Is life beautiful but sad… or sad but beautiful?
As you progress through Julian Barnes’ novel, you will encounter wonderfully perplexing questions:
Only the living can say you are wrong. But the living lie. Should one therefore have more confidence in the dead?
He never belittled. Now Julian Barnes challenges us. He places the Roman Emperor Julian at the center. (There are two centers.) The last pagan emperor who made the final attempt to stop Christianity around AD 300. He wanted to convert to the old gods not by force, but by reason. For what, he asked, did the one God bestow on the Roman Church? Neither astronomy (Babylon), nor geometry (Egypt), nor Socrates, Plato, Caesar… Heresy, he asked again, perhaps more enlightened, more just?
Julian lost to Jesus. With his death in battle, paganism and Hellenism became extinct.
Now, Julian Barnes doesn’t just throw history in front of us. But wrapped in another story, the story of “Elizabeth Finch” who taught students to (exaggerate) think. It might even be a love story.