Cuento multilingüe 4: The seven deadly sins

The seven deadly sins are: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. The seven virtues are: patience, charity, diligence, humility, chastity, kindness, and temperance. My first reflexion is that the sins are described with shorter words than the virtues. And this is strange. It seems that we have to develop more complex words in order to give meaning to the virtues while it is easier to give words to the sins. But, anyway, I will not follow on this discussion because etymology is not my specialty.

It is supposed that virtues are the way to avoid the deadly sins. It is like a matter-antimatter annihilation. You have to develop your kindness, and then you will avoid the envy. You are tempered, and gluttony never will tempt you. So, you can construct your protecting dome, based in your virtues, in order to avoid the menaces of your sins.

But, in my opinion, this is not true. In fact, I believe that life works in the opposite way. I mean, that all we enjoy the sins and all we suffer the opposite virtues, in different ways. We, you, all us, like our sins and we hate our virtues. Our virtues are just the price we have to pay to be a reasonable person in the community where we are living.

From time to time, there is a flux of sin-antimatter which hurts your dome. During these stressing moments you have to reflect and doubt. And you must modify your dome. And then, the dome becomes warped. And sometimes there are holes in the dome.

When the holes appear you can find that you have to take decisions. You have to be able to manage your dome, manage the fight between you virtues and sins, seal the holes, if necessary, or keep them opened. And, more important, set the limits of your dome at any dimension. Very likely you can do it.

Anyway, when your dome it is restored you must interact which the other domes around you: the other people’s domes.

This is more complicated. You only can see the external form of their domes; but not the reasons for their warps or holes. You cannot know how sins or virtues have modelled their dome. And you can be very confused in this interaction.

Last year I interacted very closely with two different domes. One of them was relevant for its patience. The other was relevant for his kindness.

Unfortunately, one of them had a great hole in its dome and its anti-matter damaged strongly my dome. The matter-antimatter annihilation was strong enough to destroy the main part of my dome and also my sense of living.

So, I have a lot to rebuild.

JL Llorente