Difference

I don’t know why I find some religious belief so contemptible, and not always the narrowest and most bigoted. Devout Catholics, orthodox Jews, though I have to confess I never knew any orthodox Jews, all the Jews I know revile orthodoxy, but I don’t mind these types so much, the people who take seriously the Pope and the Inquisition, now restyled the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or the guys, an inappropriate term, who take to the streets shamelessly rigged out in antique East European fancy dress with sideburns curling to their waists, they’re OK, it’s just as if they have some chronic disease or affliction that you ignore, it’s part of them of course, inseparable from who they are, but then so is a person’s penis or vagina and in most social relationships one tends to be unaware of these aspects of individual identity, or reduce them to the vaguest generality. In a sense it’s like my friend who told me he was gay, though I didn’t catch on, while we were pissing in the African savannah together, it became, when I did catch on, something about him that was rather distant, we disagreed I remember about the music of Benjamin Britten, at the time I thought he just had arcane tastes, now I realise that he was talking about a commitment, a solidarity with a peculiar sensibility and way of life, so very like everybody else’s, the same sun in the same sky, and yet so very unlike, the sun a homosexual sun, the stars gay stars, just as Jews in their great history of persecution or Catholics in their Marian besottedness must still pass their days much as the rest of us, average people locked in the Monday to Friday plus weekends, in the average skull.
In fact Bob managed to be both, gay and Catholic. And the thing about gays, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, is that that’s the way they are, they didn’t make the choice, they, men and women, became part of the world as Jews or Catholics or Muslims or homosexuals and will soon cease to be part of the world, absolutely, just as all but an infinitesimal fraction, an infinitesimal fraction of an infinitesimal fraction of humanity have absolutely ceased to be part of the world and only emerge into the present as untraceable particles in the ocean of human culture, of all the sounds and things, bricks and words, as if one could take a water molecule at one of the Ganga’s many mouths and by examining it trace its journey and its origin, or rather its initial transition across an arbitrary boundary between what in the universe is the river Ganga and what in the universe is not the river Ganga.