From J M Coetzee's "Schooldays of Jesus"

Read the first in the trilogy some years ago.

Then, seeing it was coming out in May, I next read The Death of Jesus. Lastly, I read the middle text: The Schooldays of Jesus.

Have been lazy about posting reading "clips" (busy with the end of school, the end of a career), but this one was pretty good so I had to post it.

*

He drops in on a class in astrology. Discussion turns to the Spheres: whether the stars belong to the Spheres or on the contrary follow trajectories of their own; whether the Spheres are finite or infinite in number. The lecturer believes the number of Spheres is finite – finite but unknown and unknowable, as she puts it. ‘If the number of Spheres is finite, then what lies beyond them?’ asks a student. ‘There is no beyond,’ replies the lecturer. The student looks nonplussed. ‘There is no beyond,’ she repeats. He is not interested in the Spheres, or even in the stars, which as far as he is concerned are lumps of insensate matter moving through empty space in obedience to laws of mysterious origin. What he wants to know is what the stars have to do with the numbers, what the numbers have to do with music, and how an intelligent person like Juan Sebastián Arroyo can talk about stars, numbers, and music in the same breath. But the lecturer shows no interest in numbers or music. Her subject is the configurations assumed by the stars, and how those configurations influence human destiny. There is no beyond. How can the woman be so sure of herself? His own opinion is that, whether or not there is a beyond, one would drown in despair were there not an idea of a beyond to cling to.

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