36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “Lizzie, that’s my wife, is giving me hell. She didn’t want to move to Weedham. She hates it here. It’s hard enough for her to be the wife of a permanent graduate student, but at least in Manhattan she had the museums and movie theaters and her friends from Barnard. Here pretty much all she has is me. She works at the Edna and Edgar Lipschitz Library, but that’s not as exciting as it sounds.”

  Cass had never before been the recipient of marital confidences, and he had no idea how to respond. It was the kind of mature activity he hadn’t imagined for himself. It must mean he was getting on in years, that he could be walking side by side with someone who was not only married but unhappily married.

  “Yeah, I can see that” is all that he managed.

  “In a sense, I can’t blame her. When we got married, I’d already been working with Jonas for four years, so it was safe to assume I was nearing the end. I told her I’d have my degree and a tenure-track assistant professorship, preferably on one of the coasts, in a year or two. I said it in good faith. Although maybe, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so confident. Maybe I should have taken the grim statistics into account.”

  Gideon’s intimations were putting the finishing touches to the day’s discombobulations. It was after midnight, they were sliding into yet another day, and exhaustion fell on Cass with a perceptible thud.

  “What do you mean, the grim statistics?”

  “Nobody’s ever completed a dissertation under Klapper.”

  “What do you mean? What happens to them? Does he ask them to leave?”

  “No, I’ve never known him to ask someone to leave—once, that is, he’s chosen you. He subjects us to tests of his own devising. You may not even realize you’re being tested until it’s over. He’s got his own pedagogical methods. You have to submit to them. It’s not easy. Believe me, I’ve been with him twelve years, and I still don’t find it easy. But if you pass, then Jonas will always be forbearing with you. I wouldn’t say that he’s slow to anger—well, you witnessed that for yourself—but that sort of grace that you also witnessed is characteristic of Jonas. If he takes you back in, you’re one of us.”

  Cass absorbed this information as best he could, knowing that more was being given to him than he could understand at the moment.

  “I’ve been with Jonas for longer than anyone, and you can always come to me when you’re in doubt, although you’ll find that Jonas is relatively accessible. But there are times when he isn’t, especially when the next phase in his thinking is being worked out, which can be cataclysmic— the paradox shifts.”

  “What happens to his students, if they never get their doctorates?”

  “They leave, for one reason or another. It’s always a terrible ordeal for Jonas.”

  “But you’re not planning to be a graduate student for the rest of your life, are you?”

  Gideon laughed. He had a surprising laugh. There were recessed places in him where the infantile had pooled, and his laugh was yet another of them. It was a high-pitched giggle, gleeful and a little slurpy.

  “Certainly not! I’m not lying to Lizzie when I tell her that I’m not leaving without my degree! I’ve sunk twelve years into this. I intend to leave Jonas with his imprimatur stamped on my accursed forehead!”

  Gideon Raven was at least half a foot shorter than Cass, and he took strides disproportionately long compared with his height. This gave him a bobbling locomotion, his round head springing like a pigeon’s.

  They walked down a few steps to enter the bar. There appeared to be no windows, and the gloom was lying heavy on everything. As Cass’s eyes adjusted, he saw a long freestanding bar up front, a few authentic working-class types sitting immobile and silent, and booths toward the back. Behind the bar there were yellowing posters of 1950s pin-up girls. The bartender looked as if he must have hung them up himself decades ago, when he would already have been an old lech.

  Gideon went to get a pitcher, and Cass sank down at a sticky booth. Rousing from his mind any bits that were still rousable, he tried to sort out the items of information he had gathered today. They added up to ten:

  The next assigned book for the seminar was Aristotle’s Poetics.

  His long experience with Cass here, Jesse there may have had something to do with The View from Nowhere.

  Gideon Raven was a hell of a nice guy.

  Gideon’s marriage to Lizzie had problems.

  Jonas Elijah Klapper did not like Darwin’s theory of evolution.

  Jonas Elijah Klapper believed that much of what passes for science is scientism.

  None of Jonas Elijah Klapper’s graduate students had completed their doctorates.

