Yesterday Mr. Sandwich returned to Columbia University for the first time since he was kicked out. It was six days before commencement, 1999, and Barnaby reasoned that the diplomas were already printed, but everyone was still on campus, and so it would be the perfect time to mix up a pot of wheat glue and post all over the walls a blistering attack on the undergraduate college in general and his department in particular. Alas, it did not occur to parsimonious Barnaby that the university would be willing to take two dollars worth of printing costs as a dead loss and simply throw his diploma away.

In any case, yesterday he snuck into Faculty House in a tan trench coat and enormous fedora. These were useful as he skulked around Ritu Menon, admiring her from afar. This Indian feminist publisher and essayist had won his devotion not only by her thrillingly passionate and cogent extemporaneous speaking at the panel on “Honor Killings” on Wednesday, but also because of how visibly uncomfortable she had been able to make the moderator, who came from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He asked about head scarves out in foreign places, and she returned to him with a question about new attacks on Roe v. Wade in this country, and let me tell you, the idea that the United States might not be in every last respect a shining beacon of human rights entitled to lecture and look down on other countries stuck in the man’s throat like an enormous clamshell. Ms. Menon also remarked that “patriarchy is the first globalization.” At a different panel on Thursday, Mr. Calasso denied that the term globalization had any use, and said that his only question was whether it had begun in the late neolithic or the early neolithic.

Still in Faculty House at Columbia, Richard Howard explained that he had begun to learn French from the divorced wife of his grandmother’s first cousin, when he was five years old, while driving down to Miami Beach; and that he had been delighted to have occasion once, when asked by the French president how he had come to learn the language, to reply, “Dans une voiture, mon général, entre Cleveland, Ohio, et Miami Beach, Florida.”

Still further in Faculty House, after hopping back and forth between the PEN reception and a Columbia reception in the next room, drinking red wine, and trading a few Japanese remarks with Boris Akunin, Barnaby went back upstairs to the panel “Mixed Media: Writers on Their Languages.” Agi Mishol spoke about the poetic concentration of the Hebrew language, a result not only of thousands of years of layered connotation, but of the language’s syntax; Dubravka Ugresic talked about the political division of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, and maybe soon even Montenegrin; Boris Akunin spoke about the situation of the writer in Russia, where they respect literature; and Yiyun Li read a piece of fiction about being more comfortable expressing emotion in a second language. Barnaby was reminded of a long, painful, earnest conversation in his tiny freshman-year dormitory room, sitting on his bed with a girl, insisting on speaking in French because he was too uncomfortable in English. All that said, the high point was hearing the writers read their work in their respective languages: Mishol a poem in Hebrew; Bernardo Atxaga read poems in Spanish and in Basque, which indeed sounds like nothing else; Raymond Federman read a passage from a novel written in both French and English; and Hwang Sok-Yong read a passage from a novel in brilliant and exciting Korean.

“Here’s what we should do,” Barnaby said, standing on a chair after everyone had left. “Listen! Next year, let’s get together a reading where we try to read in as many languages as possible. Maybe everyone could read a translation of the same passage; or else maybe everyone could read from their national epics or scriptures or famous novels. A Finn from the Kalevala, a Japanese from the Genji, and so on. We could get someone from the Vatican to read the Aeneid in Latin and someone from Columbia to read from the Gilgamesh. It could go on all day, with people coming in and out, and a nice smoked fish platter in the back of the room.” Barnaby began to foam at the mouth a little bit. “It could go on for the whole festival! An endless marathon! There are enough people in New York. How many Polynesian languages could we get? What about co-sponsorship by the United Nations? No! No! I am an idiot! Obviously they have to read the biblical passage about the Tower of Babel! The Tower of Babel in two hundred and forty seven languages! Has the Bible been translated into Sanskrit? Or no—no! Someone will read the part in the Upanisads about the dismemberment of the primal cosmic man! Yes! And in Greek something about the language of Barbarians! And who’ll read in Old English? Beowulf, for the love of Christ! Nursery rhymes! Fairy tales! Proverbs! Holy mother of God, proverbs, proverbs in the world’s thousand languages!” Barnaby shut his eyes, turned red, screamed at the top of his voice his favorite Welsh proverb, and then fainted dead to the floor. Gorau chwedl gwirionedd!

