Page 125
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Dani argues that beauty and light are what give pain meaning, while Michael admits he can no longer believe in God and answers with a South America story about a gangster made to fight bare-fisted under guns and rich spectators for a year.
The exchange pulls Michael's violence into a larger moral frame: Dani keeps pushing toward faith and light, while Michael answers with spectacle, rackets, and bodily ordeal. South America arrives not as travel but as another proof that power turns men into entertainment.
Daniel tells Michael that 'The beyond is always there' and that 'Mankind would not endure, if there was no belief in light', while Michael answers that he finds it 'very difficult to believe in God anymore' and recalls a South America 'hell journey' with his father's gangster 'business friends', one of whom fought bare fisted as a 'gladiator' for a year under men on a cat walk with 'tommie guns'.
The page sets a theology of light against a parable of money and violence, and the second half reads as Michael's reply to the first. The gangster's year 'under the lights, between the fat faces of the rich' turns light into spectacle, and the dry close, 'That was his business orientation', lets the word business carry the whole moral judgment.