort of freedom?'"
-from Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" (1881)
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