“Sublime? Cathedral?” She’s craning her neck to see what he’s talking about, but they’re already making the turn that will get them onto the turnpike, and she turns back to him, shrugging. “So this is how the atheist with the soul carries on. Sounds like there’s a whole lot more soul than atheism going on in there. How’d you come to write a book like that anyway?”
“We can talk about my book later. Let’s concentrate on you first.”
“You always know the right thing to say!” She laughs. “Okay. So you want to know what I’m doing now that I’m retired from academia? You won’t believe it! Cass, this is the most exciting adventure of my life.”
“I hope this one doesn’t involve international lawyers and investigators from the State Department.”
“I’m sorry, but I’d smuggle those papers out again in order to help Absalom.” Absalom Garibaldi had been her dissertation adviser and field supervisor in the Amazon. “I had to defend him against those outrageous charges his enemies were making! Accusing him of intentionally infecting people for experimentation, like a Nazi doctor, when we were trying so desperately to inoculate everyone! You remember what we went through!”
“I just sometimes wish you wouldn’t take the risks you do.”
“Well, this is one you’re going to love! This one is unbelievable! I’ve started my own non-profit! It’s called the Immortality Foundation! We’re going to conquer aging! It’s ironic. I retire so that I can devote myself to wiping out old age! You have no idea how close to our goal we really are! Anybody who can just hold on long enough is going to make it. We don’t have to accept aging! Think of it! We don’t have to accept decline and decay and diminution! Aging is simply barbaric. It’s like bubonic plague.”
“You don’t literally mean immortality, do you?”
Roz breaks out into her peals of laughter.
“You think I’m going off the deep end, right? You think I’m going to end up like the Klap, Yahweh rest his bogus soul!”
“‘Rest his soul’! My God, Roz! Is he dead? My God! I hadn’t heard anything!”
“Calm down, Cass, calm down! You’re going to kill us both! No, I haven’t heard he’d died! I just assumed it!”
“Don’t do that to me!”
“I’m sorry, Cass! I should have thought before I spoke!”
“That’ll be the day,” Cass mutters. He’s seriously rattled, his hands gripping hard on the steering wheel to stop their trembling.
“The Klap” refers to Jonas Elijah Klapper. This was how Roz had invariably referred to the man who had been Cass’s idol.
“I’m sorry,” she repeats. “My God, I didn’t know he still has that kind of hold on you. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay, Roz. I’m okay. And who knows, maybe Klapper has died.”
“I honestly had taken it for granted. I haven’t heard a word about him in years. So I just naturally assumed he was dead. What else could have shut him up for this long?”
“It’s true that it’s been decades since he’s published anything.”
“It’s like he disappeared off the face of the earth. That guy was always publishing. He’d excuse himself to go the bathroom and come out holding his latest. It’s like he shat magnum opi—is that the plural?”
“Opera.”
“Really?”
“The plural of ‘opus’ is ‘opera.’”
“I love the way you know these things. How do you know these things?”
“Klapper.”
“Which brings me back to the question: how could he have deprived the world for so long of his erudition? That is, if he’s still alive.”
“But surely there would have been an obituary in the Times. He was too important in his day for his passing to go unremarked.”
“Well, I could easily have missed it. I spend a lot of time in places that don’t have the New York Times home delivery.”
“Even your hunter-gatherers will know when Jonas Elijah Klapper dies.”
“If you think that, then you’re still delusional. I know he loomed larger than life itself for you and his other hierophants, but that was collective lunacy.”
“Granted. But he was still a monumental figure. He’ll get a major obituary in the Times.”
“There was nothing monumental about him besides his ego.”
“That’s not true. His memory was phenomenal.”
“Okay, the guy had memorized a lot of stuff. I think that’s what convinced you he was a genius.”
“Well, it certainly convinced him.”
“I once called him Gertrude Stein in drag, on account of his major project being to convince everyone else of his genius. It wounded you deeply.”
“You were always wounding me deeply when it came to Jonas Elijah Klapper.”
“Just so long as I never wounded you about anything important. What about that magnum opus he was working on? The magnum opus to top all magnum opera? Did it ever appear?”
