The Latest Thing is (or was) a monolithic New York Times or Globe and Mail-type newspaper published during the Old Testament period.

            -- David Elliot

IN THE NAME OF THE LORD GOD OF HOSTS

KING SOLOMON OF ISRAEL

CONQUEROR OF THE PHILISTINES
CANAANITES AMORITES HITTITES
PERIZZITES HIVITES JEBUSITES

DEVOUT FORTUNATE RENOWNED
VICTORIOUS AND TRIUMPHANT
FOREVER KING

FINAL TESTAMENT UNTO
THE PEOPLE OF THE TWELVE TRIBES OF ISRAEL

You think you know me, O my people; you think, but you do not truly know.  You gossip, muse, and dream; damn, pander, and praise (how I have heard it in the streets daily) but all I have heard are cloying eulogies and pedestrian whimsies as fleeting as ants in the mouth of a furnace.  For three and twenty years, you have hearkened to Wisdom as the fruit of my lips, you have built my Temple to the Lord, brick upon brick, with the mortar of your sons’ blood, and like wheat nodding on its stalk, you have bowed to me as a god among the insects of heathen kings.  You have seen golden chariots, royal liveries, vengeful scimitars, vanquished foes, and my queens – seven hundred – fawning on their King with a sickly sweetness that caused me to sicken the city with idols.  But despite the encomiums the harpers have sung me, it is not the shrill cry of steel on steel in battle, nor the world’s adulation for a wizard’s proverbs, nor the silks, perfumes, jewels, metals, exotic animals, or impregnable fortresses that I garnered - but rather - the Babylonian narcotic of feminine allure, that I think of as I lay here dying.  Blessed be God for that beauty which combines the angel’s comeliness with the brute’s touchability, but O cursed, thrice cursed is he who, forgetting the Beauty which made it, lets his soul sink from god to garbage.  What is beauty, the honeyed manacle?  What is this that delights like eatable, drinkable, breathable gold; that does not die, like the bee after its first sting, but makes wither, like the eye staring at the Sun, the man born desiring it, whose every draught of it makes him more thirsty, whose feasting leaves him still more famished, who, pricked by the thorn, reaches again for the rose?  Royal father, know this: there is one whose blood also stains the rapier that pierced your breast when you saw the indescribable she, like a Grecian nymph, bathing in the moonlight.  There is one who also understands that something within the world and beyond the world that whispered to you then of the love more terrible than hate and thrust your bent will flaming into the void.

And yet it should not be so.  I whose wisdom was a byword to the nations, who become the fool, sot, debauchee, and tyrant (I could go on) of my mistresses’ passion, know that it is not so, for the angels showed it to me when I walked where God walked and the psalmist sang a new song.  They said that beauty and pleasure are the faint and far off echoes of God’s creative rapture implanted in matter, but that they are only tasted at ten million years distance by the impure palates of a fallen race.  The form of God in the flesh, as man is the image of God in soul, it is given to good and evil alike, so that, while knowing that it is high, we should not mistake it for the Most High.  You will think then that beauty and pleasure are the greatest goods for us.  You will make them into a goddess and become her priest.  If she sends you her daughters, you will devour them with idolatrous abandon, and if she withholds them, you will cry that she is fickle and a cheat.  You will betray friend, pervert the flesh, and kill your children just to lick up one drop of her ambrosia spilt upon the dust, crying “Let me but have this, and I will forfeit all the bliss in Paradise!”  And you will trot dully to senile decrepitude after thirty or sixty years of animal rutting; a bewildered, witless, apish parody of man, belching over the cups, musing over titillations past, and with nothing to look forward to but Death and the prospect of a fearful Judgment.  Your grave will be cold.

You will say then, O Israelites, that it is evil for us.  At my royal intimation you will call the flesh a prison and say that pleasure is the ancient serpent.  You will rack, scourge, freeze, and burn the house of your soul, offering up your gangled flesh as a savoury oblation in the nostrils of the God of love.  Gone will be the bullocks, then: the Temple will stink of your self-loathing.  And you will hate the Lord, His daughters, and yourself most of all for it, for the flesh is clean creation of a good God – a light darkened only by the cataract of a malfeasant eye.

Let them lay my body out simply and soberly, as befits idle clay.  Let the flautists’ dirge be brief, the Steward’s eulogy briefer, and let the mourners keen for my numberless sins rather than for an end to the number of my days.  Let the following transcription be etched upon my grave: “Beauty is great and Eve’s daughters sublime, but he who has the flesh for his god will not have God for his flesh.”