The Story of B

by Daniel Quinn

  “He would tell his superiors to prepare for a new era in human history.”

  “He wouldn’t care to do that.”

  “No, he certainly wouldn’t.”

  We paused under the hotel marquee, and I turned to face her. Her eyes came up to meet mine with a look of vulnerable entreaty that sank into my heart like a knife. She held my gaze for half a second, then glanced away.

  “I want to believe you’re telling me the truth,” she murmured uncertainly.

  “I am,” I said.

  Adding to myself: at least about that.

  Monday, May 20

  Radenau: Day three

  I’m sitting here yawning and yawning, waiting for my jaw to crack. Not from sleepiness but from nervousness. Six o’clock, nearly time to go.

  Fr. Lulfre has received his daily fax in continued silence. I’ve performed routine maintenance chores—sleeping, showering, shaving, eating, and so on—and have brought this diary up to the minute. I’ve also acquired a very sophisticated (and very expensive) tape recorder that, set at a slow tape speed, will put two full hours of sound on each side of a single cassette without my having to fool with it.

  6:07—I feel strongly that I shouldn’t go on till I’ve found the source of this terrible nervousness. Is it just the fact of playing this double role? I’m like a lawyer trying to represent both sides in a dispute—and struggling to persuade each side that he’s trustworthy. Struggling to persuade himself that he’s trustworthy. I’m wallowing in a sea of lies while trying to look like someone standing on a solid ground of integrity.

  True as all that is, however, I know that’s not quite it. What I’m nervous about is something else. What I’m nervous about is B’s program for me. It’s one thing to check out someone who might just be the most dangerous man alive—and quite another thing to become his disciple.

  Setting this down in visible words doesn’t make the nervousness go away, but it does make further stalling seem pointless.

  Down there again

  B was alone in the subterranean greenroom of the Schauspielhaus Wahnfried, and as I wound my way through the jumbled acres of theatrical antiques, he watched me with a rather sad smile. He was seated as before, in his wonderful Regency bergere in gilt and ebony. I seated myself as before, in my wonderful old Biedermeier fauteuil with cushions of faded pale green velvet.

  “A couple of times,” he said after we’d exchanged polite greetings, “in Munich and in my talk last night, you heard me refer to a colleague, Ishmael—another teacher but quite a different kind of teacher from me. He was a maieutic teacher, and I’m not.”

  “Maieutic?”

  “From the Greek word for—”

  “I think I know it,” I told him. “From the root maia, meaning midwife.”

  “That’s right. A maieutic teacher is one who acts as a midwife to pupils, gently guiding to the light ideas that have long been growing inside of them.”

  I thought about this for a moment, then asked him if one can choose to be a maieutic teacher or if this is dictated by one’s subject matter.

  “Not every teaching objective lends itself to the maieutic approach. For example, it would have been inane for Isaac Newton to try to draw his discoveries in optics from his pupils’ heads—inane because they weren’t in his pupils’ heads. On the other hand, he might have used the maieutic approach to show pupils why his alchemical studies seemed worthwhile to him. Socrates was of course famous for his use of the maieutic method. Jesus only dabbled in it, usually as a means of helping people understand their own questions, as when he said, ‘If it is by Beelzebub that I cast out devils, then by whom do your children cast them out?’”

  Again I gave this some thought before saying, “I assume this means that what you have to teach me is not something that can be drawn from my head.”

  “This is largely the case, yes.”

  I showed him the tape recorder I’d bought and asked if he minded my taping our conversations.

  “It’d be pointless to mind,” he replied. “The purpose of our conversation is to make a record for your Fr. Lulfre.”

  A mosaic

  “At this point, I have nothing like a curriculum for you,” B said. “You know what a curriculum is, I suppose.”

  “I’d say it was a sequence of teaching objectives.”

  “A sequence that proceeds on what basis? Presumably it’s not an arbitrary sequence.”

  “I suppose ideally it proceeds from the familiar to the unfamiliar or from the simple to the complex. A curriculum is structured like a pyramid, building from the ground up. You have to know A to learn B, you have to know A and B to learn C, you have to know A, B, and C to learn D, and so on.”

  “Exactly. But as I say, I have no such curriculum. Rather than a pyramid, I’m constructing a mosaic. The pieces can be added in any order. In the early stages, there’s nothing like an image, but as pieces are added, an image begins to emerge. As still more pieces are added, the image becomes more distinct, more definite, so that eventually you feel sure that the basic picture is before you. From this point on, the picture can only gain in sharpness and detail as pieces continue to be added. At last it seems that there are no ‘missing pieces’ at all, and only the cracks between contiguous pieces remain to be filled—with ever tinier pieces. As the cracks between pieces are filled, the picture begins to look more and more like a painting—a continuous whole rather than an assembly of fragments—and in the end it no longer resembles a mosaic at all.”

  “I understand.”

  “You’ll have to transmit what I’m saying in pieces, I think. We’ll just have to see what happens. I’ve had many pupils, but they’ve always learned simply by hanging around. Circumstances compel us to adopt an untried method.”