This morning Barnaby Sandwich, hungover and grimy, sat down to finish off the last of the Passover gefilte fish while writing his entry for the Diddlesworth College alumni magazine.

“Oh, Wednesday, Wednesday,” he belched into his DictaBelt, “you almost got me, you sneaky bastard. Last night at Town Hall, Roberto Calasso began his remarks by quoting Confucius on the importance of the rectification of names, and I was tempted to begin my letter to you with a brief comparison of Confucius and Chuang-tzu; make an incidental nod to Shankara (who said that if you see a rope and think it is a snake, it is not really a snake, but you did really think so); and then make a headlong dive into a pit of false dualities, attempting to do my part to straighten out the confusions that bedeviled yesterday’s conversations and panels on Faith and Reason.”

For the benefit of his cockatoo Lucille, Barnaby mimed digging himself out of quicksand with a plastic trowel.

“I was going to argue that we are all stupid believers in our own different ways,” he continued, “and that the idea of a contrast between religious faith and scientific reason is a deadly red herring with deadly consequences. The conflict in the world is between two different habits of mind, or styles of reading, and the clothing of ideology or cosmology that these two systems happen to wear has nothing to do with their primal conflict.”

Barnaby belched and pinched his nose, and then walked into the kitchen for a bottle of medicinal red wine.

“But I have faith,” he said, “that the truth will continue to exist and to multiply itself without my aid; that the world continues to exist behind me even as I walk forward; and that those that understand this, will understand this, and those that do not, will not. At the same time, reason—the cherished ideal of the Buddha, the Mahavira, and any number of God-fearing philosophers in the West—reminds me that you cannot hurry the process of understanding, and also, by the way, points out that there is something ridiculous about a man in his underwear, early in the morning, strapping on a DictaBelt and attempting with desperate urgency to displace what he perceives as the misapprehensions of others with his own much more compelling misapprehensions. And so, all of that not said, I am going to begin with a different interesting point raised by Mr. Calasso. In talking about Vedic rituals, he mentioned ‘the confidence implicit in every act that the visible may act on the invisible and the invisible on the visible,’ and described how the universe depends on the proper execution of Brahmanic ritual. But the rituals only work if we believe in them. To put it another way, the world would cease to exist if the children in the playground stopped their games; and we all play our different games; and merely by playing we manifest our belief. We can approach these games with different emphases—as Chinua Achebe put it last night, also at Town Hall, we can follow Julian of Norwich in saying that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,’ or we can say, ‘For whom is it well? For whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well,’ and be equally correct. But in the end the truth defies all reduction, and for my part, I think Yusef Komunyakaa spoke the day’s most living truth with his poem ‘Ode to the Maggot.’”

Barnaby scratched, had a drink of red wine, and then quoted from memory:

“No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.”

And then he threw his DictaBelt on the couch and went out to walk his cockatoo Lucille. Lucille is a bit high-strung, and she spooked a ferret that someone was walking the other way; and the ferret spooked a chihuahua; and the chihuahua spooked a pit bull; and the pit bull spooked a police horse; and, to make a long story short, Barnaby will finish his column when he gets out of jail.

The Bubble Lounge: Despite growing up one block away, Barnaby had never before set foot inside this particular obscene tumor of New Tribeca tackiness. Tonight, however, a friend had a book party. Barnaby was the first to arrive; after confirming with a short officious personage that there would be free liquor—and ignoring this personage’s suggestion that he take a walk and come back in twenty minutes—Barnaby walked directly to the bar, past champagne bottles, foofy chairs, and bad art, and had this exchange with a French bartender dressed all in black:

“Vodka gimlet, please.”

The bartender nods.

“Grey Goose,” says Barnaby, concerned to avoid Absolut, which tastes to him like circus dwarf lubricant.

The bartender nods again, mixes the drink, and puts it on the bar.

“Are you with the party?”

“Yes,” says Barnaby, “I am.”

“Would you like to open a tab?”

“Isn’t this on the party?”

