“Well, people say that, too, you know, that it’s necessary that there be some amount of suffering in the world to create the opportunity for certain virtues to develop, virtues like forbearance and compassion….”
“Courage, charity, forgiveness, empathy—even true love, which don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sting.” Roz finished his sentence for him. “Suffering provides us wonderful opportunities for character-building. Yes, I’m familiar with this line of reasoning. The only people who push it are the God-apologists, who are trying to make excuses for what an insufferable world this is, even though there’s supposed to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and well-intentioned Big Boy running the show. Any suffering the apologists can’t rationalize away as a product of our having the ennobling capacity for free will, including the free will to inflict unspeakable atrocities on one another, they try to explain with this character-building song and dance. I find the song pornographic and the dance macabre. A grieving mother whose child was senselessly lost has the chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop her soul toward tranquil acceptance. And what of that dying child himself, who doesn’t have the psychological and spiritual equipment to transcend what’s happening to him and is never going to get it because he’s going to be dead? Wouldn’t this theodicy require, at the least, that all humans—I’m not even going to bring up the suffering of animals—have an equal opportunity to develop their capacities for nobility? Cass, this is obscene. I don’t have to tell you any of this. I learned it all from The Varieties of Religious Illusion. That’s where I learned the bloody word ‘theodicy’ in the first place.”
A change had come over Roz, a modulation into a lower key. She had been hyper, even for her, since she’d landed on his doorstep yesterday morning. But now her voice had lost its manic edge, her face its clowning slant. She looked, if anything, even younger, flushed and earnest.
“You’re right, of course. I wasn’t actually pushing that argument about suffering, just making the point that it’s not a tautology to say, ‘Suffering is bad.’”
“I think it is. I think that ‘Suffering is bad’ is as obvious as it gets. And even if people don’t think it’s so obvious in the generic case, they catch on fast enough when the suffering is theirs. ‘My suffering is bad’ is a tautology to anyone who says it. I’d like to see someone in the throes of agony still pushing this treacle called theodicy. Sure, the transcendent possibilities afforded by suffering make this a better world. But only when it’s the other guy doing the suffering.”
Cass nodded. He wasn’t going to argue with her. And she was right to bring up the children who never get the chance to theodicize their suffering, just as Dostoevsky had been right: “If the suffering of children goes to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.” Cass had quoted that in his book.
“I loved your book,” she said suddenly, out of the blue. “I haven’t told you yet, have I, how much I loved it? It made me proud.”
“Thank you,” he said, dumbfounded.
Roz, too, seemed a bit unsteady, her pacing slowed.
“You’re doing something important, Cass.”
“Oh, come on, Roz. You used to be able to hold your alcohol better.”
“No, I mean it. I kept thinking that only you could have written The Varieties of Religious Illusion. You’ve spent years trying to understand what happened back then, all the drama with the Klap and Azarya and even me, and this book is the outcome, and the world’s the better for it.”
“I don’t know what to say. Thank you. It means the world to me to hear you speak like this. I had no idea.”
“I guess you know now how I feel about what you’ve been doing with your life. So—why don’t you tell me your objections to what I’m doing?” She was smiling again. “What have you got against immortality?”
“I just wonder whether coming to terms with one’s own mortality isn’t a necessary part of seeing oneself with the proper objectivity. Understanding that you have your time here on Earth, as the others that came before you had theirs, and as those who will come after will have theirs. You weren’t for ages and ages, you are now, and soon enough you won’t be anymore. There’s nothing special about you just because you happen to be you. There’s nothing special about your time just because it happens to be your time.”