  When Jonas Elijah Klapper was testing a graduate student, one didn’t necessarily know it until it was over (if then).

  Once one was chosen by Jonas Elijah Klapper, one would not be exiled.

  He, Cass Seltzer, would not be exiled.

  Gideon came back with a pitcher of beer, two mugs, and several shots of tequila, and when he had sorted them out and sat down, Cass asked him, “What exactly is scientism?”

  Gideon drained his mug and chased it with a tequila before he answered.

  “Scientism is the dogma of our day. It’s the sacred superstition of the smart set that savors its skepticism. It’s the product of the deification of the stolid men of science, so that the arrogance of the illiterati knows no bounds. More particularly, it’s the view that science is the final arbiter on all questions, on even the question of what are the questions. Science has wrested the questions of the deepest meaning of humanity out of the humanities and is delivering pat little answers to all our quandaries.”

  “And much of what passes for science is scientism.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But a lot of what passes for science really is science.”

  “No doubt. But I wouldn’t go emphasizing that point in front of Jonas if I were you.”

  “What’s he got against science?”

  “The same thing that he’s got against Great Britain.”

  “What’s wrong with Great Britain?”

  “They don’t get Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

  “The whole country?”

  Gideon might have considered the question rhetorical, since he didn’t let it interrupt his drinking. He drank with an extraordinary thirst. Cass tried to keep up, which brought him quickly to the point of wondering what would happen if, theoretically, he tried to stand.

  When Gideon decided again to speak, he launched back into the theme of his marital difficulties as if that’s what they had been discussing this whole time.

  “Jonas warned me not to marry Lizzie. ‘She is in her victorious prime, the pinnacle of her prothalamic prowess.’” His impersonation was uncanny. It wasn’t for nothing that he was reputed to be the foremost expert on Jonas Elijah Klapper. Cass had heard, when he was back at Columbia, that Gideon had already published half a dozen articles analyzing Jonas Elijah Klapper’s paradox shifts. “‘The bloom of youth has painted her vividly with the war stripes required for victory on the battlefields of sex. She stands before you, a Maori warrior, only armed with mighty cleavage. She shall go downhill on that front, have no doubt. Heed me well, young pup! That woman will run to fat before the first five years are out, and by the tenth she’ll have a lap wide enough to hold the heap of mewling babes she shall wrest from your besieged manhood.’”

  Cass was shocked by what Gideon was saying. He didn’t want to rush to any interpretations, but, at least on the surface, the words sounded misogynistic.

  “So I take it Professor Klapper’s never married?”

  “The only woman Jonas ever talks about with real longing is Olga the cheesemonger at Zabar’s. And, of course, good old Hannah.”

  “Hannah?”

  “You really are a novice, aren’t you? You mean to tell me you don’t know about the sainted Hannah? Sophocles’ Antigone, Dante’s Beatrice, Quixote’s Dulcinea of El Toboso, and Luke’s Madonna all rolled up in one.
”

  Cass couldn’t tell whether Gideon was being ironic or not. The more they drank, the less possible it became to tell. Gideon Raven seemed to be undergoing his own paradox shifts, and all in one sitting.

  Cass shrugged, so weary he had to exert himself to lift his shoulders.

  “She’s the one with the crazy eyes he keeps framed on his desk.”

  Cass had seen the photograph in Professor Klapper’s Columbia office.

  “Ah, so that’s Hannah. I wondered who that was.”

  “Of course you wondered. Who can help wondering at those haunted eyes, lit by the unmistakable lambency of lunacy? Hannah Klepfish, the extraordinary woman to whom Jonas Elijah Klapper owes it all.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s his mama, Mr. Seltzer, that’s why. Hannah Klepfish is our very own Jonas’s mother, which makes her, in some sense, the mother of us all. And as one of the last of the thinkers who take Freud seriously enough to allow their own psychology to be dictated by him, Jonas is required to have a chronic case of mother fixation. Of course, she was no common mother. She had the gift of prophecy. While she was carrying Jonas, she was vouchsafed the divination—the mantikê in ancient Greek, the nevua in ancient Hebrew—sorry, you develop these tics when you’ve been with Jonas as long as I have—that she was destined to die in childbirth, but that she was carrying a boy child who would survive and be a great light unto the nations. As Jonas tells it, she heard a great voice declaring that it had been decreed.”