“No,” said the bartender, “not Grey Goose,” and then presented Barnaby with a bill for thirteen dollars.

Barnaby made such a scene that, in the end, the manager let him pay with Canadian money.

Cooper Union: After this Bubble Lounge brouhaha—and please, if you are going to charge us thirteen dollars for a vodka gimlet, for the love of Christ, use fresh lime juice!—Barnaby rushed up to the “Arthur Miller Freedom to Write” lecture, given this year by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Using a press pass that he had forged on a piece of old bologna, Barnaby sailed past the line snaking around the block and walked right in, experiencing, as he did so, an enormous wave of ecstatic self importance. Once inside, however, he met with what John Lennon called instant karma: he was informed that the press, in keeping with their position as the fourth (and last) estate, would be standing in the back. Normally Barnaby wouldn’t mind, but on this particular evening he was suffering from a recent judo injury of a personal nature. No matter—he had a thermos full of beer and orange juice and a couple of old opium cigarettes to see him through.

First Salman Rushdie offered an introduction, and drew fervent applause for the observation that America is very important, but the rest of the world is even more important. And then Mr. Pamuk delivered a charming and thoughtful if somewhat free-associative speech about the importance of free expression. “If many nations outside the west suffer from poverty and shame,” he said, “it is not because they have freedom of expression, but because they don’t.”

Barnaby was most interested in Pamuk’s description of being drawn by accident and half reluctantly into the world of political action: “I felt drawn to the world of politics by guilt,” he said, “but at the same time I wanted to do nothing but write beautiful novels.” The way he intoned the second clause made it into a self deprecation, as if to imply that he had been childishly idealistic in thinking that beauty for beauty’s sake was enough. But I would quarrel with the contrast of political action and art for art’s sake: it is precisely because believing in and pursuing art for art’s sake is an inherently political action that it needs defending in the more literal political world; and this writer, for his part, remains committed to only writing beautiful novels.

Then Margaret Atwood joined Mr. Pamuk onstage, and they sat down in perpendicular chairs to talk past each other about whatever was on their minds. At this point Barnaby’s judo injury began to disturb him, and he squatted down behind a low wall to drink his beer and orange juice. (Budweiser and orange juice, by the way, will make you feel very funny indeed, particularly after vigorous exercise.) Everything proceeded along on an even keel until Ms. Atwood remarked that she had always liked country and western music, even as a child, because it told stories, albeit sad ones, unlike most of the music today. This was too much for orange-beer-addled, rap-music-loving Barnaby to accept, and so he leaped to his feet and began bellowing “Underwater Rimes” from the Digital Underground album Sex Packets:

Now, last night underwater, I saw a French mermaid/ Treated her to caviar, wine over shrimp brain/ In the raw, on the ocean floor—need I say more?/ You never heard nobody kick it like this before

Who knew that a PEN event would have so many plainclothes security officers? No matter—Barnaby, after executing a beautiful judo fall on the concrete, walked over to Second Avenue and had some Belgian frites. Then he came back and managed to sneak into the after party, in the room behind the clockface, where a writer named Allison gripped him tightly by his amply-padded arm and insisted that he try the twice-baked fingerling potatoes.

The Guggenheim Museum: What put Barnaby’s mind on the narrative powers of rap music in the first place was a morning at the Guggenheim Museum, where, until May 14th, there is an anniversary show of the work of sculptor David Smith. Barnaby was so powerfully impressed by Smith’s brilliant, coherent, joyful work that at one point he was actually knocked onto his back and rolled all the way down the twisty Guggenheim ramp to the bottom. “The Royal Bird” made him choke on his orange-beer, “Cockfight-Variation” sent him into cascades of giggles, and by the time he got to the top, under the bright white light of Platonic reality and the skylight, and stood before the Voltri sculptures, he was in another world. But the middle aged women decoding the work—“Is this a leg? No, that’s a back”—distracted him, and so he put in his earphones and listened to the Lords of the Underground, which was, perhaps, a bit incongruous, but not nearly as incongruous as the time he spent a day wandering around the cemetery in Qufu where Confucius is buried while listening to a bootleg Eminem CD. But that is another story for another time.

