Prologue

     I do not know if Judah ever wrote anything. I suspect not. In his obscure, happy life there was no god, no wisdom, no magic to pass on. Like a thousand anonymous god-minds before, he simply stared back into the void until he flickered out. He shined, and for a while I mistakenly thought he shined for me.

     Like you, I am slowly falling away from a few moments of frightening clarity. Some of us are damned, worn down through insidious compromise with forms we do not think to challenge--commodity, family, nationality, self. Others are tragic, diverted by Buddhas in the road back into cul-de-sacs of attachment and desire. 

      I do not know which I am. I know very little, and what I do know is unhelpful. I know there is no giving, only letting go, that the myth of altruism conceals the truth that there is nothing to give. . .

     I sound like Judah, but I am not Judah. I have a story to tell.