by Alix Shulman
I had had my fill of that discipline in the Sunday school (that met on Saturday) my parents had enrolled me in as a child to learn “about my origins.” I wasn’t having any of it. I was willing to accept as “literature” the Bible stories presented in Literature class; I might even have learned to recite them in Hebrew as we were expected to do in Hebrew class; but when they filed into the History class dressed as real events that had once taken place, God and I parted company. If there was ever a possibility that I might have fallen for stories like Genesis or Moses and the Ten Commandments, it was destroyed by the ridiculous title of the textbook we used: When the Jewish People Was Young. An author capable of such a travesty had about as much authority to convince me of God as my Grandfather Charlie, who, despite the presence of several respected MDs in the family, shamed us all by taking himself to the local apothecary to be treated with leeches whenever he had the sniffles. And my father warning me every Saturday, “You mustn’t believe everything you hear,” didn’t boost the Temple’s credibility. I sat through the weekly compulsory religious service following History class with a skeptical heart.
The God of Abraham forfeited every challenge I threw him. Either He had no dignity or He didn’t exist. He didn’t even strike me down for standing among the mourners and weeping during that most holy portion of the religious service, the Prayer for the Dead. After I whispered the forbidden name of God and still nothing happened to me, I knew I had flushed him out. If He existed at all, he was chicken shit—certainly not worthy of worship.
My love for philosophy took an opposite course: whatever challenge I came up with, philosophy always had an answer. I never once got the last word. My little skepticism was like dusting powder next to the cosmic doubt of a skeptic like Hume. I watched heavies like Descartes and Leibniz or Plato and Aristotle slug it out together, perfectly matched champions. Who knew who would win? They were all incomparable performers, each with a style of his own.
Though it was several terms before my infatuation became a passion, I can trace the affair back to a vision I had during final exam week in my freshman year.
It was probably because of the No-Doz pills I’d been using to cram and the high level of tension around the dorm, for it was more than an ordinary insight. It was a genuine vision, complete with flashing lights and sirens in the background. Suddenly all the little rooms in my mind popped open at once, and the vision flashed through them like a comet. Every event in life can be ordered on a single continuum. All the diverse chronologies that had been complacently resting in the various rooms of my mind for years suddenly got up and started rearranging themselves. Until the vision, in one room there had been cavemen (who really came first), followed by Indians, Pilgrims, African slaves, and the Presidents. In another room had been the Egyptians (who came first), followed by Queen Elizabeth, the Renaissance, and Napoleon. And in yet another room had been first Beowulf, then the Middle Ages, then Biblical Times (including the Arabian Nights), and ancient Greece and Rome—all mostly mythical. Not until after the No-Doz vision did it occur to me that they could all fit cozily on a single continuum together. Eureka! The American Indians and the ancient Egyptians on the same line not only wind up nowhere near each other, but the Indians do not necessarily come first!
Even when exams were over and I went off No-Doz, I fought to keep hold of my vision. It was too large to assimilate all at once. I believed it intellectually but it took a long time before I felt it in my gut; it required a habit of faith too new to serve me daily, and again and again I would come up short as I was struck with fact upon astonishing fact:
There were slaves in America (slaves!) less than a hundred years ago!
Beowulf was composed after Deuteronomy; King Lear before the Declaration of Independence!
Before long I noticed vast stretches of my line with nothing filled in. They made me uneasy. What happened between Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages? between Voltaire and Victoria? I wanted to fill it all in so I could see the line whole. I knew it would require diligent application over a very long time, but theoretically at least, it was possible. If one took the longest view, holding that simple Time Line clearly in mind, one could eventually fill in all the details and know everything.
For someone starting, like me, from scratch, it was a breathtaking thought. Everything. So far I knew nothing; I believe I hadn’t yet even registered for the second semester. But spending my time in pre-law when instead I could be on my way to learning everything seemed a tragic waste. Perhaps I ought not even bother becoming a lawyer. People were always saying how silly it was—all that work, when I’d wind up getting married anyway. Whereas, knowing everything could always come in handy.
Not that I had any choice in my program. The freshman courses were all requirements anyway—no electives at Baxter until sophomore year. But I started applying myself to my studies with a special ardor. Any course was a good starting place.
Western Civ.: Instead of examining cultures as discrete units, as the teachers taught, I examined them as moments on a continuum and ignored the details. Though I scribbled down furiously the same notes as everyone else, coughing them back up on exams, to me the Renaissance was not a series of Italian names and dates constituting what-happened-in-Italy; it was a Time with a Character. Why, Elizabethan was Renaissance! I hoped that someday I would be able to stand back far enough to see all Western Civ. itself as a Time with a Character.
Survey of English Lit. I.: English Literature was a parochial flourish on a segment of my line. Beauty was Truth.
French Grammar (otherwise loathsome): a blue chalk for coloring bits of my line.
Intro. to Psych.: a sharp pencil for detail work.
Classic, Romantic, Economic, Social, Cause, Structure—indispensable iridescent hues. I knew that only when all the colors blended together would I achieve that pure white blinding beacon that would show me All.
