A few weeks ago a learned friend hit me with a notion so simple yet unyielding it had me walking around in circles for half the day. It went something like this: follow your word and see where it leads you. To put it another way, keep your promises and take your lumps. Fair makes you think twice about the next time you vow to pop by a friend’s gig in the Dog & Duck of a wet Tuesday night.

As is the way with these things, once I’d registered this straightforward yet bloody-awkward-to-implement idea, it seemed to manifest itself in every other book I opened. The first line of the apostle John’s poetical fourth gospel says, In the beginning was the Word. Not God, but the Word. Certain scholars of apocrypha reckon John was a closet Gnostic, and that his gospel only made it into the church-approved books of the Bible by the skin of its teeth. In Elaine Pagels’ majesterial study The Gnostic Gospels, in a mind-bending final chapter that equates Coptic philosophies with psychoanalysis and the kind of self-realisation theories usually associated with Eckhart Tolle, the following statement appears:
“The New Testament term for sin, hamartia, comes from the sport of archery; literally, it means 'missing the mark.’ New Testament sources teach that we suffer distress, mental and physical, because we fail to achieve the moral goal toward which we aim: 'all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.’”
The Gospel of Thomas, which appears in full at the back of Pagels’ other book Beyond Belief, is full of such hard-nosed maxims. For example: Jesus said, “Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, because all things are revealed before heaven.”
Or maybe this one: Jesus said, “Let one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled. When he is troubled, he will be astonished and will rule over all.”
I should add that same friend also laid upon me a separate but not entirely unrelated idea: that the things you’ve achieved should be measured not by what you’ve gained, but what you’ve lost in order to attain them.
The other night I was perusing Dylan’s Chronicles and came across a passage I’d missed in the original love-buzz of first reading, concerning Bob’s meeting with the Pulitzer-winning playwright Archie MacLeish: “He asked me what I had sacrificed to pursue my dreams. He said the worth of things can’t be measured by what they cost but by what they cost you to get it, that if anything costs you your faith or your family, then the price is too high and there are some things that will never wear out.”
Then again, the same Dylan also sang, “When you got nothing/You got nothing to lose.”