“No.”
“On messianism, right? That was supposed to be his latest thunder -klap, right?”
“The Messianic Ideal in the Course of World History: 1750 B.C.E. to 1988 C.E.”
“He makes an earth-shattering discovery, so big he can’t even share it with his elected ones, and then he just shuts up about it? I think the only rational conclusion is that he’s dead.”
“Maybe he discovered his discovery wasn’t so great, after all.”
“Oh, come on, Cass. You know he wasn’t capable of self-criticism. The only proof that any one of his thoughts ever required was that he- had thought it. So you never tried to get in touch with him over all these years?”
“Lord, no.”
“You were cosmically furious.”
“Was I? I don’t remember that. I just remember being cosmically confused.”
“You’ve never been great about getting in touch with your anger. You were furious, all right, more on account of the others, especially Gideon Raven. You in touch with him?”
“Now and then. Who would have guessed what he’d make of himself after that disaster?”
“He’s certainly been productive, producing his pearls. I hope he’s happy as a clam.”
“Oyster.”
“What?”
“If he’s producing pearls, he’s an oyster, not a clam.”
“Are oysters happy?”
“Probably less happy than clams.”
“Who don’t have to produce any pearls for The New Yorker on deadline. Gideon’s always publishing there.”
“He’s one of the main horses in their stable.”
“He never got his doctorate, did he?”
“Not after putting in thirteen years with Klapper. He wasn’t going to start all over again.”
“It’s impressive, the niche he’s made for himself. What would you call him?”
“An intellectual-at-large. Klapper’s leaving him in the lurch was the best thing that could have happened to him, as it turned out.”
“Best thing that could have happened to you, too, as it turned out.”
“It was hard to see that at the time. Of course, he did offer to take me with him. I was the chosen one.”
“You had sense enough not to go.”
“I couldn’t very well do that to Gideon. He should have been the one. And, anyway, by that time I was pretty disillusioned.”
“‘Disillusioned’ doesn’t begin to capture it. You were devastated, desolated, devoured by the dentures of despair.”
“Not as devastated, desolated, and devoured as Gideon.”
“And then Lizzie left him, on top of it all. What a colossal mess that guru-with-the-kuru of yours created.”
“Kuru?”
“The human equivalent of mad-cow disease. You get it from eating the brains of your dead ancestors.”
He laughs, shaking his head at her deadly aim. “I’ve got to say, you’re the one who sounds furious.”
“I was back then, the whole time we w
ere together.”
“Really? It’s amazing we had all the fun that we did.”
“Just think of the fun we could have now, with the Klap no longer in your life. Oh yeah. Now there’s Lucinda.”
“You know, I don’t think I ever really held Klapper responsible. He was in the grip of something inexorable.”
“No excuse. Some mental diseases are moral diseases, too. You can be insane and a mean, selfish bastard simultaneously.”
“I know you think so.”
“He was obscene.”
“I thought it was against the anthropologist code of ethics to call anything obscene.”
“Even among the Onuma”—these were her Amazonian people— “who don’t even have the concept of privacy, what with the guys running around with just a string holding up their foreskins and the women wearing just these little ruffly waistbands that don’t hide a thing, nobody would ever publicly masturbate the way Klapper did.”
“I assume you’re speaking metaphorically? That’s metaphorical masturbation?”
“With that tumescent ego standing in for the prize.” She looks at Cass’s face and laughs. “Okay, I’ll stop. Let me just say that I’m proud that I was never taken in by him. I never could believe how he took you in.”
“He took in a lot of better minds than mine.”
“All except the British!”
“Who seem to have lost, together with their empire, the ability to appreciate Jonas Elijah Klapper!”
Cass can barely get out the words from the laughter that’s choking him. Only Roz can get him choking on laughter.
“I’m glad to see that you can laugh about him now. That’s healthy!”
“It’s taken me long enough.”
Roz doesn’t answer, and Cass, glancing over, sees that she’s got him under a scrutinizing stare.
“What is it?”
“I’m taking to heart your implied admonition that I should think before I speak.”