In the past week, the Israelites have gone up out of Egypt with signs and wonders; the risen Christ, returned from Hell, has conquered death; the murdered god Tammuz has been reborn from the dark earth; gentle Persephone has returned from Hades and his treacherous pomegranate seeds to her mother fertile Demeter; and the Callery Pears and other flowering trees of New York have begun turning from white to green.

Barnaby Sandwich drove up to Massachusetts for a seder. There his friends Maeve and Arthur—who, at the end of college, recognized each other as Romeo and Juliet through the crowded fog of a garden square in upper Manhattan, and pledged themselves, shortly after this recognition, with their hearts, and some time later, with their words, to reenact together forever the primal commingling of male and female, to exemplify and thereby conjure into being the sexual division-in-union and union-in-division that give rise to all creation, and, indeed, which all creation depicts and expresses—live in a wooden fisherman's house in a small town by the sea. Arthur, much excited by the recent publication of the Gospel of Judas, claimed to have found a Gnostic haggadah, whose ending read "This year we are enchained in gross material form; next year may our spirits return to the Pleroma. This year we are in Egypt—next year in the realm of Barbelo!" But it was only a joke. Instead they used a Reconstructionist haggadah, which expanded the traditional four questioning children in various and beautiful directions. (The simple child asks, "What is the Lord," but it is not a simple question.)

They did, however, get into an argument that has been repeated an infinite number of times over an infinite number of meals, as the Seed of Abraham has scattered through the nations, beginning with Joseph's argument with himself in the Land of Keme, the Black Land of Egypt, the Kingdom of Death. Arthur, whose Hebrew name is Abraham, played the part of all other Abrahams before him—or rather, he was the part, for he, no less than the particular Abram we consider to be the first, and no less than all the Abrahams stretching back behind that one into obscure mists of time, he was Abraham, and his wife, Maeve, as a Congregationalist and lukewarm defender of Easter, was forced into the life and voice of an idolater.

"What is interesting," said Arthur, or Abram, son of Terah the idol maker, "is that everyone is talking about the suppression of Gnostic heresies when mainstream Christianity as we know it is completely Gnostic anyway."

"That's ridiculous," said Maeve, worshiper of Osiris, the murdered and resurrected god, and his mother-wife Isis, or Mary, the vulture woman. "Eat your haroses."

"No," said Abraham, reluctant sacrificer of Isaac, "it's true. It's completely death-centered. It's all about the importance of the afterlife, the escape to heaven from a material realm which exists only to entrap the divine soul and drag it down further into hellish darkness. What could be more Gnostic than that?"

"Shut up," said Maeve, partisan of Amun and the dead gods of Egypt. "The difference between mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism is the difference between faith and knowledge, okay? That's fundamental. Eat your haroses. As we have done since the time of Hillel, who made a sandwich of haroses and bitter herbs, to follow literally the words of the scripture, as it is written—"

"Shut up!" said Arthur. "What's important isn't eating the haroses. What's important is discussing or, better yet, reenacting the story of the Exodus, when God led us out of Egypt, the land of tombs and stone gods, the underworld, where we were slaves in a land of death, through the empty desert, sustaining us for forty years with manna, and finally to Sinai, the mountain of revelation, to give to us eternally the living law—"

"Aha!" said Maeve, "what could be more Gnostic than that?"

Abram, her husband, vouchsafed himself in his faith in the Hidden One, and declined to answer, and Maeve declared time-out and began serving the vegan kishke, while dog-faced Milo, the dog, under the table, whimpered and sniffed at the gravity of the mystical incarnation. Meanwhile, under the table, Barnaby continued reading Thomas Mann's "mythological novel" Joseph and His Brothers, very much enjoying it, but also looking forward to finishing, so that he can think in single layers again. He considered accidentally spilling his third cup of wine on it, but decided against this, largely because the Modern Library edition cost him more than forty dollars. (Nine hundred pages down, six hundred to go.)

In the car on the way back, A.J. struggled for four hours to open a bag of Sour Skittles, and Barnaby, when he got home, was so full of love and emotion that a cassette tape of "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie reduced him to tears.

Barnaby and I wish you a Gut Pesach!