The Atheist in the Attic

by Samuel R. Delany

  “I had written my book of crisis already—and little good it had done, not for Jan or Cornelius. Even when they break my heart, usually injustices don’t incense me so. But I rushed back home—I was not sick to my stomach, I was not sick in my heart; that all came later—

  “I was furious!

  “I snatched out a piece of vellum and swiped up a burnt coal from the dead fire, and wrote a sign to tell the people what barbarians they were, what pigs they’d become. I was trying to take it out into the streets when the woman you met here, who brought me down, looked up from the washing, read what I’d written on it—well, she had to stop me bodily from going out! She grabbed the sign, threw it across the room, grabbed me. ‘You will be next, you idiot!’

  “‘I don’t care, cow!’

  “‘I don’t care if you call me a cow! I’m not letting you go out there waving your intentions to commit suicide on a sign above your shoulder.’ We fought in the house here while I raged that I didn’t care:

  “‘You’re trying to stop me because you want my rent! You want my body! You want the pleasure of dominating something wiser and weaker than you! You’re as bad as they are! You are them! You are too selfish and greedy to let me do what I—’”

  He sighed. “But she won.

  “‘No,’ she said at last, breathing hard, when I was sitting on the floor and she was sitting on a table corner. ‘I want to stop you because you are a good old man—as good as I too thought those poor corpses strung up outside the jail yard. No, they did not have me to their house the way they had you. But I was here sometimes when they came to see you. They came here.’ Wasn’t that a kind thing to say—even if she was lying? Does it matter whether it was her truth? Or if she wanted me to think it was because it could make me or both of us, right then and there, feel a little better? But ten minutes of the cruelties of life had turned us from two good friends to an old man with a skinned knee and twisted shoulder, and a big woman with one braid hanging down by the arm of her dress I’d torn and a bruise under her right eye that it had certainly not been my intention to give her. My outrage and arrogance had made us go at it like a pimp and a whore tussling behind the lowest tavern. Some people think philosophers can’t know the passions. Ha! Might does not make right. Still, sometimes it even wins when on the side of compassion. And it gave me time to think: ‘One must speak the truth.’ Especially when there is nothing else one has to give. But she’d stopped me, nevertheless.

  “I am alive, not dead.

  “We are”—he shrugged, smiled—“still friends.”

  And the door opened. We both looked up. With a tray and two bowls, she stood there.

  “Now, you see,” he said, “I was just telling my visitor what a good woman you are, and what an even more exemplary landlord. Not every landlord will save the life of a tenant.”

  She said, “It’s his breakfast time. I thought I’d bring in a bowl of potato and onion soup for you—with dill. That’s the way he likes it …”

  “Why, that’s kind of you,” I said.

  “I’m going to be taking a bowl out to your driver—if that wouldn’t be amiss with you, sir?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m sure he will appreciate it as much as I will this one. Thank you.”

  So she brought the tray around, and I took a plate with the deep Dutch bowl on it, with butter and dill, and placed it beside my chair on the table where such collations had probably been set down beside family and visitors for five years, five generations? Netherlanders, like Germans, are a frugal people. (Eating one another in the country … ? Like a tale students might still tell in Altdorf of some woodsman’s family waylaying strangers in the Black Forest during the Thirty Years’ War.)

  “You were angry,” I said. “But you were brave. Bravery makes us like our heroes, which is important to the people who prefer liking them to despising them. Truth is what’s important in the world. But is what’s important always the truth?”

  He sighed. “All I am saying is if the Temple comes down as easily as all that on my head or on yours, it can’t be the true one. It’s too flimsy. It falls too easily.”

  “Again, your understanding,” I told him, “swerves dangerously close to my own.” I always find myself thrown back to talk of virtue that tends to change into its opposite. Or at any rate is always putting us in a position from which that looks suspiciously to be the case.

  “I suppose,” he said, “it appears dangerous to some when an ordinary lens grinder in The Hague seems to think too much like a German duke and courtier, with all the advantages the Landgraves of Saxony can confer.”

  In last night’s letter, I had mentioned Duke John Frederick.

  “Lens grinders in The Hague are not whom I think of when I think of ordinary people—Van Leeuwenhoek is also in The Hague. I’m planning to see him as well, while I’m here.”

  “But you are seeing him as a scientist, I assume.” He nodded. “I’ve ground lenses for him, too. I think of him as an admirable pursuer of truth.”

  “As there are some who say what he has discovered are not little plants and animals, but rather little microscopic demons and devils.”

  The Dutch Jew (who will always remain a Jew to the rest of us, if not to himself, even when we forget or he does; and who will remain so as long as we can say gentile) slid his robe over his knee. “Did Oldenburg tell you I am at the end of my work on another treatise—or nearing it? One never finishes. I’d sent him some pages of one of the earlier sections I feel is finished.” He smiled. “At least till I want to revise it.”

  “He is your friend,” I told him. “Not your enemy. He told me the title and the topic. Nothing more. And even if he had, I would not have bandied it about to get to the ears of your enemies who would immediately begin to drown it in premature misunderstandings.”

