Fairy Tales: On the Wing 1 🧚 B.C & Alberta

Beneath the Old Apple Tree

Summerland, BC

When he was 11 years old, Antonio was lectured by his father beneath the Old Apple Tree. While the bombs were falling on the rice paddies of Vietnam and Cambodia, the preacher dropped these heavy words onto the frail shoulders of his progeny: Son, the world is like the fruit of this tree, full of Good and Evil. The skin of the apple must never be touched. But the seed lies within the flesh, and must be passed on to future generations. He then bit into the apple that lay firmly in his right hand. A juicy bit of flesh flew up into the air and splattered onto the invisible surface of Antonio’s third eye.

Antonio was condemned to spend each summer picking the barely ripened fruit of the Okanagan Valley. Labouring under the hot sun, he asked himself, How to extract the seeds and sweet juices without rupturing the skin? In high school, and later at university, he pursued this question relentlessly. By his second year he realized that he would never find the answer in Biology or in any other science that pretended to answer the basic questions about life. As his Law professor said, science attempted to find means, not motives, and any lawyer knew that motives cut deeper than means. 

So Antonio switched to the Dark Arts, eventually completing degrees in Law and Literature. He reasoned that these Arts were the source of the arguments that defined the problems of his existence in the first place, however unjustly guarded these ivory secrets might be:

the Towers of Heaven are filled
With Armed watch, that render all access
Impregnable; oft on the bordering Deep
Encamp their Legions, or with obscure wing
Scout far and wide into the Realm of night,
Scorning surprize.

Ever since grade school, something inside Antonio told him that the teachers and priests were idiots. They didn’t understand that however hard they shone their little flashlights of knowledge and truth, they would never see the nature of darkness. The very light they shone on it made it disappear. And then they said it didn’t exist.

At university, Antonio didn’t believe anything his instructors said, yet he wanted to learn everything they taught. The source of his rebellious infatuation with knowledge went deeper than his hatred of the politically correct educational system or the moral rectitude of his father. Beneath his angry thoughts was a dark impulse throbbing with revolt. This impulse urged him to study Law in order to break it, discover Beauty in order to possess it, and find Religion in order to destroy it. English Literature seemed just the thing.

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Next:🧚 On the Wing 2: Natural Selection

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