  “So she died in childbirth?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, had I implied that? No, the old girl pulled through. Jonas is the youngest, but all his siblings—there are four or five of them—are girls, and Hannah had been a bit long in the tooth when she at long last gave birth to the prophesied son, just like the matriarch Sarah, a comparison of which Jonas himself is quite fond. So the divination had been two-thirds accurate. And to Hannah was born a son, and the child was unlike any other, growing in knowledge from one day to the next, from one hour to the next, so that what he did not know upon waking he could teach to others upon going to sleep.”

  “Meaning he was exceptionally smart?”

  “Did you have any doubt?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “No, of course not,” Gideon Raven repeated. “As for poor old Hannah, not even the late-life glories of such a son as hers were able to save her from the howling hounds of madness.”

  “What?”

  “Rumor has it she was as gaga as she looks.”

  “So what you’re saying is that she was actually crazy.”

  “Certifiable. Jonas, being the proverbial doting son, refused to send her away. He was forced to keep her locked up in the attic with a caretaker named Grace Poole.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m not capable of making this stuff up. They had a big estate called Thornyfield on the banks of the East River, and one night Grace got stinking drunk—unfortunately, she was often what they call ‘in her spirits’— and Hannah escaped the attic stronghold and set fire to Cornyfield, plunging to her death amidst the flames. The Daily News headline was ‘Hindenburg Mom Lights Up New York Skyline.’ You can well imagine the effect on a soul like Jonas’s. He’s never quite recovered his senses, which is why he’s apt to fly into a homicidal rage if you answer one of his bloody obvious questions in the bloody obvious way, instead of somehow retrieving the mess of oblique associations he’d had in mind. ‘No, no, no, that’s not what I was thinking of at all! I’d meant how would Matthew Arnold have responded to Sophocles’ intimations of eternal sorrow had he read Schopenhauer’s response to Hegel, as he anticipated Adorno’s necessary observation that there is no poetry after Auschwitz? That’s what I’d meant by querying the “long, withdrawing roar.”’

  “I see,” Cass said quietly. Now he wasn’t sure whether Gideon Raven was taunting him or consoling him. Both, he suspected. He had already decided that, whatever his motive, Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere had no part in it. “So it isn’t true about Hannah being crazy.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “But she didn’t burn down the house.”

  “I’m not capable of making that stuff up, but Charlotte Brontë was. Jane Eyre. Sorry. I thought you’d get the reference right away. Grace Poole and all.”

  “I was pre-med.”

  “You were pre-med?”

  “Yes.”

  “Permit me to be vulgar, but wow. How did you end up working with Jonas?”

  “My senior year, I took ‘The Manic, The Mantic, and the Mimetic.’ It changed my life.”

  “As you no doubt told Jonas? Not in so many words, of course. Or maybe yes, in so many words?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Cass, I don’t really know why I’m telling you this, since there’s really nothing in it for me. But just because there really is nothing in it for me, you should take what I’m saying extremely seriously. I want you to concentrate hard and try to understand what I’m going to tell you. It’s been a long, hard day, you look like you’re ready to collapse, but I want you to listen closely. Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go back to pre-med.”

  Cass was silent for a while.

  “I guess what you’re saying is that I can’t make the grade, that I’m just not good enough to work with Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

  “You’re not getting it, Mr. Seltzer. The un-Adorno-ed truth: if I had any chance to go to medical school, I’d be out of here so fast the back draft would blow the foam off this beer. I’ve sunk twelve years into Jonas Elijah Klapper. You haven’t lost anything yet. Just walk out of here and never look back, Billy Budd.”

  Yet another classic Cass had never read.

  “Baby Budd, Jimmy Legs is down on you.” Gideon was again impersonating someone or other.

