I come from a Catholic family, and church was part of my life growing up. I didn’t really question it until I got older—thirteen years maybe? My parents didn’t like it when I stopped going to church. My mother especially. They are simple people. I guess I wanted to make a point. Once you look at the concept of religion with a scientific frame of mind, it seems less and less plausible. Though I would NEVER rule anything completely out because part of keeping a scientific frame of mind is being open to being proved wrong. A lot of discoveries came from scientists entertaining ideas that seemed ridiculous at the time. Do you know what a paradigm is? A paradigm is a view of the world that organizes our way of thinking, and even our perception, what we see and don’t see. Scientific revolutions don’t just add new facts, they change our entire worldview.

I do find it very hard to conceive of an afterlife. We are animals. Smart animals, but even so, animals don’t go to heaven, do they? I suspect it is a story people tell themselves because it is so hard to accept the idea of not existing. You also have to look at the damage religion has done. So many wars fought in the name of it. People thinking they don’t have to make the most of their life because they have a spare one. In my way of thinking we must believe we are given one life. I know you have an inquiring mind, and that is such an important thing. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it for now!

Antonio

Eve

22

I had taken to arriving at work before everyone else, when Roland the security guard was eating donuts in his office on the mezzanine. He knew I liked the run of the place before the day began. I snapped the switches one by one as I made my way through the dark building. Light leapt ahead to create the space as I needed it: the lower gallery with its shrouded piano, the paneled staircase, the glass bridge that linked the original house with the airy modern half of the museum.

After Maddy died, I’d preferred going to work to staying at home. I let go of the young people’s programs, but retained my managerial responsibilities and still led sessions with adults. Lately I’d been spending a lot of time alone in the galleries. I felt thrown back to a time when art had seemed thrilling and necessary; but when I stood in front of the paintings I loved, they were like old friends I had fallen out with, trying to tell me something I couldn’t understand.