Equus
...and oyster shell if they already have the pearl. Dysart says that in healing Alan all that he can do is “ make this boy into an ardent husband- a caring citizen- a worshiper of abstract and unifying God”(107) Dysart will not break Alan of fantasy, but simply replace his God with another God, another abstract fantasy. He can lead him from illusion to another. Dysart cannot truly heal Alan. He takes away the illness but he can’t stitch him back up. He can remove all that is not normal but leave a gaping hole. That is not healing, that is destroying. Dysart knows that life is worthless with out passions. He lives a passionless life, with his passionless wife, reading his passionless books, and afraid of the passion he finds in Gods. Time and time again he has removed the passion from his patients “making sacrifices to the normal… I have cut form them parts sacred to the rarer and more wonderful Gods”(65) These parts that he cuts out are the passions that are sacred to the more hidden and more wonderful Gods, such as Equus. Dysart is a logical man, a scholar and a revered doctor. Yet there is something about Alan that he wants, as he describes here on page 82 “That boy has know a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it” Dysart is jealous of Alan’s passion. What worship has Dysart ever known? None. Dysart may be intelligent or well paid but he says, “With out worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that…I shrank my own life” (82) Dysart’s life is passionless because he has no worship. He knows no God. He travels each year to some tropical islands to a world rich with Gods but he can never seem to find them. He reads books and fantasies about the many Gods he could pray to, but never does, he has no passion because he has no worship. Alan, then, has more passion than anyone. Most just worship and pray to their Beliefs but Alan “Stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat of his God’s cheek”(page 83) nothing can have more passion than contact with your God. Dysart would settle just to have a God, just an ounce of that passion. No one has the right to destroy someone’s God. There are many millions of people of people who worship a God of some sort. Sixty-tree million people in the United States alone worship a Christian God. Acts of violence are committed every day for supreme beings, and no one is seen as insane for doing them. Countless numbers were murdered in the Crusades in the name of the all holy God, and they were seen as heroes. Even Dysart himself has a calling to the Gods. Dysart often speaks of his fascination with the ancient gods of Greece. He even dreams of making sacrifices to these Gods. He speaks of the importance of gods on page 62 “Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods…worship...