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

  “You’ve never read that either? Well, no matter. You won’t need Melville in medical school. Medical school! God, what I wouldn’t give for the chance to go to medical school! The humanities are finished, dead so long they’re long past stinking. Jonas is the Shakespearean gravedigging clown. Medical school! Could you imagine the joy and jubilation on the part of Lady Lizzie! To have a real doctor as a husband, instead of a gravedigging clown-in-training whose only acquired skills are appeasing and impersonating Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

  Gideon fell into a gloomy silence, and Cass had no inclination to disturb it. At some point, Gideon had replaced the pitcher with another, and they were nearing the bottom of that one, too.

  “You had any dinner tonight?” Gideon asked, and on being told that Cass hadn’t, he went to get some sustenance, bringing back “the house special,” a saucer plate with some tubules of beef jerky.

  Cass thought about getting up and leaving—he’d probably be doing Lizzie a favor—but he was pretty sure that he no longer had access to the muscles controlling his limbs. If you have to think about it, it’s not a good sign. He wasn’t altogether certain either whether he could find his way back to his bleak room on Canal Street. He was dissolving into oblivion for the third time that day, and only the middle time had been edifying.

  From some unlit level of his mind, a submerged question, vaguely menacing, swam to the surface. A slippery, eel-like thing, with a long poisonous ray—he struggled to get a grip on it.

  “Why isn’t he Klepfish?”

  “Hmm. What’s that, young Billy?”

  “Klapper, not Klepfish, why?”

  “He changed his name.”

  “Another book, or for real?”

  “For real, Baby Budd.”

  “Klepfish.” Cass was staring down at the table, shaking his head, unable to assimilate the enormity of the fact, repeating the name softly.

  “Time to get you home, Billy boy. Come on. Upsy-daisy.” And Gideon Raven, all five feet eight of him, helped the towering Cass to his feet with surprisingly tend
er solicitousness, which is how he delivered him to his room. Cass couldn’t quite remember, but he had a vague memory of Gideon’s actually helping him get his shoes off and into bed, murmuring, “Fated boy. What have you done?”

  Next week, Cass was back at the less-crowded seminar table—the three undergraduates had jumped ship, as well as the philosophy graduate student and a few of the English students.

  In addition to Aristotle’s Poetics, Cass had brought to class the reassuring knowledge of the culminating fact on the list that he had assembled last week. Cass had been chosen, and he would not be exiled.

  VI

  The Argument from Intimations of Immortality

  to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

  from: GR613@gmail.com

  date: Feb. 27 2008 1:15 a.m.

  subject: the missing proof

  Are you awake? Any new proofs tonight?

  to: GR613@gmail.com

  from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

  date: Feb. 27 2008 1:20 a.m.

  subject: re: the missing proof

  In a manner of speaking, yes. You’ll never guess who breezed into town today. Roz!

  to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

  from: GR613@gmail.com

  date: Feb. 27 2008 1:23 a.m.

  subject: re: re: the missing proof

  Has she really been downgraded to a breeze? How is she? What’s she up to?

  to: GR613@gmail.com

  from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

  date: Feb. 27 2008 1:35 a.m.

  subject: re: re: re: the missing proof

  Pretty much the typical. She rode along with me to Frankfurter, and I dropped her off while I went to see Shimmy Baumzer (who stood me up). By the time I got back, Roz had organized a campus protest. The president’s wife, Deedee Baumzer, is a sorority girl from the University of Texas, and she’s long been pushing for less geek and more Greek at Frankfurter. Either Shimmy finally caved, or he’s feeling sufficiently sure of himself these days. It’s been a good year for Shimmy. He’s got some glitter on his faculty, and the trustees and the donors have been happy. Shimmy moved to revoke the ban on the Greeks, and there was a backlash. When Roz and I got to the campus, we passed one student with a hand-lettered sign: “Say NO to Greeks.” Roz jumped out of the car to investigate, and by the time I’d gotten back she’d joined the counter-campaign on the pagan side. She’d rallied a group of students who were chanting “Go Greek” and there were a few more kids on the other side, also chanting. And right in the middle was Roz holding a placard saying “Maccabees = Taliban.”