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smiling, because here exactly was her task, the task set by Jesus, to love the sinner even though you might hate the sin. Or, as she interpreted it, even though people were crabby and snappish and impolite and angry with each other and weird and hard to look at, being either enviable or grotesque, even though they were lusty and argumentative, and even though she had seen people eat some of the food that was supposed to be weighed at the checkout, stealing routinely, and right in front of her as if she weren’t there, she DID, mostly, love them as she knew she ought to.
    What she really liked to think about was how far they had come to walk through her line—not only from all corners of the campus, but also from all corners of the world. She liked to think about them setting out, all on their own, one by one, from thousands of different spots, tracing meandering courses on their feet, in cars, on buses and trains, on airplanes of course. She liked to think how predictable it was, that at seven a.m. and eleven-thirty a.m. and five p.m., so many would be taken by the same urge, and then streams of them would converge on the commons, and in spite of all their differences, they would all be after the same appeasement of the same appetite, and then they would leave, no longer like converging liquids but like the dissipating atoms of a gas.
    She worked hard and she didn’t like her job. She was tired of her coworkers and beginning to fear the sight of Jane and Amanda, two older women who’d been ladling food since the Second World War. She was so hungry to quit her job that she could taste it, but she didn’t see the people she had served over the years as participants in a secular humanist conspiracy. There were too many of them and they were too wrapped up in their appetites to be as focused as her brother thought they were. If secular humanism arose out of their activities—and surely it did, that was the evidence according to every preacher—it arose from a natural mixing of desires and appetites, the way an odor arises from a natural mixing of flavors. The secular humanists and the critical thinkers didn’t really offend her, maybe not as much as they should have. It was easier, once you were among them, to accept and even enjoy their flow.

6

Creative Writing
    Assignment: Dialogue—dialogue is one of those elements of fiction writing that is at least as much of a skill as a talent, but you need to train yourselves to listen carefully when people are speaking, and to hear how they choose to phrase things as well as what they want to say. Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.
    Your assignment is to eavesdrop upon and to write down about two pages of dialogue. Do not use a tape recorder. I want this dialogue to be filtered through your ear and your hand. Try the commons, your dorm dining room, the TV room at your fraternity. You’ll find a place. To protect the innocent AND the guilty, do not use names or describe the speakers. “Girl 1” and “Boy 1,” etc., are good enough. No copies necessary, we will read these aloud.
    G ARY O LSON positioned his desk a little closer than usual to the door of his room and turned off the CD player. Then he switched on his computer and opened a file labelled “CWASS.Doc.” Bob, he knew, was quietly working on statistics problems—he’d checked that with a trip to the bathroom. Lyle and Lydia, his quarry, were lounging on Lyle’s bed just the other side of the door. He could see their feet, hers bare, his sporting thin dark green socks that Gary thought typical of Lyle, whose idea of style was anything his mom sent from home. Gary himself wore only white athletic socks and Air Jordans. He turned the screen a little so that even if Lyle or Lydia looked in the doorway, they wouldn’t be able to see what he was writing.
    G IRL : I’m hungry. Are you hungry?
    B OY: You had that ice