And Jonas Elijah Klapper, still beaming, gathered up his books and papers and shambled out the door.
Cass looked up from the table to see forty-two eyes fastened upon him. The three girls looked away so quickly they may have lost a few eyelashes. Only Gideon Raven continued to hold his stare, blankly and noncommittally He pushed back his chair and came over to Cass’s side, tossing something onto the table right in front of him.
Cass’s first thought was that Gideon Raven was so outraged with him, either for upsetting Jonas Elijah Klapper or, more probably, for the original sin itself, that he wanted to pelt him with a spitball and his aim wasn’t good. Cass looked up questioningly, and Raven gave him a little twitch of a smile and then exited from the room, the rest of the seminar silently filing out after him.
Cass looked at the missile. It was a piece of paper that had been folded over many times, until it was the volume of a sugar cube. Cass unfolded it to find a flyer for something called “Sex Week at Frankfurter”:
Our goal is to promote an open discussion of love, sex, intimacy, and relationships. All sexualities, no matter how alternative, and all individuals, of whatever sexual experience, are welcome. If you would like to get involved contact Shoshy Wasserman at 555-4256 or Hillel Schlessinger at 555-7861.
What did this mean? Could Gideon Raven be so offended that he was insinuating that Cass was of an alternative sexuality? The fire in Cass’s face and under his scalp, which had begun to subside, re-flared.
After a few minutes of sitting there alone, it occurred to him to turn the paper over. There, scribbled in chicken scratch, were the words:
meet me midnight, view from nowhere
Cass had not the hint of a clue as to what these words could mean. Was it a line from a poem? These people were all so formidably well read. Whatever it meant, it must have been given to him because of what had befallen him during the seminar. Did it contain a hint as to what was the nature of the peripeteia that he had just undergone? Was it what he needed to know in order to survive as a student of Jonas Elijah Klapper’s?
He trotted over to the Lipschitz Library and up to the reference librarian on duty. She was a woman of about sixty, thin-lipped and spare. The nameplate identified her as Aviva Landesmann.
“Would you have any idea how I could go about finding out what this means?” Cass asked Aviva Landesmann.
She read it aloud, scowled at Cass, and then read it aloud again.
Aviva Landesmann looked familiar somehow. She reminded him of someone, someone who stirred up forgotten love and confusion.
Did psychologists have a word for this sort of thing, a reminding that consists in nothing but a mute emotion that can’t name its own object? Was he having a Proustian moment? He wouldn’t know. Wherever he turned, he was confronted by the vast ignorance that made him unentitled to be a student of Faith, Literature, and Values.
Aviva Landesmann was staring at the slip of paper. She turned it over and saw the announcement for Sex Week at Frankfurter, and her expression, which was none too encouraging to begin with, curdled with distaste.
“Feh!”
That’s when it hit Cass. Aviva Landesmann reminded him of his beloved bubbe, his mother’s mother.
His mother always kept the details of her stormy relations with her mother from Cass and Jesse when they were little, but he remembered the unsettling voice from behind the closed door of his mother’s bedroom when she phoned his bubbe, terrifying bursts of fury that his mother emitted with no one else. When she emerged, her face white and strained, she could only say that his bubbe had “done it again.” He later learned that what Bubbe had done again was what people with borderline personality disorder always do with their intimates: get their goats, push their buttons, pick at their vulnerable spots, draw them into destructive dramas that don’t let up until the borderline tastes blood. Then, finally, Bubbe had stepped over some invisible line and had gone too far, even for her. All that Cass knew was that the support group that his mother belonged to, Borderline Offspring Injured Lifelong (BOIL), backed Deb up in her decision. One of the rules in the BOIL handbook was: set the limits of your own tolerance. Deb had reached her limits.
Cass had nevertheless loved his bubbe. He couldn’t help himself. She used to sing a special song about a rooster, “Cookooreekoo,” just for him. She had spoken in a special cooing voice, just for him, her oldest grandson, whom she called Chaim, his Hebrew name.