  His black hair touched only at temples and neck with gray, this Jew without a beard gave me a questioning look.

  I sighed seriously. “He said it was about God. He said you’ve called it Ethica. And I must say, given your last book, as titles go that seems a radical one, if not openly dangerous: we come to it prepared to learn about God and are handed a title that suggests it’s about the way men treat men.”

  “More than half will be just that—at least by implication.”

  “There are some who say that you are laughing at us. And the more serious, the more measured, the less passionate your tone, the more clearly they hear your laughter and the more painful to them is your derision.”

  His face grew serious. “I hope it is more radical than that—and that it’s not too much more dangerous. When, in its later parts, it speaks about how men behave, it speaks about how they delude themselves into thinking they are doing things beneficial or harmless when they are not—”

  “And if,” I said, “that self-delusion takes place without the help of any demons or devils … ?”

  He nodded. “It’s all a set of rational errors. It suggests that rationality can fix them.”

  “You, sir,” I said, “are a dangerous man. That’s a dangerous idea and a great responsibility.”

  “So they are always telling me.” He gave the most modest of shrugs. “Thank you, I suppose.”

  It’s always surprised me how quickly we find ourselves considering social distinctions, especially in philosophy. I mean, if you’d spent as much of the last month reading and rereading Plato, Heraclitus, and Descartes as I have since I began this leg of what has sometimes seemed endless traveling with endless obligations, you too would sometimes find it hard to hold your thoughts in check: Plato and Heraclitus were, after all, princes. And Descartes worked (as do I) for princes. For small talk I went back to something less accusatory:

  “Truly to get away from the notion of philosophy as a princely calling you have to go—not to Socrates (he worked for Plato, after all, or perhaps Plato worked for him; on that metaphorical level sometimes it’s hard to tell) but all the way to Diogenes of Synope, the old slave with his
master too lax to keep him in check: the vagabond sleeping with the street dogs in a broken bathtub at the edge of the old slave market (because they wouldn’t let him in the Agora where Plato walked and taught through some of the same years, though, with their different markets, they were really ‘sparring’ friends, if you read the testaments). Diogenes—pleasuring himself without shame where passersby could watch, while he, not even in rags, but unconcerned and presumably grinning, shouted his barbs about old Plato: ‘Plato winces when I track dust across his rugs; he knows that I am walking on his vanity! … If only I could free myself from hunger as easily as from desire! … I’ve seen Plato’s cups and tables, but not his cupness and his tableness!’ To yell about freedom from desire with your cock in your fist, is that enough to start a revolution? Perhaps not. But he’s always been a character in every account I’ve known.”

  “Plato’s fool, some think—without whom Plato cannot truly be understood.” He nodded.

  We talked on. I spoke more with him in Hebrew, because I prided myself on my conversational command of all the classical languages. I’d heard enough gentiles speak Hebrew with Jews to know that was no guarantee they’d get on, any more than if both spoke Estonian or Norwegian to one another. But we did. Why? Some of it I can guess at. (She owned the building, it seemed. Herr Spinoza was her—and her husband’s, who was not there that day—favorite and, now, only tenant. Had been for years. What was theirs was his. And I was ready to admit the mug of Dutch beer she eventually brought was really more flavorful than the German brew Gunter had laid in for my visit to the great Venice of the North.) Still other elements were as indecipherable as the fact that he was green eyed and I was missing a right rear molar that had shattered when, as a child, I’d bitten down on a clamshell for the fun of it—the kind of fact that makes you wonder from time to time: Does that have anything to do with his or my becoming a philosopher?

  Of the diplomatic visits I expected to carry out for my lordship during my visit to Amsterdam, this is the one that I’d wanted to make the most—the one that was entirely for me. I had set it up by and for myself. I remember sitting, thinking, while he was going on and momentarily my mind drifted:

  Sixteen, seventeen is old to learn Latin. Or Greek.

  My new acquaintance, Spinoza, was the opposite of the sort of prodigy I had aspired to be since my childhood; I started tutoring in all three languages probably younger than this one had started his Hebrew alone.

  But allow me once more to appeal to Diogenes who said Plato’s philosophy was an endless conversation. I think the truth he points to there is something that pretty much any bright youngster who actually reads the greatest of our philosophers can quickly intuit. Yes, it’s an endless conversation, and what’s more, it’s an endless conversation in which the parts of the various participants can only be played by aspects of a single consciousness. Plato’s discussants and querents are not polite as students and teachers are polite. They are polite the way only fantasy discussants can be civil inside a fantasy. Were they real, they’d be at each other’s throats before eight or nine pages were done.

  But we talked—in Hebrew. Then Latin. And now and again our language so enfolded us that our minds appeared to do the same. I had felt as much when I’d read his Tractatus. And there is nothing to make someone feel that a writer or a thinker is important like the belief—not now and again, but again and again—that his argument is right first; and only more or less clearly put, second; or believable, third.