“You’re an old retired dame. You’re not about to change your ways now. Go on and say it.”
“Well, I was just thinking what a deeply personal book The Varieties of Religious Illusion—which by the way I loved—actually is. Every one of us is in it, in a way. Klapper and Azarya and Gideon and me. You’ve worked us all into what everybody thinks is a psychologist’s learned discussion of religion.”
They’re pulling off onto the road that leads to Frankfurter’s campus, making the sharp right that will bring them up the steep hill on which the university is laid out, and Cass is considering the surprising thing that Roz has just said, trying to judge if there’s any truth in it, and feeling the queasiness of suspecting that there is, and wondering why that should induce queasiness, when Roz gives a yell.
“What’s that?” She’s pointing out her window. “Wait a minute! It can’t be! It’s a genuine protester! Whooohoo! The sixties live!”
Sure enough, there’s a kid with a hand-lettered placard on the side of the plowed road.
“What does his sign say? I couldn’t make it out with all the glare from the snow. Let’s go back, Cass! Let’s see what kind of action’s going down in good old Frankfurter.”
“Are you kidding, Roz? I’m late. And anyway, this road is one-way and slippery as hell.”
“Oh, Cass, you’re no fun at all! Just slow down and I’ll bail!”
And so he does, and so she does, which is no mean athletic feat in those high-heeled boots. His eyes on the rearview mirror, he watches her slip-sliding away, and he can’t help laughing out loud as she plops her fur hat down on her head, imagining that he can actually hear her muttering, “The hell with hat-head!”—which is, in fact, exactly what she’s muttering.
V
The Argument from Reversal of Fortune
There had always been the hothouse atmosphere of a mystery religion enclosing Jonas Elijah Klapper and his band of disciples. Entrance into his circle had the feel of an initiation. “I sense the aura of election upon you,” he would pronounce in a hushed voice to some severely young person, who, unsurprisingly, rarely disagreed. Cass had not disagreed when confided the news about himself.
Cass had first arrived at Frankfurter as a graduate student in order to study with Jonas Elijah Klapper, who himself was then only newly arrived on campus, the single professor composing the Department of Faith, Literature, and Values that Frankfurter had constructed around him in order to lure him away from the English Department at Columbia University, which is where Cass had first come under his sway.
As a pre-med, intending to be a doctor like his father (though not necessarily a gastroenterologist), Cass had had little time to take courses outside his requirements. It was his last semester of college when he attended Jonas Elijah Klapper’s oversubscribed course, “The Manic, the Mantic, and the Mimetic,” and his life has never been the same.
Rumpled as he came shambling into the lecture room, a Jewish walrus in a shabby tweed jacket, by the time Jonas Elijah Klapper was fifteen minutes into the hour he looked in need of a tranquilizer dart, the few wisps of his frizzed gray hair sticking out in every direction as he mussed it in his inspired distraction, his eyes rolling around in daemonic frenzy, tears trailing his declivitous jowls as he brought forth the riches of his prodigious memory. With his eyes staring off to just above the head of the tallest student in the class—that would be Cass—it was as if the words were imprinted on the drifting dust motes of Hamilton Hall, and he had simply to read them off from midair, great long paragraphs ranging from Augustine confessing to Zarathustra thus spaking.
This is what it is to be a mind, a real mind, a cultivated mind. This is what it is to lay claim to the entire intellectual corpus, all of it filed within the capacious precincts of one’s own inviolably sacred inner life.
An inner life! That’s what Cass wanted! A self! Professor Klapper’s asides, which sometimes expanded to the size of the hour, were often variations on the theme of “get thyself a self.” Cass hadn’t even known before this semester that he didn’t have a self to call his own.
“Thinkers treat theories like fashionable women treat clothes. They must always have one, and it has to be sufficiently avant-garde so that the lower orders have not yet acquired it, are not buying cheap knockoffs at Macy’s and Gimbels. So, if you are taking this course to find out what the well-dressed theoretician is wearing this year, then I shall have to disappoint you. There is only one theory, and it is the theory you shall pull bloody from the afterbirth of your own self.”
This was heady stuff. This was disruptive, destabilizing, and absolutely necessary stuff.
