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By Root 1260 0

if it wasn’t just self-pity again. At the orphanage they had gone to religious services every Sunday morning in the dining room and listened to different preachers tell them that God loved them especially because they were orphans and that they had a hard lot in life, but the hardness of their lot gave them a precious opportunity to be particularly saintly in their conduct, to be obedient, to be moral, without having placed in front of them the temptations toward sin that come to children who have sinful parents around them, tempting them away from the path of goodness by their bad example; how they, the children of the orphanage, were the results of the sins of their fathers, and yet at the same time had this great opportunity to lead blameless uncontaminated lives of purity and virtue; to obey the rules and be the especially beloved of Jesus Christ, who Himself disowned His own Mother and made Himself into an orphan, so to speak; and how they, the children of the orphanage, were actually better off and luckier than the children on the outside, because in the absence of the love of parents and the misguided behavior of parents, they could come directly to the love of Jesus Christ and therefore the love of God Himself under the direction of the orphanage administration. But it did not take much thinking on their part to see that if Jesus Christ and God approved of the administration of the orphanage, in fact preferred it to home and parents, then they were the enemies of the orphanage children because if that hollow cavity in their souls was the love of God then God was the ultimate murderer of love.

Because the children of the orphanage were taught, all week long every week of their lives, that the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, was purely a question of feeling: if it felt good, it was bad, if it felt bad, it was good. The food at the orphanage did not taste very good, and the children were taught, told, that this food, this unappetizing oatmeal or dish of prunes or boiled-to-death vegetable, was nourishing and good for them and would make them strong and capable of much hard work; and that the candy they got from the ladies who visited was at once a treasure and a sin, because while the candy tasted beautiful, it did them no good and after they ate their candy and thanked the ladies, they had to go in and brush their teeth and get rid of the last traces of flavor, because candy, that delicious rarity, rotted everything it touched. And they were told that presents were not good, because presents were possessions, and possessions were fought over and caused bad feeling, not that the authorities would take their presents away from them, only that the authorities had a way of making the children feel guilty about possessing them. And of course the pleasures of the body—running, jumping, laughing, masturbating—were sins, particularly the last, but all the others were too because they disrupted the routine, were contagious and threw things off schedule, and were not to be permitted except under certain well-defined circumstances. And Jack could remember particularly the feeling of near-rage at being told that for the next hour they could go out into the yard and have fun and jump and run and play, and remembered his desire to stand stock still and refuse to enjoy himself. And then, unable to control himself, running, skylarking a little desperately, a knot of anything but joy in the center of him, under the approving eyes of the authorities. And work, they were taught that work was good, especially hard work, and the harder the work the better it was, their bodies screaming to them that this was a lie, it was all a terrible, God-originated, filthy lie, a monstrous attempt to keep them from screaming out their rage and anguish and murdering the authorities. But they did not, because they knew that nobody, not the ministers, not the ladies who visited, and least of all the authorities themselves, believed it, any of it, because they did not act as if they believed it. They acted as if they believed only one