Night Train to Lisbon Page #5

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You should read this, Jorge.

You wrote most of them anyway.

They are your words.

I only helped to choose them.

- Amadeu, which is our religion?

- Loyalty.

What are our values?

Truth, above all else.

Exactly. Just keep your eyes on me

and you'll be fine.

As is traditional,

we end our ceremony with

a grade 12 graduation speech.

In this year,

that honor will be bestow

to Amadeu de Almeida Prado.

I would not like to live

in a world without cathedrals.

I need their beauty

and grandeur

against the dirty colors

of military uniforms.

I love the powerful words

of the Bible.

I need the force

of its poetry.

I need it against

the decay of language

and the dictatorship

of worthless slogans.

But there is another world

I do not wish to live in.

A world in which

independent thinking is disparaged,

and the finest things we can

experience denounced as sin.

A world in which our love

is demanded by tyrants,

oppressors and assassin.

And most absurdly,

people are exhorted from the pulpit

to forgive these creatures

and even to love them.

It is for this reason

we cannot just put the Bible aside.

We have to throw it away

completely.

for it speaks only of

vain holier-than-thou.

In his omnipresent,

the Lord observes us day and night.

He takes note of our acts and thoughts.

But what is a man without secrets?

Without thoughts and wishes

that he, and he alone, knows?

Does the Lord our God

not consider

He's stealing our soul

with his unbridled curiosity,

a soul that should be immortal?

But who would in all seriousness

want to be immortal?

How boring to know that

what happens today,

this month, this year,

does not matter?

Nothing would count.

No one here knows what

it would be like to live eternally.

And it's a blessing we never will.

One thing I can assure you,

it would be hell,

this endless paradise of immortality.

It is death and only death,

that gives each moment

beauty and horror.

Only through death is time living thing.

Why does the Lord not noticed?

Why does He threaten us

with a... endlessness

that can only be

unbearably desolate?

I would not want to live

in a world without cathedrals.

I need the luster

of their windows,

their cool stillness,

their imperious silence.

I need the holiness of words,

the grandeur of great poetry.

But just as much

I need the freedom

to rebel against everything

that is cruel in this world.

For the one is nothing

without the other.

And no one

may force me to choose.

What do you think?

I though you would

deliver a speech in Latin.

But then, only a very few,

would understood it.

Are you friends with that boy?

We are the best of friends.

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