Alasdair Gray - Unlikely Stories Mostly

6I began by asserting that all men originally shared the same language, since mankind had been made in one place at one time: he nodded agreement.

7And before I could say more, recited verbatim the first nine verses of the eleventh chapter of Genesis, first in the Hebrew, then (because he said, it contained no very glaring innacuracie) in that translitteration authorized for the press by King Jamie in 1608, the year of my birth.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech .

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there .

3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar .

4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth .

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded .

6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do .

7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech .

8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city .

9 Therefor is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth .

8I hid my surprize, by suavely thanking him for anticipating me, and asking, How God had worked to confound the first speech he had given men to use? Was the Latin Secretary of the British Republick one of those who believed Jehovah had miraculously and simultaneously infused, into the Babelbuilders’ brains, entirely differing sets of grammars and vocabularies?

9He answered saying, No; he agreed with the Rabins, that the first confusion was of accent meerly, the foundation speech of these accents not deeply changing, until by dispersal around all the earth, the scattered nations of men were divided one from another by almost impassible distances of desert wilderness, mountain chains and nearly non-navigable seas: for each nation encountering different soyls, plants, creatures and climates, was compelled to devize new tools, arts and oeconomies to cultivate them, new sciences to understand them, new words to describe them, so that in time, lacking all written records, the old verbal tokens of our common oeconomy on Shinar’s plain were by new speech utterly ousted and submerged, leaving one accurate account of the paleological confusion among a people living near the place where it happened, the rest retaining bur foggy legends of a primitive catastrophe.

10Then it behoves us to enquire (said I) how God, operating within one single city-state on Shinar’s plain, came to stunt that great work by diversity of accent; for you and I are rational not superstitious men; we know God works His changes on earth by the agency of nature, his deputy magistrate, who in men is called human nature: what fact of human nature made men inarticulate to one another, who were united in a great project which, while certainly presumptuous, would otherwise have succeeded?

11To this he replied, The desire for supremacy over their own kind .

12I had intended, by a skilled deployment of Socratic questioning, to educt from his own lips conclusions which were precisely my own; his answer was so unexpected that I responded to it with open mouth and arched eyebrows, which he interpreted as an invitation to explicate.

13We may only understand these nine verses rightly, said he, if we remember two things: firstly, that when Jehovah said, Nothing will be restrained from men, which they have imagined to do , He was speaking ironically to his Angels, for although the Almighty had not read the astronomy of Signor Galileo, He well knew the Grandeur of the Heavens He had Builded, and knew that they were far beyond the reach of any earthly construction; had the tower rizen one or two short miles above the surface of the plain it would have entered a region of air too rarified to support human nourishment; if this tremendous irony is forgot, then God’s words sound like the peevish pronuncimentos of a meer absolute Monarch, who dreads that his people will usurp his privelege.

14But the knowledge that the tower would never reach Heaven belonged to more than God, it belonged to the architect, Nimrod, that valiant warrior who (Moses tells us) was the first conqueror to substitute the monarchical yoke for the patriarchal independancy of the nomadic tribes; for had Nimrod believed Heaven could really be reached by a tower, he would have commenced to build, not on a flat plain, but on the summit of Ararat, or any other toplofty peak.

15Like all overweening edifices, the tower was devized to raize a pack of lords and their followers above the heads of the commons; who were perswaded to support the superiour stance by the usual publick lie: that the overexaltation of some would in time lead to the benefit and happiness of all; but the building itself was the happiness at which the imaginations of the builders aimed, for as they gazed out across the heads of their fellows, they felt themselves to be gods; and this was the false heaven, this the bad eminence, which the True God of Heaven came down to confound, and did so most mercifully, out of the builders’ mouths.

16For men who overmaster their own kind cannot long continue to deceive and servilize them without the cloak of a different language, by the cause that knowing little about the handling and making of solid things, and their chiefest concern being management of those who do, their speech becomes a jargoning about bonds, monopolies, legal niceties, scholastick abstractions, ostentatious sophistry, flattery, backbiting, gossip about those positioned higher than themselves and contempt of those below.

17At last they sound so different from the commoners as to be almost unintellegible to them, and vice-versa, and this provokes the just Nemesis of God.

18For the less they understand the suffering cries from underneath, the harder they press, in their pursuit of wealth and eminence, upon the necks of those who feed, cloath and build for them; till in tame nations an utter civil collapse ensues, and in brave ones, a revolt.

19The most notorious modern example of Babelonian enterprize (he said) was the newmade mosque of the Bishop of Rome, pretentiously lifted up to the Glory of God, but really to the glory of an immund impanative Papacy, the funds being raized by selling pardons for crimes not yet committed, to the rich and poor sinners of Germany; which act soon split all Christendom into four times as many Christian sects as there are Christian governments.

20He also predicted, that if the rumour hath substance, that young Lewis the French Autocrat will wall off the discontents of his people by building, outside Paris, the biggest Regal dwelling since Nero’s Golden House in Rome, then Lewis will one day perish in the same schismatick cataclysm that befel Nimrod, the Roman Caesars, and the Papal Catholicks.