“We are no more born into the self than we are born into the truth. Both must be acquired with a labor and a love that call forth powers few possess, with the consequence that the earth is populated by veritable zombies, whose inner emptiness would elicit a chorus of execretion if exposed to the eyes of the few carriers of consciousness among us.”
Cass had almost gotten through college, had all but wasted irretrievable years of his life, without having realized that he was about to take the next step having never embarked on the first. He had done nothing toward acquiring a unique and inviolable being. That is what he was being shown that he wanted—only everything!—as he sat in that classroom wandering breathless in the rarefied landscape that opened up within the sculpted syllables of Jonas Elijah Klapper’s lectures, which were rendered in the very voice of Western civilization, sweeping in a matter of mere sentences from frolicking disquisitions to stentorious exhortations to whispering tremolos, a voice that astonished even itself with its impartings, moving the speaker to tears that traced their torturous way down the pleated jowls of ageless genius.
Listening to the immensity which was Jonas Elijah Klapper grappling with the immensities of Goethe and Nietzsche and Swedenborg and Blake, not to speak of Yahweh Himself, had induced the out-of-person giddiness of his childhood lower bunk bed: Jesse there, Cass here. What transpired in Room 201 of Hamilton Hall also veered ver
tiginously toward disempersonment, at least for Cass Seltzer, beholding for the very first time the world-spurning, worlds-spawning nature of pure genius, and something even—yes, something even beyond genius. That was the greatest astonishment that Cass had taken away from Jonas Elijah Klapper’s class on “The Manic, the Mantic, and the Mimetic.” Professor Klapper himself implied that genius, exalted as it is, can amount to a dereliction of duty. Goethe had settled for being a genius, the professor had whispered, and Cass’s spine had tingled, as it always tingled when the professor’s voice dropped down to a quavering hush, even when Cass had no idea what Professor Klapper meant, as he so often had no idea what Professor Klapper meant.
Cass had gone to speak with Professor Klapper during office hours, and he had been made privy to an enthralling exposition on the evolution of Professor Klapper’s thinking through the successive developments that he called “paradox shifts,” and at the end of the two-hour private session, the great man had murmured to him, “I sense the aura of election upon you.”
Arriving in Frankfurter as a graduate student of Jonas Elijah Klapper, Cass felt stunningly ill-prepared to take on faith and literature, not to speak of values. He had learned on his acceptance that he was one of only twelve students sharing the honor, and the other eleven were all far more advanced than he. Gideon Raven was the number-one student among them. He had already been a graduate student for twelve years.
Cass had spent the summer at his parents’ home in Persnippity, New Jersey, sitting on the back deck and reading his way through the professor’s extensive corpus, some twenty-eight tomes in all. His parents had taken the news calmly. His mother, who tended toward strong views, was constrained in this case by her strong views on personal autonomy. She was also a bit distracted by Jesse’s decision to move out of the NYU dorms into an apartment that she couldn’t figure out how he could afford. His father had only once raised the subject of Cass’s giving up his plan to go to medical school. It had to be somewhat of a disappointment for Ben Seltzer. He had loved to talk over Cass’s pre-med courses with him, and was himself a happy gastroenterologist, as he was a happy husband, a happy father, a happy weekend squash player. His wife, Deb, was more the intellectual—a “culture vulture,” as Ben fondly called her—and he was always more than happy to accompany her to operas and symphonies, lectures, art exhibits. “More than happy to …” more often than not characterized Ben Seltzer’s attitude. It was from him that Cass had gotten his height, as well as the implicit apology in his bearing for taking up too much space. When his father asked him whether he was sure about giving up on medical school, it sounded almost as if the man knew that it was written in the handbook of Jewish parents that he was required to ask, and he was just trying to get it over with. Cass was accommodating. He wanted to get it over with, too. He held up his current book, which happened to be Jonas Elijah Klapper’s The Perversity of Persuasion, and said, “This is sheer genius, Dad.” His father’s response, after a considerable pause, was to say that maybe he’d give it a read, “or, better yet, your mother can read it and then explain it to me.”
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