"Go forth and sin no more"

 I was 14. My grandfather was after me as usual, berating me for wasting my time reading science fiction when I could be reading the Classics.

"How do you know it's a waste of time unless you read it?", I asked defiantly.

He conceded the point I was trying to make. We made a pact.

I would read a play by G.B. Shaw and he would read an Asimov novel.

The deal was that we would each choose the work we wanted to read.

I picked "Mrs Warren's Profession". In retrospect, a terrible choice, because I couldn't make head or tail of it.

But something about the characters charmed me and I continued onto "Arms and the Man", and finished Nine Plays that Summer.

'Caves of Steel' was the book he chose. A murder mystery set in a future where mankind is forced to live in underground cities, completely cut off from the outdoors.

I was convinced he would hate it. I was preparing my arguments to defend the genre.

"It has Biblical undertones", he commented when I asked him how it was going. "It's a little confusing, but he seems a smart chap."

"It's not Dickens, but it is not bad", he pronounced when he was done.

The reference to Dickens confused me. I had never claimed the book was great literature. But I still asked him to explain.

It was the story of the adulterous woman that he was referring to. Of how the robot grasped some part of 'he who is without sin cast the first stone'.

His praise of a genre I didn't think he would like, and his stamp of approval on my reading choice made me internalise the message.

"Go forth and sin no more", was what I would use in my mind when I forgave people for hurting me.

"Let he who is without sin" remains my philosophy.