about halfway through all the king's men and actually enjoying it more than i thought i would. has anyone else in our set read this? i'm thinking poach. here's a passage i liked:

...I stood there and felt like God-Almighty brooding on History.

Which must be a dull business for God-Almighty, Who knows how it is going to come out. Who knes, in fact, how it was going to come out even before He knew there was going to be any History. Which is complete nonsense, for that involves Time and He is out of Time, for God is Fullness of Being and in Him the End is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts written and handed out on the street corners by the fat, grubby, dandruff-sprinkled old man, with the metal-rimmed spectacles, who used to be the Scholarly Attorney and who married the girl with the gold braids and the clear, famished-looking cheeks, up in Arkansas. But those tracts he wrote were crazy, I thought back then. I thought God cannot be Fullness of Being. For Life is Motion.

(I use the capital letters as the old man did in the tracts. I had sat across the table from him, with the unwashed dishes on one end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the rom over across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said, "God is Fullness of Being." And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick. For Life is Motion. For --"

(For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above the metal-rimmed spectacles, which had hung down on the end of his nose. He had shaken his head and a flake or two of dandruff had sifted down from the sparse white hair ends which fringed the skull within which the words had been taking shape from the electric twitches in his tangled and spongy blood-soaked darkness. He had said then, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick."

(For Life is a fire burning along a piece of string -- or is i a fuse to a powder keg we call God? -- and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be completely blown away. So I had said to the old man.

(But he had replied, "You think in Finite terms." And I had said, "I'm not thinking at all, I'm just drawing a picture." He had said, "Ha!" The way I remembered he had done a long time back when he played chess with Judge Irwin in the long room in the white house looking toward the sea. I had said, "I'll draw you another picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the color always changes and the shape. Let us give a name to the picture which he is trying to paint: Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is therefore Non-Knowledge, then Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God, Who is Complete Knowledge."

(The old man had said, "I will pray for your soul.")