diff --git a/writing/3/unknown-things/iyov/reverse/choice.md b/writing/3/unknown-things/iyov/reverse/choice.md index 9706ceab..21470a83 100644 --- a/writing/3/unknown-things/iyov/reverse/choice.md +++ b/writing/3/unknown-things/iyov/reverse/choice.md @@ -26,6 +26,8 @@ This is only part of the image, though. He and his family play harps and lyres a The Job of the fable appears largely unchanged, simply happy to live out the rest of his days, and it is tempting to dismiss this as just how fables work, but, as Mitchell puts it, "Blake, who with all his gnostic eccentricities is the only interpreter to understand that the theme of this book is spiritual transformation, makes a clear distinction between the worlds of the prologue and of the epilogue." \parencite[xxix]{mitchell} The instruments hang, untouched, on the tree behind the family in the first plate, while they play them actively in the last. They "look up to heaven with drowsy piety" in the first, while in the last they look knowingly ahead, out into the world. +But Job is, as ever, an upright and honest man. He's just also a man who has had a spiritual revelation on a scale that we --- we who do not have the unnamable answering our please from within the whirlwind --- cannot possibly know. "A man who hungers and thirsts after justice is not satisfied with a menu," writes Mitchell. \parencite[xviii]{mitchell} "It is not enough for him to hope or believe or know that there is absolute justice in the universe: he must taste and see it. It is not enough that there may be justice someday in the golden haze of the future: it must be now; must *always* have been now." Job calls for an account of what has been done for him because he *does* hunger and thirst after justice. He's an upright and honest man who is struggling against hope to maintain this disinterested faith he desires so greatly. + Job has confronted God, has seen Him in His whirlwind, has heard Him speak, heard that note of exclamation, heard when "the deep will, contemplating the world it has created, says "Behold, it is very good."" \parencite[xxviii]{mitchell} Rather than simply falling back into his old life after this, he is changed, and at this point of change, he is at last presented with his choice.