The Story of B

337 Pages·1997·2.52 MB·English

by  Daniel Quinn

DANIEL QUINN
A NEW NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF
ISHMAEL

THE STORY OF B
An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
“Daniel Quinn has written two of the most unnerving and transformative
books in recent memory. The first was Ishmael; The Story of B is the other, a
compelling ‘humantale’ that will unglue, stun, shock, and rearrange
everything you’ve learned and assume about Western civilization and our
future.”
—Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce

“One of the most important storytellers of our age, Daniel Quinn, in The
Story of B, continues the journey begun so beautifully with Ishmael. Whether
or not you agree with every word, there is no doubt that ‘B’ offers us a unique
opportunity—to think together about the unquestioned beliefs and
assumptions that have shaped our culture over the past 10,000 years and that
will, if they remain unquestioned, keep us on a path that seems increasingly
unsustainable.”
—Peter M. Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline

Praise for Daniel Quinn’s ISHMAEL
Winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship

“Wonderfully earnest and engaging. Think of Robert Pirsig in Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or B. F. Skinner in Walden Two.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the
plane...laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“As suspenseful, inventive and socially urgent as any fiction or nonfiction
book you are likely to read this or any other year.”
—The Austin Chronicle
Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael was the winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship,
a prize honoring fiction that produces creative and positive solutions to global
problems. This extraordinary novel has become an underground bestseller
and a testament for a burgeoning spiritual movement. Now Quinn carries the
message of Ishmael even further, in this remarkable and compelling new
novel filled with intrigue and startling ideas.

“Population: A Systems Approach” was published in a slightly different form
by the Center for Biotechnology Policy and Ethics, Texas A&M University.

All rights reserved.
Copyright © by Daniel Quinn.
Covert art copyright © 1996 by Alan Ayers.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.
For Goody Cable
and of course Rennie, always

When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one
is blind.
—Paul Veyne
PART
ONE
3
Friday, May 10

A Diary
Today I ducked into a drugstore and bought a notebook—this notebook
right here that I’m writing in. Clearly a momentous event.
I’ve never kept (or been tempted to keep) a diary of any kind, and I’m not
even sure I’m going to keep this one, but I thought I’d better try. I find it’s a
peculiar business, because, though I’m supposedly only writing for myself, I
feel impelled to explain who I am and what I’m doing here. It makes me
suspect that all diarists are in fact writing not for themselves but for posterity.
I wonder if there’s a child anywhere who hasn’t, at some stage of
awakening consciousness, incorporated into his/her address “The World” and
“The Universe.” Having already done that (almost three decades ago), I begin
this diary by writing:
I am Jared Osborne, a priest, assistant pastor, parish of St. Edward’s,
professed of the Order of St. Lawrence, Roman Catholic Church. And having
written that, I feel obliged to add: not a very good priest. (Wow, this diary
business is hot stuff! These are words I’ve never dared to whisper, even to
myself!) Without examining the logic of this too closely, I can say it’s
precisely because I’m “not a very good priest” that I feel the need to start this
diary at this point in my life.
This is excellent. This is exactly where I have to begin. Before I go on to
anything else, I have to put it down right here in black-and-white who I am
and how I got here, though thank God I don’t have to go back as far as my
childhood or anything like that. I just have to go back far enough to figure out
how I came to be involved in one of the strangest quests of modern times.
4
Recruiting Poster: Why I’m a Laurentian
By long tradition, we Laurentians have been defined in terms of our
difference from the Jesuits. Some historians say we’re not as bad, some say
we’re worse, and some say the only difference between us is that they have a
better instinct for public relations. Both were founded at roughly the same
time to combat the Reformation, and when that battle was lost (or at least
over), both redefined themselves as elitist educators. And where do little
Jesuits and Laurentians come from? Jesuit recruits come from Jesuit schools,
and Laurentian recruits come from Laurentian schools. I came to the
Laurentians from St. Jerome’s University, the intellectual hearth of the order
in the United States. This may explain why I became a Laurentian, but of
course it doesn’t explain why I became a priest. All I can say on that point
right now is that the reasons I gave when I was in my early twenties no longer
seem very persuasive to me.
The important thing to note here is that I was considered a real comer when
I was an undergraduate. I was expected to be another jewel in the crown—but
by the time postdoctoral studies rolled around, I’d been spotted as a
rhinestone—plenty of flash but pure paste. I was a big disappointment to
everybody, most of all to me, of course. My superiors were as nice about it as
they could be. I was never going to be invited to join the faculty at St.
Jerome’s or any other of the order’s universities, but they did offer to find a
place for me at one of their prep schools. Or if I didn’t care to be humiliated
quite that much, I could be loaned out to the diocese for work in the parochial
trenches. I chose the latter, which is how I ended up at St. Ed’s.
I say I’m not a very good priest. I suppose this is a bit like a cart horse
saying it’s not a very good horse, because it expected to be raced but couldn’t
make the grade. The blunt truth is that you don’t have to be a very good priest
to make the grade at the parish level. This observation is not as cynical as it
sounds—the priest is only a mediator of grace, not a source of grace, after all.
Sure, you’ve got to be even-tempered and patient and tolerant of human
shortcomings (which says a lot), but nobody expects to you be a St. Paul or a
St. Francis, and a sacrament that comes to you from the hands of an utter
5
swine is every bit as efficacious as one that comes to you from the hands of a
paragon. The way things are going nowadays, you’ll be considered a bloody
treasure if you don’t turn out to be a child molester or a public drunk.

