on the other side of the globe.
Sophie felt she was being drawn into an unnatural world. Maybe it was not so
dumb after all to believe in fate. Still—she shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions; it
could all have a perfectly natural explanation. But how had Alberto Knox found
Hilde’s wallet when Hilde lived in Lillesand? Lillesand was hundreds of miles away.
And why had Sophie found this postcard on her sidewalk? Did it fall out of the
mailman’s bag just as he got to Sophie’s mailbox? If so, why should he drop this
particular card?
“Are you completely insane?” Joanna burst out when Sophie finally made it to
the supermarket.
“Sorry!”
Joanna frowned at her severely, like a schoolteacher.
“You’d better have a good explanation.”
“It has to do with the UN,” said Sophie. “I was detained by hostile troops in
Lebanon.”
“Sure ... You’re just in love!”
They ran to school as fast as their legs could carry them.
The Religious Knowledge test that Sophie had not had time to prepare for was
given out in the third period. The sheet read:
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE AND TOLERANCE
1. Make a list of things we can know. Then make a list of things we can only
believe.
2. Indicate some of the factors contributing to a person’s philosophy of life.
3. What is meant by conscience? Do you think conscience is the same for
everyone?
4. What is meant by priority of values?
Sophie sat thinking for a long time before she started to write. Could she use
any of the ideas she had learned from Alberto Knox? She was going to have to,
because she had not opened her Religious Knowledge book for days. Once she began
to write, the words simply flowed from her pen.
She wrote that we know the moon is not made of green cheese and that there are
also craters on the dark side of the moon, that both Socrates and Jesus were sentenced
to death, that everybody has to die sooner or later, that the great temples on the
Acropolis were built after the Persian wars in the fifth century B.C. and that the most
important oracle in ancient Greece was the oracle at Delphi. As examples of what we
can only believe, Sophie mentioned the questions of whether or not there is life on
other planets, whether God exists or not, whether there is life after death, and whether
Jesus was the son of God or merely a wise man. “We can certainly not know where
the world came from,” she wrote, completing her list. “The universe can be compared
to a large rabbit pulled out of a top hat. Philosophers try to climb up one of the fine
hairs of the rabbit’s fur and stare straight into the eyes of the Great Magician. Whether
they will ever succeed is an open question. But if each philosopher climbed onto
another one’s back, they would get even higher up in the rabbit’s fur, and then, in my
opinion, there would be some chance they would make it some day. P.S. In the Bible
there is something that could have been one of the fine hairs of the rabbit’s fur. The
hair was called the Tower of Babel, and it was destroyed because the Magician didn’t
want the tiny human insects to crawl up that high out of the white rabbit he had just
created.”