Getting the feel of my line, by semester three I found I could run quickly through it and pull out a little something from every epoch or a little more from just a few to make a neat subline, good for a term paper. I crammed for final exams by squeezing onto a single sheet of notebook paper, in perfect subdivided outline, every fact I had learned in the course: if I couldn’t comprehend the whole course in one glance, it was of no use to me. Since I had to list something, I chose History as my major, but wars and rulers, like conjugations, minor poets, and other particulars, were profoundly boring unless I could view them as reflections of something larger and more abstract. It was impossible for a notion to be too abstract for me. Abstraction was the key to seeing everything at a glance.
It was in the second semester of my sophomore year that I accidentally stumbled onto that abstraction of abstractions, History of Ideas, which opened my mind to philosophy and closed it to such comparatively trivial needs as food and rest. Offered for History credit by the Philosophy Department, the odd course was taught by one Professor Donald Alport, a hulking philosopher with strange intonations, a grey mustache, and thinning hair, who must once have had my very vision, so learned was he. My French verbs went unconjugated, the War of the Roses went unexplained, as under Alport’s tutelage I contemplated the Great Chain of Being and the Idea of Progress.
Too late for history or law, I was smitten. History itself was but an idea occurring in a mind: like Number, like Justice, like Truth.
By the next semester, taking the ultimate abstraction, Logic, and both Philosophy of History and Professor Alport’s History of Philosophy, with each class I fell more desperately in love. A hopeless case. I didn’t even care that I was reading myself right out of the marriage market but gave myself wholly up to my new passion. I could hardly drag myself out of the library back to the dorm at night. Before long I began to see my onetime dream of knowing everything as foolishly naïve. Socrates was right: the more one knew, the more one must recognize one’s own ignorance. But he was also right that the unexamined life was not worth living.
I plunged in, pur
suing the ideas deep into ancient texts, losing myself among subtle distinctions. Nothing else mattered. I analyzed with Aristotle and flunked my French midterm. I synthesized with Augustine and stopped eating everything but Cheezits and black coffee. Discovering with Spinoza the connectedness of things, exploring with Kant the mind that thinks so, I stopped going to chapel or gym and eventually stopped sleeping at night. My brain was in a constant state of intoxication. With Schopenhauer I saw the world as pure will, until, with Bishop Berkeley, I saw it as pure idea. The more I studied, the less sure I was of anything—even of what I had sworn by the week before. My letters home grew enigmatic, alarming my mother. When I wrote that I planned to stay at school during Christmas vacation so I could study, she called up long distance begging me to come home.
“What’s the matter Sasha? Are you in trouble? Are you falling behind?”
“No, I’m not behind. I just want to read, that’s all.”
“Can’t you read at home? Is it really something else you want to stay for, darling?”
“There’s nothing else.”
“Your father and I have been counting the days until Christmas. Everyone’s been asking after you. If you don’t want to come home we can’t make you, but we’re worried about you, dear. Your letters have been so … so … strange. Won’t you at least tell us what’s wrong?”
She was right: something was wrong. Without gym or chapel or French I wouldn’t graduate, yet I had wiped gym and chapel and French out of my life. The official notices and warnings I had received from the Dean of Women were stuck away in the corner of my room among a mounting pile of empty Cheezit boxes, unanswered letters, incomplete law school applications, and No-Doz pills.
“Nothing’s the matter, Mom, really. I just need to spend some time thinking. But I’ll see, maybe I will come home.” I had a week left to decide.
That night I dreamed I wrote all my finals in a mysterious secret code, the more brilliant the matter, the harder to decipher. I had much to say, but I couldn’t make myself understood. Helplessly I watched my potential A’s dissolve to F’s. Waking in a panic, I spent the rest of the night reading Saint Augustine, and the next day, in desperation, I went to the infirmary to see the psychologist. It was an extreme measure for a former believer in the Behaviorism of Dr. John Watson.
The nurse looked up at me curiously, then handed me a pink paper. “Fill out this form and take a seat,” she said. “Does it go on my record?”
“Of course.”
I sat down with the form. Name. Date. School. Year. Age: 18. Class: Junior. Major: Philosophy. Minor: Philosophy. Religion: Philosophy. Complaint:—
“What does this question mean, nurse?”
She looked at the form. “Put down what your problem is.”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what my problem is. That’s why I’m here—to find out.”
“Doctor has to know what kind of a case you are. Now go write a sentence stating your problem.”
I couldn’t name my problem. How can we know that we know? What is Truth? What is the meaning of Problem? If there were any answers, they were all in an indecipherable code. I put the pink form back on the nurse’s desk and walked out. There was no help for me here.
I returned to the dorm and flung myself on my bed. Around my room at eye level I had run a strip of masking tape representing Time. It started at the door with prehistory and stretched, densely crowded with tiny writing, all the way around to my bed. There wasn’t room on it for one more entry, but I didn’t care. What I yearned to know could not be fit between a then and a now. It could not be numbered. It was simple and yet hugely complex, like a perfect circle and the Grosse Fuge. It existed outside of Time. If I were lucky it would come to me in another vision that would be so stunning as to obliterate forever the triviality of unlearned French and the pettiness of chapel.