“We’ll still have mortality enough to try our souls, Cass. Living forever isn’t on the table. Death will come. It’s simply mathematics. I’m just talking about curing our senescence, our biologically running down. There’s nothing we can do to prevent accidents like falling down the stairs and breaking your neck, or being caught in the crossfire of some pointless feud, or getting hit by a runaway trolley. There’s no way to bring the probability of life’s slings and arrows down to zero, which means that, by the laws of probability, something’s going to get you, sooner or later. Five hundred years is actually a bit of an exaggeration. It’s probably more like two hundred years on average that we can expect to live, once we’ve wiped out senescence. Every morning, you play Russian roulette, and the gun has no memory. Sooner or later, your bullet will come. No one is literally immortal. So carpe diem! In fact, carpe diem all the more, because if you die today—and you know, if you compute which is the most likely day that you’ll die, then mathematically the answer is always today—then you’ll be losing out on all the more, an eternity of more.”
“So what you’re saying is that death will be even more terrifying, since we’ll have so much more to lose. And the life we’ll be losing will be that sweet life of undiminished potentiality, with all our powers still intact. You’re making death even more alarming. Death is going to be just as inevitable, if your mathematics is right, but we’ve got that much more to lose. So remind me again of what we gain?”
“You don’t think that eliminating the horror of watching yourself run down, getting more debilitated and diminished and pathetic with every year you live past seventy, isn’t a gain? You don’t think that the probability of your getting, on average, two hundred years to explore all of life’s possibilities isn’t a gain?”
“You don’t think our pleasure in life will be diminished if we have more than double a normal life span? The ability to savor life does tend to diminish as one gets older, doesn’t it, once the freshness and newness has worn off?”
“Does it? I haven’t noticed.”
“After you’ve seen it all and done it all, several times over, doesn’t the pleasure pall?”
“You can never see and do it all! And I think the capacity for pleasure is something that needs to be cultivated, like an appreciation for music or wine. The more experience you have, the more profound the pleasure. Memories add depth.”
Cass didn’t answer. He held his glass of Rioja up before the candle flame, staring into its rich ruby color as it caught the light. It was a good bottle, a Muga Reserva 2003—“very elegant and suggestive” is the way the menu had put it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Well, it’s a funny thing, Roz. I’ve missed you.”
“That’s funny?”
“I have to confess that I hadn’t exactly realized it until now.”
“I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed you either, until I read your book. It brought me running.”
“Running? Where?”
“Why, here. Right here.”
He shook his head, agape at the irony. He’d written The Varieties of Religious Illusion in order to answer the question Lucinda had posed to him. He didn’t know at the time whether the question was sarcastic or sincere. He only knew that to answer it he had to write an entire book, working out his conviction that the religious sensibility comes in many varieties and isn’t exclusively confined to explicitly religious contexts. He hadn’t expected Lucinda to read his book, much less to be carrying it in her shoulder bag as she materialized out of his fantasies in the autumn twilight. And as a consequence of his writing the
book, all sorts of other things had followed—not least of all, Roz.
“Now, Roz. We’re old enough friends to speak perfectly honestly, aren’t we?”
“Perfectly honestly? I don’t know whether we’ll ever be old enough for that, not even if my crack team of researchers come through for me. But proceed.”
“You’re not actually saying that you’re interested in me romantically? Not after all these years. We’re in such different places from where we were back then.”
“I’d say that’s probably all for the good. We weren’t even old enough to be too young for each other.”
“Part of my being in a different place now is that I’m with Lucinda. It’s a wonderful place for me to be.”
Cass had kept his gaze fastened on the jeweled depths of the Rioja. Roz waited for him to look her in the eye before she spoke.
“Do you want to be in that same place for two hundred years?”
“Not a day less.”
“Well, then, the least you could do, Cass Seltzer, would be to become a friend of the Immortality Foundation!”
He burst out laughing, as much in relief as anything else. Roz had had him going there. The rest of the meal continued with more Rioja and laughter, and they’d even splurged on a dessert: besos de amor, dates stuffed with marzipan and drizzled with tamarind sauce. Marco, their waiter, had bent low to kiss Roz’s hand in farewell, and Roz had patted him tenderly on the cheek.
