by Roger Ebert
Actually, he left some things out. As our library was being cleaned, I noticed for the first time in some years the bound albums of our wedding photos sitting out. That lodged in my mind. When Chris was about to arrive and I was a little nervous, I told Chaz, “For God’s sake, don’t start showing him our wedding photos! That will make us look bourgeois.” She looked at me in disbelief. “What makes you think I would ever show him our wedding photos?” I explained that because I had seen the albums sitting out, I thought it was for a purpose. Chris Jones arrived. He hadn’t been in the house half an hour before the conversation turned to Gene Siskel. I said what a close friend he had been, apart from our fights and feuds and the rest of it, which were real, but didn’t dislodge our friendship. “His daughters were even the flower girls at our wedding,” I said. “Chaz, show Chris our wedding photos.” She looked at me like the eighth wonder of the world.
A little later I was telling Chris that Siskel was secretive and I was the opposite, always blurting out what I should shut up about. “He said my middle names should be Full Disclosure.” This started Chaz to laughing and in the spirit of full disclosure she told him about my dire warning to her about the wedding photos.
Well, that was okay with me, actually. My theory was that if Chris had an article to write it was not my place to write it for him as a favorable press release about myself. Let him write what he observed. Oliver Cromwell is said to have commissioned an official painting of himself, “warts and all.” He apparently never said any such thing, was misquoted a century after his death, and his official portrait showed no warts, but never mind. He should have said it.
The best interview I ever wrote was for Esquire. It was told almost entirely in dialogue, and involved an afternoon I spent with Lee Marvin at his beach house in Malibu. He spent much effort ordering in fresh supplies of Heineken’s. I took faithful notes, sent the piece in, and waited for the shit to hit the fan. Esquire ran it with the headline, “Saturday with Lee F——ing Marvin.” They used dashes in those days. I never heard a word from Marvin.
A few years later, I interviewed Marvin in his house outside Tucson. I observed he was not drinking. “I’m alive, aren’t I?” he said. I said I didn’t know if he would want to talk with me after the Esquire piece and the earlier piece in the New York Times. He had married again a few years earlier, a girl he’d been in love with before he went off to the Marines. She started laughing. “That was Lee,” she said. Marvin lit a cigarette.
That’s all you can really ask: for Chaz to be able to read the article and say it was about me. It was. By and large, it was a faithful account of what happened over the course of two days and evenings. The errors were few, small, and understandable.
I knew going in that a lot of the article would be about my surgeries and their aftermath. Let’s face it. Esquire wouldn’t have assigned an article if I were still in good health. Their cover line was the hook “The Last Words of Roger Ebert.” A good head. Whoever wrote that knew what they were doing. When I turned inside the magazine, I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw drooping. Nobody had seen me quite that way before. Not a lovely sight. But then I’m not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, what the hell, it’s just as well it’s out there. That’s how I look, after all. I was a little surprised at the detail the article went into about the nature and extent of my wounds and the realities of my appearance, but what the hell. It was true. I didn’t need polite fictions.
One strange result of the cover line was that many people got the idea that these were my dying words. The line Chaz liked least used the words “the time he has left.” We’re all dying in increments. I don’t mind people knowing what I look like, but I don’t want them thinking I’m dying. To be fair, Chris Jones never said I was. If he took a certain elegiac tone, you know what? I might have, too. And if he structured his elements into a story arc, that’s just good writing. He wasn’t still in the room the second evening when he wrote that after Chaz had gone off to bed and I was streaming Radio Caroline and writing late into the night. But that’s what I did. It may be, the more interviews you’ve done, the more you appreciate a good one. I knew exactly what he started with, and I could see where he ended, and he can be proud of the piece. It was sort of a relief to have that full-page photo of my face. Running it that big was good journalism. It made you want to read the article. What I hated most was that my hair was too neatly combed.
54 HOW I BELIEVE IN GOD
WHEN I WAS in first or second grade and had just been introduced by the nuns to the concept of a limitless God, I lay awake at night driving myself nuts by repeating over and over, But how could God have no beginning? And how could he have no end? And then I thought of all the stars in the sky: But how could there be a last one? Wouldn’t there always have to be one more? Many years later I know the answer to the second question, but I still don’t know the answer to the first one.
