Free City of God by E.L. Doctorow Page A

Gymnasium: that in order to maintain his self-respect he required my attention, and that Jesus had been crucified by such as I. So there were the two elements now fused—the authoritarian and the militant Christian. And now I ask you to consider the possibility that the pious brainwork of Christian priests and kings that over centuries had demonized and racialized the Jewish people in Europe with the autos-da-fé, pogroms, economic proscriptions, legal encumbrances, deportations, and a culture of socially respectable anti-Semitism. . . had at this moment in my gymnasium classroom attained critical mass.Let us imagine such small quiet resentments imploding in the ears of a thousand, a million children of my generation. And a moment later: the Holocaust. For you see what moves not as fast as light but fast enough, and with an accrued mass of such density as not to be borne, is the accelerating disaster of human history.
    So what, to be logical, must we conclude? We must conclude that given the events in the twentieth century of European civilization, the traditional religious concept of God cannot any longer be seriously maintained. Well then, if I am a serious person, as I believe I am, I must seek God elsewhere than in the religious scriptures. I must try to understand certain irreducible laws of the universe as a transcendent behavior. In these laws, God, the Old One, will be manifest.
    Now oddly enough, though these are cold, eternal, imageless verities, insofar as we are beginning to understand them, these great voiceless, vast habits of universal dimension, we may take comfort in their beauty. We may glory in our consciousness of them, that they are—incomprehensibly—comprehensible!
    For, remember, there could in theory be alternatives to what is. For example, if gravity ceased to be a fundamental mechanism of the universe—let us do a thought experiment—what would result? Our solar system would fly apart, all the waters of the earth would spill out of their ocean basins and pour in crystals through black space as lumps of coal down a chute, the whole system of dark-mattered space and stars, sunlight, organic life, mitosis, one thing leading to another in an unfolding of necessary and sufficient conditions. . . would not be. Well, what would be? Perhaps after several trillions of years something organic would occur out of the vast eternal black shapelessness that did not depend on light or moisture in order to propagate—some formless ephemera nourished on nothing—and life, if it was life, would be defined in a way that cannot now be defined. Surely all of this is less an inducement to consciousness than what we have now, what we see now, what we try to understand now.
    By way of calming our nerves, let us celebrate the constancy of the speed of light, let us praise gravity, that it is in action the curvature of space, and glory that even light is bent by its force, riding the curvatures of space toward celestial objects as a fine, shimmering red-golden net might drape over them. The subjection of light to gravity was proven by my colleague Millikan some years after my theory cameto me, when the light passing near the star X shifted by his measurements to the red spectrum, indicating that it had bent. And there, my dear friends, is a sacrament for us, is it not? A first sacrament, the bending of starlight. Yes. The bending of starlight.

    â€”Sarah Blumenthal’s Conversation with Her Father
    I was a runner. My job was to carry the news or the instructions from the council to the families in their houses. Or messages from one council member to another. Or to stand watch by the square, at the entrance to the bridge, to let them know if the open car was coming with the half-track filled with soldiers just behind it, which meant the next bad thing was about to occur. I would run like the wind through the back alleys and side streets to give warning. So I had responsibilities beyond my