By The Waters Of Babylon Summary

By The Waters of Babylon: is Knowledge really that important?

In the short story “By the Water of Babylon” a young man is a son of a priest who yearns for knowledge and wants to learn more and more. He is then sent out on a quest through a vision and finds something he was definitely not expecting. In the society he lives in idolizes priests, allowing them to omit knowledge, as they have all the knowledge and they are the only ones allowed to go to the “Dead Places”. What he finds out is an incredible discovery and one that he cannot take lightly.

The character of the story is only a son of a priest, but he has the freedoms of roaming the dead places. However, he is now at the point where he is now going to be a priest or not, so he has to go to on a quest to find out who he really is. Through visions he finds out where food, water, and where to go. He talked about his hunger and wanting for knowledge like a blazing fire that he needed to full fill, almost like an addiction or necessity like food and water (p 312, lines 43-44). He eventually finds the “places of the Gods” and is scared. He is cared, because it is forbidden to go to the place of Gods, even a priest or normal civilian is not allowed to go in.

When he first stumbled upon it he was trying to look or go through it, but eventually he noticed certain things were off so he his curiosity led him in, because the more he looked at it the more he realized it wasn’t what was always described to him.

What he found was unlike anything the priests in his village had described it, such as an always blazing city, a misty and enchanted fog all around it, and its incredible towers all crumbled. He then finally started to question everything he knew, even what his family and other priests had said about this place. He noticed the towers were still there, no flames were burning, and no fog was on this island New York City, because it is on the island of Manhattan, with many tall skyscrapers. (p 316, line

175)
When he finally got over the fact he was in the Gods place he decided to go to a high up, and which he thought to be a God's place, a tall tower. . He thought this god was very rich and knowledgeable which he liked, by all the books, papers and riches scattered throughout. He found “magical” things around it like running water, electricity and other modern conveniences. When he found the “god” of this place in a chair dead he realized that everything was wrong. (p321 lines 361-363).
The “gods” they believed existed were nothing but human beings. The knowledge he had found had finally been found and it was not what he wanted. Everything the priests had said was a lie or simply just uneducated. When he got back to the village he told his father about everything and there is one lesson that he learned. Knowledge is not what you always want it to be, because as he found out it wasn’t what he expected it to be. If he would tell his village about the discovery of the gods place they would simply laugh or not take him seriously (p231, lines 374-375). However if he they did, he could be thrown into jail since it is forbidden.
In conclusion, the main lesson of this story is that knowledge can be a good thing, however it cannot be abused or taken in all at once, because it can either hurt you, someone else, or just simply nobody believes it. (p321 lines 376-377).