VIII
The Argument from the Existence of the Poem
Gideon Raven had always had a rigorous bent to his mind. He’d come to identify this as his major problem. It made him panicky to step from one thought to the next without some connective scaffolding, even if slippery and narrow. It was a form of cognitive acrophobia, and he was acropho-bic to begin with.
He’d close his eyes and picture himself stepping tentatively out into midair, his jumpy foot nervously feeling for something solid before advancing. Even in his imagination he was an earth-crawler, eyes filled with dirt, unable to fling himself forward an inch, much less streak like a shooting star.
Step! he’d urge his dangling doppelgänger. Step and be saved! Cling and be damned! O ye of little freaking faith.
It was why his poetry had never been worth a damn, why it had progressed from middling to mute. It was why, after a full dozen years, he was still a graduate student, which was to be something a little less than human, the determination of his life for someone else to decide. He railed against Jonas, but he knew he deserved no better than to spend his life paralyzed in this purgatory of pedantry.
He could, of course, make a decisive move. It was theoretically in his power. He could call it quits and leave academia, dip his arms up to his elbows in the river of cash flowing from trickle-down economics. Three of the five original Klapper defectors who had decided not to move to Weedham were already learning how to program computers, and the other two had applied to law schools.
But that was the thing about purgatory. It voided volition. Obsessed with genius, he had never been further from it. Genius was a matter of incantatory intuitions and phosphorescent blasts into the dark. Genius was a matter of thunderclap reasons, of which reason knew nothing. Genius was oracular, overweening, and severe. It left it to others to grub around in dusty doubts and cavil in insect voices.
All of Klapper’s students obsessed unhealthily on the nature of genius, its signs and siphorot, the Kabbalistic term for emanations—Jonas had been introducing Kabbalistic terms more and more frequently—though in obsession, as in all things, Gideon outstripped Klapper’s other students. They recognized the unwholesomeness of their preoccupation, its self-destructive futility and navel-gazing focus, but that was hardly a deterrent. Genius itself is diseased and self-destructive, antisocial and ill-mannered. It’s also the only thing that redeems us.
In the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being, man is assigned a place between the angels and the animals, but that isn’t exactly right. Between man and the angels there’s another ontological stratum, vanishingly slim and eternally endangered, occupied by the men and the women of genius. As the angels communicate only with the angels, and the animals with the animals, so the geniuses speak each to each, sometimes overhearing phrases fallen from the angels up above them, as we, in turn, overhear them.
I do not think they will speak to me.
There you go again, schmuck. That’s the whole problem. You can’t even talk to yourself without sounding like someone else.
Nothing came to Gideon pure and unblemished. He was sophisticated, in the original meaning, defiled and desecrated. If he didn’t love Lizzie so much, he’d have offed himself last week.
And he’d never write poetry again. He’d never get out an original line again. Every line he heard could be traced back to someone. The perversity of persuasion had slimed everything.
The more Cass got to know Gideon, the more aware he grew of the man’s tunneling despair. It was strange, since Cass admired Gideon so much. Aside from Jonas Elijah Klapper—who inhabited another category of being altogether—Gideon was the most extraordinary person Cass knew.
“I know this is going to sound naïve to you, from your point of view and all, but I don’t want to be a genius,” Cass confessed to Gideon one night after a few pitchers. “All I really want is to be able to understand the geniuses. Understand a little bit of what they say when they talk back and forth across the millennia to each other. I’d be happy if I could just follow the ideas of men like Hegel and Goethe and Jonas Elijah Klapper.”
They were in The View from Nowhere, just Gideon and Cass, though some of the others were supposed to join them after midnight. The seminar had closed ranks now. All of the outsiders from the other departments had dropped out, so it was just Klapper’s seven. In addition to Gideon and Cass, there were Nathan Suarez, Miriam Chan, Ezra Lull, Zack Kreiser, and Joel Lebow. The mean number of years they’d spent as graduate students, averaging in Gideon’s 12 and Cass’s 0, was 7.2. But attendance at any seminar taught by Jonas Elijah Klapper was a tacit requirement that nobody had ever thought to challenge. After all, why would one? Miriam had shown up at the seminar last week with a raging fever, which hadn’t surprised anyone, though Professor Klapper had firmly ordered her home, reminding her that there was no need for her to expose others to her misbehaving microbes.