A junior from Cleveland’s West Side called to offer me a ride home in exchange for a tankful of gas and some of the tolls. I accepted. In the car, three Ohioans in N.E.U. sweatshirts and dungarees sang hillbilly songs and Christmas carols with the radio all the way across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I slumped in the corner pretending to sleep. Not that I disliked the music; I loved to sing and would even have tried to harmonize if it hadn’t been for another tune buzzing in my ears. The farther west we drove the harder I strained to hear it. With my nerves taut as harp strings and my brain cells poised to replay every tantalizing signal, nothing could shake my conviction that I was listening to the Music of the Spheres.
• • •
At home I cowered through Christmas, avoiding “Jingle Bells” and relatives. Only the books I had brought from school and baroque music could soothe me. I read deep into every night that vacation. In the daytime I slipped off to the quiet garden of the Cleveland Museum of Art where, thrilling to Bach on the organ, I could contemplate with Spinoza the vanity of all human wishes save one. I followed each idea to the next, finding one subsumed under another, itself subsumed under yet another, soaring after that single axiom or thought or word that would somehow sum up everything.
“Sasha, you’ve hardly eaten a bite the entire holiday. Don’t you think you’re studying too hard, darling?” asked my poor mother. But the only nourishment I took was for my mind; for my body I couldn’t care less. Like Descartes’s, my mind and my body led separate lives, but unlike Descartes, I found no satisfactory way to connect them.
I had always despised my body. Slowly my contempt spread to all things material. For the only time in my life, I didn’t care how I looked. Neither Leibniz, nor Spinoza, nor Newton, nor Locke, nor Berkeley, nor Descartes’s God Himself could bridge for me the growing gap between mind and matter.
My second day home I had gone to an engagement shower for an old high school friend. It turned out so unhappily that I didn’t want to see another Baybury soul.
“Sasha! We never thought you’d come,” said the hostess. “We thought you wouldn’t want to associate with us anymore since you got into that fancy college.”
Fancy college! Just because it wasn’t Ohio State! “Baxter’s not fancy at all,” I said. “It’s just far away.”
“Well,” said the hostess, “nobody ever hears from you.”
“Come on, admit it,” said another friend. “You have to be a Brain to get into those Eastern colleges. But then, Sasha always was a Brain.”
“That’s not true—” I began excitedly. It was the dream again. How should I begin to explain myself?
“Calm down, now. You’re probably both right.”
“You must be meeting a lot of interesting people there.”
“We were sure you’d be engaged by now. Things turn out so funny. The three girls from our group that are left are the ones we all thought would go first.”
“She always said she wasn’t going to get married right away.
“Yeah, she said she was going to be a lady lawyer. Maybe she really will.”
Being spoken to in the third person didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. After the shower I decided to spend my evenings in the house.
“If it’s for me, say I’m not home,” I hollered whenever the phone rang, and retreated to my room. (Actually, it was now only nominally my room. Since I had gone away to school, it had been converted into an upstairs den. My bed was still there, and my things were still in the closet, but my pictures had been taken down, the room had been painted blue, and a large TV set had been installed on my desk in place of my phonograph and records.) I refused all Christmas parties and phone calls. “You always have to be different, don’t you?” asked my father, shaking his head.
I decided that would be my last vacation at home. When it was over I took a Greyhound bus back to school rather than accept a ride from some frivolous student. I couldn’t bear to be distracted by human chatter. Professors alone, pure mind, didn’t stink of humanity.
“Sasha Davis?”
“Yes.” I stood in the doorway of my narrow room peering at a tall blond g
irl in a school blazer. Her hair was cropped short at the neck like Joan of Arc’s—not like all the other Baxter girls with smooth pageboys or feather cuts like mine.
“I’ve seen you in the dining room, but I never knew your name. I thought you might be missing this.”
I let out a gasp as delicate fingers held out the small black notebook to which I committed certain of my profoundest thoughts. I had not yet missed it.
“It seemed too private to turn in at the Dean’s office, so I found out your room number. I’m Roxanne du Bois. I write too.”
She dropped her voice and eyes so modestly on the last sentence that I wanted to take her hand. She couldn’t have read my notebook, or she would have known that, as a matter of fact, I didn’t “write.” But I didn’t tell her.
“I guess that makes us both creeps,” I laughed warming with gratitude. “Thank you. Do you want to come in for a few minutes?”
She smiled and walked into my sanctuary, sitting on my unmade bed. It was one of the rare times I had invited anyone into my room. I had chosen Baxter College in the first place because I knew no one there, and I wanted to keep it that way. But this tall, pale girl with the soft voice and delicate hands seemed as separate as I, and fragile besides. “I’ll make us some coffee,” I offered.
As I plugged in the coffee pot to boil the water, I felt her take in my black walls, my Time Line, my cases of books, and the bulletin board on which I mounted pictures of me at cottage, me at several dances with dates, me with my family, and our Baybury house.
“Black walls. What a great idea,” she said. “It really gets the feel of this place. I’m surprised your roommate lets you have black walls. My roommate put some flowered horror in our room, but since she paid for it all I can’t complain. It’s better than the prosaic green we moved into.”