  I told him I was willing to try the untried.

  “Here’s a piece to begin with. You remember young Heinz and Monika Teitel, who were here last night.”

  I said I did.

  “They’ve followed me through a complete course of lectures and so have heard at least once everything I’m able to say in public that I feel will be comprehensible. But you don’t become a Christian by hearing one sermon, you don’t become a Freudian by hearing one lecture, and you don’t become a Marxist by reading one pamphlet. If an outsider asks the Teitels something that goes beyond anything they’ve heard from me, they must refer the question to me. They know what I’m saying, but my message is not sufficiently theirs that they can generate answers of their own. For them, the mosaic is only a rough sketch.

  “Frau Doktor Hartmann has twice followed me through my course of lectures and has attended many more such soirees as we engaged in here last night. If an outsider asks her a question that goes beyond anything she’s heard from me, she may try to deal with it, but when she reports her answer to me, she usually finds out that my answer would have been quite different from hers—sometimes even contradictory to hers. She too knows what I’m saying, but my message is not sufficiently hers that she can generate answers with certainty. She can see the general outlines clearly enough, but the image in the mosaic is still rather shadowy.

  “Michael, on the other hand, has been with me a bit longer than Frau Hartmann, and if an outsider asks him a question beyond anything he’s heard from me, he almost never gets the answer wrong, though it will probably lack the depth and assurance that it would have if it came from me. The message is almost his, and the image in the mosaic is substantially complete, though still a bit vague, almost as if it were not quite in perfect focus yet.

  “But Shirin has been with me longer than anyone, and if an outsider asks a question that goes beyond anything she’s heard from me, she’ll answer without hesitation. Her answer will not necessarily have the same emphasis as mine would have or be delivered in the same style or reflect an identical point of view, but it will have the same authenticity and power, because the mosaic image she’s referring to for her answer is as solid and well-focused as mine is. The message is he
rs entirely. It’s as much hers as it is mine. She is the message in the same sense that I am the message.”

  B paused as if for a response, and I told him that I understood what he was saying but wasn’t sure why he was saying it.

  “I’m giving you a second look at something I talked about at our first meeting,” B said. “When Jesus departed, he left no one behind who was the message.”

  I managed to suppress an urge to blurt out a “Wow,” but wow was certainly what sprang to mind. This was undeniably true—not in any sense a condemnation, but undeniably true. Jesus left behind no one who could speak with his authority, no one who could say “This is what’s what.” There were very elementary questions the apostles couldn’t answer with confidence, like: To what degree were those of the new dispensation bound by the laws of the old dispensation? You can hardly get more fundamental than that. In fact, it was St. Paul—a man who had never even seen Jesus—who ended up saying “This is what’s what” with more authority than anyone else could muster. More than John or Peter or James (as far as we know), Paul was the message. But even with the writings of Paul and all the evangelists, it still took three hundred years of Christian thought to reconstitute Christ’s message—to piece together the hints, reconcile apparent contradictions, cut away heresies and lunacies and irrelevancies, and organize it into a self-consistent, coherent creed that more or less everyone could agree on.

  Even so, I told B that I still didn’t quite know what he was getting at.

  “Last night I talked about changing minds. I said that if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds. Not by programs. By people with changed minds.”

  “I remember.”

  “What you’re here for today is to have your mind changed.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Right now, Jared, what message are you?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “When Jesus departed, he left no one behind who was the message. None of the apostles was his message. You understand what I mean by that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not in the same condition as those apostles. Are you?”

  “No, I guess I’m not.”

  “Are you or aren’t you?”

  I’m not.

  “Christ’s message is yours, isn’t it? If I ask you whether premarital sex is right or wrong, you won’t have to call Fr. Lulfre to find out the answer, will you?”

  “No.”

  “If I ask you whether suicide is right or wrong, you won’t have to consult the scriptures, will you?”

  “No.”

  “You possess these answers as your own. These and ten thousand others like them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I’ll ask again: What message are you?”

  “I’m Christ’s message.”

  “A Lutheran minister would say the same, as would a Presbyterian minister or a Baptist preacher, even though some of their answers would differ from your own. So here you are, and I want you to understand what you’re doing here.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Though he probably wouldn’t think of it in these terms, Fr. Lulfre has sent you here to become my message.”

  An icy chill skittered down my spine.

  A new horizon

  “If you press a group of schoolchildren to explain why we’re teetering on the edge of calamity, they’ll soon trot out all the coffeehouse cliches—all the theories the Unabomber set forth so solemnly and at such great length in his magnum opus a couple years ago: out-of-control technological advancement, out-of-control industrial greed, out-of-control government expansion, and so on. How do you think all these commonplace explanations evolved?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Forgive me for answering so promptly, but I know this is something I’ve never given any thought to.”

  “Then let’s give it some thought now. One of the major obstacles to building the Panama Canal in the late decades of the nineteenth century was yellow fever. Its cause was unknown and it was unbeatable by the medical science of the day. Perhaps you know something of this.”