“To bed, Miss Ching, with pots of tea, and no reading to overly tax your strength. A little Robert Frost perhaps. Whitman, in moderation, when you’re feeling more robust.”
Cass had reacted to the preoccupation with genius in his own way. He had taken out books on famous minds, as interested in their lives as in their ideas (maybe even a little more). Right now he was reading E. T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics, which was the best yet, even though it had real mathematics to slow him down. Some of these people sounded as if they had to be changelings, non-human visitors from some other sphere, with powers so prodigious they burst the boundaries of developmental psychology, lisping out profundities while other children were playing with their toes. Gauss, for example, who struck Cass as the most amazing one yet, which was no wonder, since, according to Bell, Carl Friedrich Gauss was one of the three greatest mathematicians of all recorded history, the other two being Archimedes of Syracuse and Sir Isaac Newton.
Gauss was German, born in 1777, and the stories that Bell told about him defied belief. His father couldn’t appreciate what his son was, and if he’d had his way the prodigy would have become a gardener or a bricklayer like him. His mother, though semi-literate, had been his protector when he was young and vulnerable, making sure that he was able to get schooling. Gauss’s genius had shown itself when he was barely out of infancy.
“People who witnessed it said it was like something otherworldly,” Cass said, quoting Bell.
Gideon had patiently heard out Cass about the child Gauss, including the story involving the stern schoolmaster who, out of mean-spirited spite, had given his pupils the exercise of adding up all the integer
s from 1 to 100. Within seconds Gauss had returned the answer, seeing, in a flash, that adding pairs from opposite ends of the list gave the same sum: 1 + 100 = 101, and 2 + 99 = 101, and 3 + 98 = 101, so all he had to do was take 101 fifty times and he had the answer.
“The children were supposed to work out the solution on a slate and then put it on the teacher’s desk, piled one on top of the other. Gauss, who was ten, wrote it down as soon as the teacher got the words out and said in his peasant dialect, ‘Ligget se,’ ‘There it lies.’ Of course, the teacher thought the kid was a lazy lout. After all the slates got piled on top, hours later, all of the answers wrong, the teacher found Gauss’s with just the number 5,050. And then he realized what he had.”
Gideon nodded. “I see why you find these stories interesting, from the point of view of psychological curiosities, but they just don’t engage me the way literary genius does. It’s not even genius in the same sense. These computational tricks don’t indicate a special order of soul. They’re like machines, these kids. Sometimes they’re even functionally retarded.”
“Gauss wasn’t an idiot savant. These aren’t little computing tricks. Gauss was comparable to Goethe.”
“I don’t accept that. Gauss’s talents were from the brain, not the soul. I’m not saying he was an asshole—I don’t know anything about the guy—but theoretically he could have been, and that’s the point. He could have been a total asshole when it came to all human concerns and just had some single part of his brain overdeveloped. Isaac Newton was simple-minded to the point of semi-retarded when it came to spiritual matters. He used his cerebral calculating machine to calculate the date of the end of days. They’re the Gump Worsleys of thinking.”
“Who’s Gump Worsley?”
“He was a goalie for the Canadiens.” Gideon was from Montreal, and if the names he bandied didn’t come from the canon, chances were they came from the Canadiens. “He was this short, pudgy guy, looked like he’d keel over if you asked him to drop down and do twenty, with a hanging beer belly and a goofy mug of a face. He never played with a mask. He said his face was his mask. And he threw up before every game, his good-luck ritual. But he was a great goalie. At his height, in 1968, he went undefeated in the playoffs with eleven straight wins.”
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 12