“Oy, such a boychik, so shoen”—which means “beautiful”—“so klig”— which means “smart,” though it tore up her heart that he was being brought up like a vilda chaya, a wild animal.
Deb always blamed inbreeding for her mother’s personality disorder. Deb blamed inbreeding for a great deal. Deb—who was originally Devo-rah Gittel Sheiner—came from a family that belonged to a sect of Ha-sidim, the Valdeners, who had originated in a town called Valden, in Hungary. Almost all the Hasidic sects are named after the towns where their first Grand Rabbi, the founder of his dynastic lineage, had originated, or where he had established his rabbinical court. So there are the Satmars, from Szatmárnémeti, Hungary (now Satu Mare, Romania), the Lubavitchers from Lubavitch, Lithuania, the Breslovers, from Breslov, Ukraine, and at least a dozen sects still surviving from the dozens more there had been before the Second World War. And all of them are crystallized around a charismatic Rebbe, the term that means “my rabbi,” with the position of Rebbe passed down through family lines, from father to son or to another male relative, though occasionally there are controversies, splits, factions. Only the Breslovers never saw fit to have any Rebbe but their first, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: a mysterious figure with messianic aspirations, known for his collection of allegorical tales, and himself the great-grandson of the eighteenth century’s founder of Hasidism itself, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.
The current Rebbe of the Valdeners, Rav Bezalel Sheiner, also claimed a lineage that could be traced back to the Ba’al Shem Tov. Deb was related, on both her maternal and paternal sides, to the Valdener rabbinic dynasty, though according to her that was nothing to brag about. Valdeners tend to marry each other, so just about everybody was related to everybody.
“And then they wonder about the genetic diseases.”
Cass’s father, Ben Seltzer, had also come from a fairly observant family, but it was standard modern Orthodox, so Deb’s family was exotic to him, too. Both Deb and Ben had wandered far from the religiosity they had each been born into, but Deb had had to travel a lot farther to get to where they were, the non-kosher and non-Sabbath-observing house in which Cass and Jesse had been raised. After Jesse’s Bar Mitzvah, his parents had let their membership in the synagogue lapse.
The Valdeners lived in a self-contained village, tucked into the folds near the rocky Palisades edging the Hudson River. It wasn’t a gated community, but it might as well have been. Nobody but Valdeners lived in New Walden, except for a few sons-in-law and daughters-in-law who had come over from some other Hasidic sect.
The other sects lived in urban areas—in Jerusalem, or Montreal, or Brooklyn—always in some well-defined section. In Brooklyn it was in Williamsburg and Boro Park, where the Valdeners, too, had settled when they had first come to America. The previous Valdener Rebbe, Reb Yisroel Sheiner, who in the 1930s had shepherded some portion of his flock out of Europe and into safety in the nick of time, had decided in the 1950s, that Brooklyn, too, was getting tzu heiss—too hot—what with the increasing crime rate and the deteriorating relations between the Hasidim and the blacks and Puerto Ricans, not to speak of the high rents that made it difficult for the large Valdener families—average number of children, 6.9—to afford decent housing. The Rebbe had quietly, so as not, God forbid, to raise the fears of the Gentile farmers in the area, purchased a large chicken farm not far from where Rip Van Winkle had snored, and built a self-contained shtetl, the first village in New York State to be completely governed by a religious authority, with the t
own’s mayor being none other than the Grand Rabbi himself, and the aldermen his closest disciples.
The village was to have been called New Valden, but through a county clerk’s typing error it had been Americanized to New Walden. The Valdeners had no idea that the spelling mistake brought them into nominal intimacy with the ghost of Henry David Thoreau, sounding the chord of American transcendentalism—visionary, romantic, self-reliantly impractical. The Valdeners knew from Thoreau like they knew from clam chowder.