I took it up with a favorite nun, Sister Marie Donald, who led our rhythm band and was our basketball coach. “Roger,” she said, “that is just something you have to believe. Pray for faith.” Then I lay awake wondering how I could pray for faith to a God I could not believe in without faith. That seemed to leave me suspended between two questions. These logical puzzles were generated spontaneously within my mind. They didn’t come from my school or my family. Most of my neighborhood friends were Protestants who were not interested in theories about God, apart from the fact that of course he existed.
I bought the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church lock, stock, and barrel, apart from the God problem. We started every school day at St. Mary’s with an hour of religion, and it was my favorite subject. We were drilled in memorizing entries from the Baltimore Catechism, which was a bore, but I was fascinated by the theoretical discussions: What qualifies as a sin? What do you have to do to get to heaven? Can you go to hell by accident? and “Sister, what would happen if…” Those words always introduced a hypothetical situation in which an unsuspecting Catholic had blundered perilously close to the fires below.
Religion class began every day with theoretical thinking and applied reasoning and was excellent training. No matter what one ends up believing, it is good to learn to think in such terms. To think that you might sin by accident and be damned before you could get to confession in time! What if you had an impure thought at the top of Mt. Everest and couldn’t get back down? We were exposed to the concepts of sins of omission, sins of commission, intentional sins, and, the trickiest of all, unintentional sins. Think of it: a sin you didn’t intend to commit. But Sister, is it a sin if you didn’t know it was? Then isn’t it safer not to know?
Some of my classmates and I would lie on our backs in the front yard, ponder the stars, and ask ourselves, “If some kid started to play with himself but he didn’t know what would happen, would that be his fault?” We concluded: only if he did it again. “Yeah, like four times every night,” giggled a pal whose anonymity I will preserve after all these years. I remember one night a kid brother asked innocently, “But what would happen if you played with yourself?” We told him, “Just don’t ever try it!” “Then how do you know anything would happen?” We decided you were allowed just one time, to find out.
I have the impression that all of my Dominican teachers were New Deal Democrats, and that for them Franklin D. Roosevelt had achieved a species of secular sainthood. Of course they were fervently anti-communist. People in the USSR could be thrown in jail just for going to church, and there was brave Cardinal Mindszenty, who was tortured by the Hungarian atheists. For many years I visualized the Soviet Union as a land where the sun never came out and enslaved Catholic peasants labored under lowering skies for their godless rulers.
But our theology was often very practical: All men are created equal. Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Follow the Ten Commandments, which we studied at length, except for adultery, “which you children don’t have to worry about.” A fair day’s work for a fair day’s w
age. A good government should help make sure everyone has a roof over his head, a job, and three meals a day. The cardinal acts of mercy. Ethical behavior. The sisters didn’t especially seem to think that a woman’s place was in the home, as theirs certainly was not. You should “pray for your vocation.” My mother prayed for mine; she wanted me to become a priest. “Every Catholic mother hopes she can give a son to the priesthood,” she said, and spoke of one mother at St. Patrick’s, who had given two, as if she were a lottery winner.
As I grew I no longer lost any sleep over the questions of God and infinity. I understood they could have no answers. At some point the reality of God was no longer present in my mind. I believed in the basic Church teachings because I thought they were correct, not because God wanted me to. In my mind, in the way I interpret them, I still live by them today. Not by the rules and regulations, but by the principles. For example, in the matter of abortion, I am pro-choice, but by personal choice would have nothing to do with an abortion of a child of my own. I believe in free will, and believe I have no right to tell anyone else what to do. Popes come and go, and John XXIII has been the only one I felt affection for. Their dictums strike me as lacking in the ability to surprise. They have been leading a holding action for a millennium.
Catholicism made me a humanist before I knew the word. When people rail against “secular humanism,” I want to ask them if humanism itself would be okay with them if it wasn’t so secular. Then I want to ask, “Why do you think it is secular?” This would lead to my opinion that their beliefs were not humanist. Over the high school years, my belief in the likelihood of a God disappeared. I kept this to myself. I never discussed it with my parents. My father in any event was a nonpracticing Lutheran, until a deathbed conversion that rather disappointed me. I’m sure he agreed to it for my mother’s sake. Did I start calling myself an agnostic or an atheist? No, and I still don’t. I avoid that because I don’t want to provide a category that people can apply to me. Those who say that “believer” and “atheist” are concrete categories do violence to the mystery we must be humble enough to confess. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word. Chaz, who has a firm faith, leaves me to my beliefs. “But you know you’re one or the other,” she says. “I have never told you that,” I say. “Maybe not in so many words, but you are,” she says. “You’re an atheist.” I say that nothing is that simple. Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution, intelligent design, God, and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs, although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist—which I am.
Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issued instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. That’s for them to believe. I don’t believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with. I believe mankind in general has a need to believe in higher powers and an existence not limited to the physical duration of the body. But these needs are hopes, and believing them doesn’t make them true. I believe mankind feels a need to gather in churches, whether physical or social. I’ve spent hours and hours in churches all over the world. I sit in them not to pray, but to gently nudge my thoughts toward wonder and awe. I am aware of the generations there before me and the reassurance of tradition. At a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at the village church in Tring in the Chilterns, I felt unalloyed elevation. My favorite service is the Anglican evensong. I agree with Annie Dillard, who says that in an unfamiliar area, she seeks out the church of the oldest established religion she can find, because it has the most experience in not being struck by lightning.
I have no interest in megachurches with jocular millionaire pastors. I think what happens in them is sociopolitical, not spiritual. I believe the prosperity gospel tries to pass through the eye of the needle. I believe it is easier for a Republican to pass through the eye of a needle than for a camel to get into heaven. I have no patience for churches that evangelize aggressively. I have no interest in being instructed in what I must do to be saved. I prefer vertical prayer, directed up toward heaven, rather than horizontal prayer, directed sideways toward me. I believe a worthy church must grow through attraction, not promotion. I am wary of zealotry; even as a child I was suspicious of those who, as I often heard, were “more Catholic than the pope.” If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, we must regard their beliefs with the same respect our own deserve.
I’m still struggling with the question of how anything could have no beginning and no end. These days I’m fascinated by it from the point of view of science. I cannot know everything, but I approach matters in terms of what I do and can know. Science is not “secular.” It is a process of honest investigation. Take infinity. We know there must be an infinite number of numbers, because how could there be a last number? The more interesting puzzle is, how did there come to be a first number, and why do many mammals other than man know how to count, at least a little? I don’t believe the universe can count. Counting is a mental exercise, and mathematics is useful to the degree it helps us describe and understand the universe and work within it in useful ways. A last number is not important; only the impossibility of one.
I know there cannot be a last star, because we know the universe to be curved. At least, that’s what mathematicians tell us. I can’t form the concept of a curved universe in my mind, but I think I know what they’re trying to say. Nor can I comprehend five, six, or many additional dimensions. Nor do I understand the theory of relativity. Growing up I used to hear that Einstein was the only man smart enough to understand his own theory. Now countless people do, but I suspect few have a literal vision of what it means. What they understand, I think, is their mathematical proofs of it. If I’m wrong about this, I’m encouraged.
That the universe may expand indefinitely and die is a concept I can imagine. That all of its matter would cease to exist I cannot imagine. That the universe, as was once thought, expands and contracts indefinitely, one Big Bang collapsing into another one, seemed reasonable enough. But in both models of the universe, what caused the first Big Bang? Or was there a first Big Bang, any more than a last number? If there was a first cause, was there a first causer? Did Big Bangs just happen to happen? Can we name the first causer “God”? We can name it anything we want. I can name it after myself. It is utterly insignificant what it is called, because we would be giving a name to something that falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge. So naming it is a futile enterprise. The word “God” is unhelpful because it implies it has a knowable definition.
Quantum theory is now discussing instantaneous connections between two entangled quantum objects such as electrons. This phenomenon has been observed in laboratory experiments and scientists believe they have proven it takes place. They’re not talking about faster than the speed of light. Speed has nothing to do with it. The entangled objects somehow communicate instantaneously at a distance. If that is true, distance has no meaning. Light-years have no meaning. Space has no meaning. In a sense, the entangled objects are not even communicating. They are the same thing. At the “quantum level” (and I don’t know what that means), everything may be actually or theoretically linked. All is one. Sun, moon, stars, rain, you, me, everything. All one. If this is so, then Buddhism must have been a quantum theory all along. No, I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am more content with questions than answers.
55 GO GENTLY
I KNOW IT is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have
brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of thirty-five years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next thirty seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second”.
Me too, but I hope not. I have plans. Still, illness led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife, religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the Big Bang, what waits after the end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death.
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am sixty-nine, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”
Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”