Hopewit

  CONSIDER THE LILIES   Have you ever wondered what could be going on in the mind of a cow lying placidly in a pasture, chewing the cud balls she stored up in her morning feed. Or that lone horse in a pasture you drive by on your way to and from work who—standing on three legs as resting horses do—could be a lonely, living statue ... day after day after day. Surely absolute, unmitigated boredom is the lot of the domesticated animal species we imprison for our pleasure and nourishment.             I’m intrigued by the creation myth in the first chapters of Genesis, primarily because it’s an  attempt to visualize what could make us so different from all other living things. Consciousness—or the knowledge of good and evil as Genesis calls it—is imagined to have been a choice fraught with such danger that the creator predicts that “if you eat of it, you shall surely die.”        ...

Book of Danielicus Chapter 13:  1. I, Commonicus, was asleep in my chamber on the day of the Feast of Thanksgiving during the reign of the King Usacadnezzar, when all the land and all its people quaked in fear of the masked monsters roaming the streets of Usalonica to arrest all aliens in their midst, and the innocent quaked in fear of what must surely follow. 2. And I and my neighbours were much perturbed by the oracles of CBC The National that had long ago begun to cry out news portending that Canatobawan could one day fall to the sword of the mighty Usacadnezzar under whose banner the most ferocious of gladiators were assembled. 3. And I, in fear and trembling double-locked the door to my bedchamber, and slept and wakened and slept and wakened until, while yet the sun had not crested the grain elevators, I woke in great perturbation, shaking as with the ague. 4. It was a dream that had so afflicted me and torn me from my restless bed. But I could neither recall   ...