Cass had only visited New Walden a few times, since his mother hated the village and would go unusually quiet for days before a visit. It was a strange place, where he and Jesse were made to feel outlandish because they didn’t dress in short black pants and large black felt hats, didn’t have long side curls and speak the language of the place, which was Yiddish. Cass remembered some little boy, maybe a cousin—there were throngs of them, many of them with Cass’s and Jesse’s red hair—laughing with scorn when they were introduced, some kid named Shloimy or Moishy or Yankel finding the name “Cass” hilarious.
Even though his mother went strange around her, Cass had loved his widowed bubbe. Another thing that was hard to ignore was that his bubbe didn’t treat Jesse as nicely as she treated him. It wasn’t even clear that Bubbe knew Jesse’s name. She called him “little boy.” If Jesse came over and tried to climb onto her lap—a space freely offered to Cass—Bubbe would push him away.
“Feh, here he is again. The second tog”—day—“of yom tov”—a holiday— “always schlepping after the first. Why don’t you go find your mommy, little boy, and let your older brother enjoy in peace a little?”
Jesse was so shocked by Bubbe’s behavior that he would go off without a word of protest, an unusual response for Cass’s brother, who could fly off the handle if Cass or his mother or father failed to read his mind concerning something he wanted. Cass always saved for Jesse at least half the babka that Bubbe gave him, even though she would impress upon him that she had made the delicious yeast cake for him “special,” as if she had foreseen he might want to share it with the little boy, his brother.
He wasn’t allowed to taste the babka, or anything else, until he had made the right blessing, the bracha. If he ever forgot, which he rarely did, his bubbe would purse her lips and say, “Feh! Like an animal, a vilda chaya, he’s being brought up. A shanda fur da Yidden.” A disgrace for the Jews.
His bubbe had taught him all the brachas that had to be made before eating. There was one for fruit, but another one specifically for grapes, and one for vegetables and one for bread and one that was for a grab bag of things. And, of course, there was a bracha for baked goods, mazoynos, including Bubbe’s babka. Bubbe would quiz him closely every time he visited. It wasn’t as straightforward as just knowing the general types, since foods could be mixtures, and some of the categories trumped the others. The bracha also depended on how much of something there was and also whether something had been done to the food to make it change its type: the apples in apple juice didn’t count as fruit. It was complicated. What if there were raisins in the babka that Bubbe had baked for her little Hasid, her little pious one? Should Chaim make the bracha for the baked good or for the fruit? (The baked good!) And what about cereal? If it was corn flakes, then you have to make the one for vegetables, haadama, for things that grow in the ground. But it if was Cheerios, then you said mazoynos.
You also had to be careful about silverware and dishes, never mixing up the dairy with the meat. It had been poor Jesse’s fate to have mixed some Bosco into his milk with a teaspoon from the wrong drawer, and Bubbe’s wrath had been biblical. She had taken both boys out to the backyard and shown them how now she had to stick the spoon in the dirt to clean it. Dirt to clean? When they had asked their mother, she had answered in a way uncharacteristically terse: “If it seems crazy to you, you understand it perfectly.”
Cass could have asked his mother to review the brachas with him. She still knew everything, including Yiddish. But he could tell that she would rather he didn’t master his brachas too well.
Funny that he could still miss his bubbe, even though by now he understood a lot more about the personality disorder that had made her decide that Chaim was git—good—and the “little boy” who was his brother was nish git. She had died when Cass was a junior in college, but she had been banished from their lives long before then, with the full approval of BOIL.
When he came back after the interval that Aviva Landesmann had specified to him, she had something better to offer him than babka. It was The View from Nowhere, by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Cass thanked Aviva much more than she was probably used to being thanked and went off to his carrel, three flights below ground level in the Lipschitz Library.
The basic idea in The View from Nowhere is that we humans have the unique capacity to detach ourselves from our own particular point of view, achieving degrees of objectivity, all the way up to and including the view of how things are in themselves, from no particular viewpoint at all. This is what Nagel calls the View from Nowhere, and he analyzes all sorts of philosophical problems by showing how they arise out of the clash of the subjective point of view with the View from Nowhere.
