|
|
 |
| |
Sounding off about the silent Quakers isn’t much fun
WHEN my time comes, I have made it known to my sister Caroline, who does good works while I do none, that I want a Quaker funeral, with lots of delicious silence, and no Alan Bennett-type imitations of unhugged curates who only eat raw vegetables.
Knowing very little about the Quakers, apart from their enjoying silence at their meetings when one of them isn’t speaking the inspired word of God, I turned to this small I42 fact-packed volume in search of authentic inspiration.
If I had paused to reflect for a few seconds, I would have realised that silence is an impossible subject to write about, as Pink Dandelion transparently found out for himself.
In addition, I was deeply shocked he doesn’t make mention of Meher Baba, the Indian God-Man and avatar, who was silent for 44 years.
Meher Baba’s biography, Much Silence by Tom and Dorothy Hopkinson, was named after the African proverb “much silence makes a powerful noise”.
This VSI to The Quakers is an extremely vexatious read. Pink doesn’t manage to dig up a single interesting fact about George Fox, who is “generally credited with the founding of the Quaker movement”.
On page I6 we learn that Richard Nixon had been one of two American presidents who had been a Quaker. But nothing about whether his trickster habit patterns had been actively encouraged by his Quakerism.
On page 35 we are told for a second time – Pink is keen on lots of repetition for driving harsh facts in remorselessly – that “today over one-third of the world’s Quakers can be found in Kenya”.
There is too much gratuitous theorising, and very little, if any, hard-won experience.
The only joke in these I44 small-printed pages can be found on page 53. There is a Quaker postcard which reads: “I am a Quaker; in case of emergency, please be silent.”
The Quakers, it can be safely concluded, are not a laugh a minute if this is anything to go by.JOHN HORDER |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
