Se7en's Deadly Sins
Monday

The pouring rain of a city, rain that doesn't cleanse, rain that merely dilutes. Dilutes everything: the color of the buildings, the grey of the streets, the skin of people walking by. All black umbrellas and grime. A railroad apartment, in one of many buildings lined together like crooked teeth. The inside of the apartment is lit in only a few rooms, the couch and chairs uninhabited for what seems like years. A man sits slumped over at the kitchen table, dead. His white tank top so stretched around his wide body that it seems like only another layer of skin. Purple veins climb his limbs like seawead thrown from a beach side storm.

Mills: How does someone let himself go like that?
Somerset: Please. He was obviously a shut in.

Later, at the precinct: (Somerset) The killer put a bucket beneath him, kept on serving. The victim's throat was swollen, probably from the effort. When you want someone dead, you drive by and shoot him. You don't risk the time it takes to do this. The act itself has meaning. It is beginning.

(Captain) They found these in the fat boy's stomach, mixed in with the food. Looks like plastic, little pieces of plastic. They were fed to him.

(Somerset) This was found on the wall behind the refrigerator: long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light. Milton, Paradise Lost. This was found behind the same refrigerator, written in grease: gluttony. There are seven deadly sins, Captain.....you can expect five more of these.

And what, I ask, would become of America if we were all charged with the gluttony of our individual lives? If it went beyond food, on to the gorging we commence upon all our resources, including the ones we are convinced that we need: houses, cars, belongings. We can only be thankful that humans don't actively judge us on our sins, that somewhere amongst the irony, there is grace.

Go back to:
Pride
Envy
Wrath
Lust
Avarice
Sloth

Glut"ton*y (?), n.; pl. Gluttonies (#). [OE. glotonie, OF. glotonie, gloutonnie.]

Excess in eating; extravagant indulgence of the appetite for food; voracity.

Their sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts. Milton.

 

© Webster 1913.

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