Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Beatrix

‘No mum,’ I replied, 'it's not like that at all.’

Perception, she said was a fraud; had not St Paul said we see in a glass darkly, had not Wordsworth said we see by glimpses? ‘This piece of fruit cake' - she waved it between bites - ‘this cake doesn't need me to eat it to make it edible. It exists without me.’

.. but she thought I should have made the Tower of Babel out of oregami, even though I told her it would be too difficult. "The Lord walked on the water,” was all she said when I tried to explain.

The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts. 

 The sermon was on perfection, and it was at this moment that I began to develop my first theological disagreement. 

Perfection, the man said, was a thing to aspire to. It was the condition of the Godhead, it was the condition of the man before the Fall. It could only be truly realized in the next world, but we had a sense of it, a maddening, impossible sense, which was both a blessing and a curse. 

‘Perfection,’ he announced, 'is flawlessness.’

The woman was indeed perfect, there was no doubt about that, but she wasn't flawless. He, the prince, had been wrong. She was perfect because she was a perfect balance of qualities and strengths. She was symmet- rical in every respect. The search for perfection, she had told him, was in fact the search for balance, for harmony.

Sweet I was not. But I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet, and here were sweets to prove it.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

We continued our walk in silence. She thought I was satisfied, but I was wondering about her, and wondering where I would go to find out what I wanted to know. 

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

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