  “Yes. At that time it was thought to be caused by night air. People who stayed inside at night caught the disease less often than those who went out.”

  “But some who stayed inside at night caught it anyway.”

  “That’s right, because they left their windows open. Eventually people realized they had to be very careful not to let in any night air at all.”

  “But, as Walter Reed eventually discovered, the carrier of the disease wasn’t the night air, it was the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which hunts in the night air.”

  “Yes.”

  “What led people to think that night air was to blame?”

  I shook my head, boggled by the question, and told B I didn’t know how to answer it.

  “Make a start at it all the same,” he said. “Give it a shot.”

  I shrugged and gave it a shot. “This is what people thought. There wasn’t anything inherently irrational in the idea, and in fact it had some merit.”

  “Good. I should add that the account you’ve just given is more legend than fact, but it serves to illustrate the point. The ideas the Unabomber articulated are also ‘what people think.’ There isn’t anything inherently irrational in them, and in fact they have some merit.”

  “Okay, I see what you’re saying. Vaguely.”

  “Both groups are struggling under a handicap. Do you see what it is?”

  “I’d say that, in both groups, their intellectual horizon is too close. They’re looking for causes too near to the effect.”

  “Exactly. This is the overriding effect of the Great Forgetting. In our culture—East and West, twins of a single birth—human history is only what’s happened since our agricultural revolution began. In our culture, because of the Great Forgetting, people looking at the horizon are only looking back in time a few thousand years. In 1654 Archbishop Ussher calculated that the human race was born in 4004 B.C. Later, archaeologists calculated that this is just when the very first cities of Mesopotamia began to be built. For a people who imagined that Man was born an agriculturalist and a civilization builder, what could make better sense? The human race appeared in Mesopotamia six thousand years ago—and immediately began building cities. The Great Forgetting imprinted this picture indelibly on our cultural mind. It doesn’t matter that everyone ‘knows’ the human race is three million years older than the cities of Mesopotamia. Every molecule of thought in our culture bears the impress of the idea that we needn’t look beyond the Mesopotamian horizon in order to understand our history.”

  “And you’re telling me that your horizon is three million years.”

  “Always. For me, Mesopotamia is erased as a horizon. How do you think one manages such a thing?”

  “I suppose one manages it by climbing a ladder, which is to say by seeing things from a higher vantage point.”

  “That’s right. When you do that, events that formerly seemed huge (because they’re close) take their place in a deeper landscape and no longer stand out with the same prominence as before.”

  Climbing the ladder

  “We were talking about the cliches that people trot out to explain why we’re teetering on the edge of calamity: out-of-control technological advancement, out-of-control industrial greed, out-of-control government expansion, and so on. These are explanations that make sense to people of the Great Forgetting, to people who think that they’re seeing the human horizon when they look at the Mesopotamian horizon. For people of the Great Forgetting, our agricultural revolution was literally the beginning of human history. When I view the human horizon, I’m looking back three million years past the Mesopotamian horizon, so it’s simply grotesque to think of our agricultural revolution as signaling the beginning of human history. It signals something, to be sure, but not remotely ‘the beginning of human history.’”

  Feeling it was time to man
ifest some evidence of consciousness, I said, “What does it signal, then?”

  “It signals the occurrence of a mind change—a new vision of the world and our place in it.”

  “How do you conclude that a mind change occurred?”

  “I conclude it from the fact that a revolution occurred,” B replied. “Revolutions don’t occur among people who are thinking in the same old way.”

  “Can’t changed social or economic conditions produce a revolution?”

  “Surely you don’t mean that. People produce revolutions, not conditions.”

  “I mean, can’t people react in a revolutionary way to changed social or economic conditions?”

  “Of course they can. But the question is, can they react in a revolutionary way without first thinking in a revolutionary way?”

  I had to admit that I couldn’t imagine revolutionary action taking place in the absence of revolutionary thinking.

  B said, “I have heard naive thinkers suggest that our agricultural revolution came about as a response to famine.”

  “Why is that naive?”

  “It’s naive because starving people don’t plant crops any more than drowning people build life rafts. The only people who can afford to wait for crops to grow are people who already have food.”

  “Yes, that makes sense.”

  “You will also hear it conjectured that agriculture was pretty much an inevitable development, because it makes life so much easier and more secure. In fact, it makes life more toilsome and less secure. Every study of calories spent versus calories gained confirms that the more your food comes from agriculture, the harder you have to work for it. The first Neolithic farmers, who probably only planted a few crops and depended largely on foraging, worked much harder to stay alive than their Mesolithic ancestors. Later farmers, who planted more crops and did less foraging, worked even harder to stay alive, and completely modern totalitarian farmers, who depend entirely on crops, work harder to stay alive than anyone else. And famine, far from being banished by agriculture, is actually a by-product of agriculture and is never found apart from it. Travel to the most inhospitable desert of Australia during the most horrendous drought—and you won’t find a single starving aborigine anywhere.”