The View from Nowhere was hard going, but Cass kept plugging along, at first motivated simply by his burning desire to get to the bottom of Gideon Raven’s gnomic message. But then Cass got to a section that made him forget all about gleaning any clues to his afternoon’s ordeal.
BEING SOMEONE
One acute problem of subjectivity remains even after points of view and subjective experience are admitted to the real world—after the world is conceded to be full of people with minds, having thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that cannot be completely subdued by the physical conception of objectivity. The general admission still leaves us with an unsolved problem of particular subjectivity. The world so conceived, though extremely various in the types of things and perspectives it contains, is still centerless. It contains us all, and none of us occupies a metaphysically privileged position. Yet each of us, reflecting on this centerless world, must admit that one large fact seems to have been omitted from its description: the fact that a particular person in it is himself.
What kind of fact is that? What kind of fact is it—if it is a fact—that I am Thomas Nagel? How can I be a particular person?
Cass only realized he had been holding his breath when he let it out. Here was the bedtime metaphysics that used to exercise him to the point of hyperventilation being described with precision by a prominent philosopher. (Thomas Nagel sounded prominent from the book jacket.) Cass here, Jesse there. The ritual used to send him hurtling so far outside himself that, night after night, he had become frightened that he might never find his way back in again, might never be able to take for granted that he was who he was. Cass had never hoped to find another person who could understand the strange state he used to induce in himself, and he had certainly never guessed that it might be shared by a philosopher.
It can seem that as far as what I really am is concerned, any relation I may have to TN or any other objectively specified person must be accidental and arbitrary. I may occupy TN or see the world through the eyes of TN, but I can’t be TN. I can’t be a mere person. From this point of view it can appear that “I am TN,” insofar as it is true, is not an identity but a subject-predicate proposition. Unless you have had this thought yourself, it will probably seem obscure, but I hope to make it clearer.
He became so caught up in The View from Nowhere, the dense mass of its distinctions parting for him like the sea, that he forgot the whole point of why he was reading it.
He wasn’t sure whether Professor Klapper would approve of Thomas Nagel. The style of The View from Nowhere was of the sort to send Jonas Elijah Klapper fleeing for protection from “the talismanic attachment of certain philosophers to logic. No thinker worth our contemplation is going to be held back by the Law of Non-Contradiction, which I do not recall being ratified with my approval.�
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Cass heard the gong of the ten-minute warning and crash-landed back into Cass here. He thought he understood the reason why Gideon Raven had tossed him a spitball commending The View from Nowhere. It was precisely so that what had happened to him over the course of the last few hours would happen. Somehow or other, maybe even because Gideon Raven had gone through a similar baptism by fire, he’d known the right salve. Nothing but extra-strength objectivity could help.
Cass emerged from his narrow cell a minute or two before the library was going to close at midnight. The rows of carrels lining the walls down here in the bowels of the library were disgorging a thin stream of pale and brooding graduate students. Just a few carrels down from Cass was Gideon Raven, sliding his door shut behind him, giving the combination lock an extra, paranoid twist.
Raven spotted him and came over, taking the book out of Cass’s hand and reading the title with raised eyebrows.
“Might as well just walk over there together” is what he said as he handed Nagel back to Cass.
“The View from Nowhere,” it turned out, referred to a working-class bar in downtown Weedham that had a certain cachet with the graduate students. Its given name, at least as it was represented on the dimmed blue neon sign that had given out a long time ago, was “The View,” for no discernible reason, since it was just a dive on one of the side streets off moribund Maudlin Street, a wooden shanty no different from any on the decaying block. Some student wag had dubbed it “The View from Nowhere,” and the name had stuck among the cognoscenti.
There was a slight rain falling as they descended the steep hill that led out of the Frankfurter campus and headed into the down-at-the-heels center of Weedham, the sidewalk glinting whenever they passed a streetlight.
Cass had never spoken with Gideon before, and so he was surprised at the confidential tone that Gideon assumed from the very beginning, as if they had already gotten over the preliminaries.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 9