  We talked. Together.

  And somehow all dialectical incongruences were filled in by the language that seemed proper—by words, gestures, facial expressions, which is to say: yes, here and there, on a surprisingly deep level, we found ourselves agreeing.

  I’ve talked to him. I’ve read what he’s written. Certainly he seems as skeptical of miracles as I am: this alone prompts me to read and even reread his argument, even if different from mine. And I do think, at this point, now that I have, we are equally rigorous against the miraculous.

  How many specificities I recall about that room on that morning, details that will last the length of time this journal entry endures and that will vanish as soon the last copy crumbles or the last citizen forgets the language, details that might compel many to decide that either there is or there isn’t (it doesn’t matter) a specific order of roomness for that room, or two specific orders of roomness for that room (modest, not in the best repair, unassuming) as opposed to this room (generally more likely to last but with secret flaws entailed in the kinds of people who come to confer in it, spend a few days in it, grow up in it; as well as true architectural instabilities that will not give way till long after the other building is pulled down, and some inner mystery—or external plot—causes this one to go up in flames or crumble into the crevice of an earthquake the size of Lisbon’s, or to fall to a marauding army)—as I said before, we talked.

  And in that talk, he chose to tell me this tale, as if it followed from what he’d been saying. I hadn’t been listening all that carefully, but because it did follow so clearly from what I’d been thinking, I knew I must have understood him anyway.

  “You know, sir, when I was a boy, and still lived in the city, I remember it was an early spring, but which spring I’m rather unsure at this point. But with my father I’d gone to visit the house of a merchant friend. I was in the back, waiting for my father to come out. Over his front door were carved the Hebrew words that dramatize so much of the best in mankind—”

  I recited in Hebrew, “‘Truth and peace form the foundation of the world …’”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Yesterday morning, I saw it over the door of a merchant in the city.”

  “Several houses have taken it for their motto. But not mine.” He smiled, nodded. “I was sitting in the back, in their garden—in summer—waiting for my father to finish, when I looked down at a table beside me, I saw a leaf—it was an all but windless day, not like today with its early winter airs—and I began to think, the way we do at that age: ‘Why can’t I move that leaf with my mind—the way the mind of God is supposed to move the world?’ So I looked at the leaf, there on the planks, and narrowed my eyes. And I thought as intensely as I could without making a sound: Leaf, move! And it didn’t. It just lay there. So once again, I thought: Leaf, move! And still it was still. So for a third time I gathered all my inner strength and prepared myself once more and—” He let out a breath. “But suddenly I knew, I saw, I experienced why I could not move the leaf with my thoughts. It was because the leaf on the table and my thought, I now knew, I now sensed, were two separate orders of ontological existence. The leaf was material and so was the wind that moved it. But thoughts were of the same ontological order as images, artworks, ideas. My thought could not move the leaf for the same reason that if I pulled a print of a winter storm from the pile of prints the merchant kept among his stores, and brought it into the garden, and set it up on the table so that its images of storm and rough weather faced the tree directly, not a leaf or a branch nor a gnat or wisp of dust would move because of that storm. That’s because thoughts modeled by material and material that provokes thoughts don’t interact. They could no more affect one another directly, without the mode of a body between, than could a drawing of a cannon just having fired fell a real and clopping cavalryman. The mind of God can’t be exempt from such restrictions, because it obtains to what mind, thoughts, and material are. Three minutes later, with hardly a move, I had figured out why there could be no miracles. Miracles entail the thoughts of God directly and without material intervention controlling matter itself. God’s thoughts couldn’t control the world—not because my mind or my thoughts weren’t strong enough, but rather because that’s not how thoughts work in the world. Any thoughts. If they could, they’d belong to another ontological order and, by definition, would be something other than thoughts. They’d have to be something that could interact with material directly, and the only thing we know of that can
do that is other material. If God wants to move materials in an unusual way, He will have to set up still other material situations and events—possibly visible, possible hidden—to bring it about. But that’s why there aren’t any miracles, because thought and material work the way they do.” He shrugged. “It’s all over the book I’ve already been so rash as to publish—though I haven’t come out and said it in so many words. I am working on the other now, where I’m planning on putting it clearly and succinctly among the first set of definitions on which all else will depend, possibly even as the very first definition. Or the second …”

  Finally I said I must go. He said he would like to see me again. Surprising myself, I asked him what about tomorrow. Surprising me equally, he said that he would be delighted. He had little to do but grind lenses—and think.

  At any rate because I had been thinking along the preparatory lines for this argument just as he had, I had no trouble understanding it.

  He concluded: “And it felt very good to have such thoughts in a garden behind a house bearing that legend on its door, but that was just an extra, a little stutter to the event, the reward of pleasure added to the event, given us by God or nature.”

  And this lack of confusion, right then and there, seemed the most natural thing in God’s world, enough to make me think, in this most particular of possible worlds, that it might be taken for a truth rather than a miracle that nature and God might be not only one, but be the kind of one, the order of one, that he thought they were.