Enter Fr. Lulfre
Six days ago I got a nice little note from the dean’s secretary asking if I
would be so kind as to present myself next Wednesday (day before yesterday)
at the office of Fr. Bernard Lulfre at three o’clock in the afternoon. Well,
now, that was interesting.
Dear Diary, I can tell right off the bat that you don’t know who this
Bernard Lulfre is, so I’ll have to enlighten you. In a word, Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin was the Jesuits’ superstar, and Bernard Lulfre is ours. Teilhard de
Chardin was a geologist and a paleontologist, and Bernard Lulfre is an
archaeologist and a psychiatrist. The difference, typically, is that Teilhard de
Chardin is world famous, while Bernard Lulfre is known to about ten people
(with names like Karl Popper, Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Noam
Chomsky, and Jacques Derrida). Never mind. To those who breathe the
rarefied air of the scholarly Alps, Bernard Lulfre is a heavyweight.
While an undergraduate at St. Jerome’s, I wrote a paper proposing that,
although belief in an afterlife may have given rise to the practice of burying
the dead with their possessions, it’s just as plausible to suppose that the
practice of burying the dead with their possessions gave rise to a belief in an
afterlife. The course instructor passed it on to Bernard Lulfre, thinking it
might be publishable in one of the journals he was associated with. Of course
it wasn’t, but it brought me to the great man’s attention, and for a season I
was shown round as a promising youngster at faculty teas. When I entered the
novitiate a year later, it was imagined by some that I was a sort of protégé, a
misconception I foolishly did not discourage. Fr. Lulfre may have followed
my progress in the years that followed, but if so, he did it at a very great
distance, and when my academic career began to falter, his remoteness began
to be interpreted (with equal imaginativeness) as a withdrawal.
In the five years since my ordination, until that nice invitation
6
arrived from the dean’s office, I hadn’t heard from him once (and hadn’t
expected to). Naturally I was curious, but I wasn’t exactly holding my breath.
He wasn’t going to offer to send me to the ball in a coach-and-four. Probably
he was going to ask for a small favor of some kind. Maybe some folks at St.
Jerome’s wanted to know something about somebody at St. Ed’s, and they
said, “Why don’t we have Fr. Lulfre contact that young Fr. Osborne who
works there?” No one would hesitate to ask me to do a bit of spying for the
order if spying was needed. We’ve had our own private espionage network
for centuries and think of it as being not one whit less honorable than that of
MI16 or the CIA. (We’re quite proud of our intrigues—in a quiet way, of
course. During the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign, for example, our
“English College” at Rheims infiltrated scores of priest spies into Britain to
keep the spirit of insurrection alive among English Catholics. Our greatest
coup was achieved in 1773, when Pope Clement XIV was feeling some
scruples about destroying his old friends the Jesuits; it was one of our own
who showed him how to reason with his tender conscience and get the job
done.) The order is our homeland, after all, and it would be taken for granted
that, even in exile, I would never allow some paltry diocesan or parochial
concern to supersede my loyalty to it. On the other hand, if it was something
as simple as this, then a phone call would have been sufficient. The more I
pondered the problem, the more intrigued I became.

At Fr. Luffre’s office

Nothing had changed at Fr. Lulfre’s office since I’d last visited it some ten
years before: It was in the same corner of the same floor of the same building.
Fr. Lulfre hadn’t changed either: Still six and a half feet tall, as broad as a
door, with a massive, rough-hewn head that might belong to a stevedore or a
trucker. Men like him somehow don’t change much till they reach an age like
seventy or eighty, when they fall apart overnight and are whisked away.