Shalom Auslander

_ It was the knowing that there had been a happier time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing_ Not the agony of what was, but the agony of what was no longer; this was the source of all life__ pain--not the fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that is no more. Hell isn't the punishment_ Eden was.

It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going.

Kugel didn't like attics, he never did. The roofing nails overhead like fangs, waiting to sink into his skull; the cardboard boxes and plastic crates and leather trunks - tombs, sarcophagi - full of ghosts and regret and longing and loss; worse yet was the implication in all this emotional hoarding that the past was preferable to the present, that what came before bests whatever comes next, so clutch it to your chests in mourning and dread as you head into the unknowable but probably lousy future.

Which is what it all comes down to, I suppose__ow you__e selling. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where the only opinion of you that matters is the one that isn__ your own. Rate My Tits. Rate My Ass. Rate My Children. Rate My Essential Being. 1 Star: Awful. This Being left me feeling like I wanted more.

We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.