36 Arguments for the Existence of God (16 page)

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 integers 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.”

“Gauss wasn’t a Gump.”

“Coulda been. But Goethe? No way a Gump.”

“I don’t know how you can be so sure.”

“Here’s how: literature works the whole soul, and mathematics doesn’t. It’s as easy as that. That’s why Gauss could be a prodigy at two, before he’d even acquired a self.”

The need to acquire a self had been a sustained theme in the thought of Jonas Elijah Klapper, surviving every paradox shift. All of Klapper’s students understood that education is a desperate business, psychopoiesis, the making of the soul of which they would have been otherwise bereft. Psychopoiesis requires that one be in the right place at the right time, one of the hot spots, occasionally located at our better universities, where the overhang is porous, and scraps from the higher conversation rain down. Thus we acquire an education; thus the species lurches on.

There were of course the exceptions, upon whom Jonas thought much, but of whom he seldom spoke: potential progenitors of a greatness that made mere genius seem jejune. Goethe, for example, had settled for genius, announcing to the world that, although he had been present at the creation, he would not lay claim to the final knowledge of the world, a revelation that had provided the subtext of Jonas’s first work,
Goethedämmerung
.

The sad truth was that almost nobody had a self. None of Professor Klapper’s students were certain they had one, not even Gideon Raven. The only people they were certain had selves were the writers whom Professor Klapper assigned them to read, and even here there was room for debate. And then, of course, there was Jonas Elijah Klapper himself.

“Gauss wasn’t a full-fledged mathematician at two. He wasn’t creating mathematics yet, just demonstrating the enormous capacity for doing so. There’s creative genius in mathematics, too.”

“I don’t dispute the existence of mathematical genius.”

Cass laughed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“It just struck me as funny, I couldn’t really say why.”

“Could be the beer laughing, Baby Budd,” Gideon had replied good-naturedly.

“‘We do not prove the existence of the poem,’” Cass had quoted from Wallace Stevens.

“Not bad, Baby Budd. Not bad at all.” Gideon lifted the near-empty pitcher in a toast.

There was a large and raucous group of graduate-student types at the next table, with a lot of punning going on, mostly around philosophers’ names, to judge from the comments that got lifted airborne and floated over to where Gideon and Cass were sitting.

“When my mistake was pointed out to me, I felt like a complete buber,” they heard, followed by shouts of laughter. And: “It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.” And: “He went into a bertrand and began to babble about the class of all classes that aren’t members of themselves.” There were more, judging from the shouts of laughter, but those were the ones that Cass had caught.

One of the punsters got up to get another pitcher and, on his way to the bar, paused and greeted Cass and Gideon.

“You probably don’t recognize me, right?”

“Who could recognize anybody in this light?” Gideon had returned pleasantly.

“Yeah. You know, I once saw Jed over there”—the kid indicated the bartender with a backward toss of his head—“outside, in so-called natural light, and it was scary. Anyway, I’m Jordan Block. I’m a grad student in philosophy. I was in that Klapper seminar the first day, and I think I recognize you two. You guys were there, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure.”

“Did you ever hope in your wildest dreams to witness such a farce? The whole scene was out
of Monty Python
. That bit when he went into his trance and intoned,
‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,’
and then, in the same breath, lumped it with the Private Language Argument, with no inkling that there’s a distinction between early
and later Wittgenstein. What about
‘wovon man nicht
knows the first fucking thing,
darüber muss man schweigen?’
I was almost tempted to come back the next week just to hear the hash he was going to make out of Aristotle. You think anyone showed up?”

Cass glanced at Gideon, who was listening to Jordan with an insouciant smile. He shrugged at the question, and then added an affable “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Jordan laughed. “Yeah, I recognized you.” He nodded at Cass. “You were the one he started shrieking bloody murder at because he didn’t like what you said about a poem. What a douche bag. Well, see you around.”

“Yeah,” Gideon returned with his imperturbable smile, which was removed as soon as Jordan left them.

“That’s typical.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. Jonas gets that all the time from the so-called philosophers. He’s the only one who’s doing real philosophy these days, ever since the logical positivists set out to hunt down and exterminate any genuine philosophical insights. These are the guys who run around calling out ‘meaningless’ wherever they find something difficult and profound. It’s like skeet shooters shouting ‘pull.’ If they can’t bag it in some trivial empirical test, they blast it out of the skies with ‘meaningless.’ Look, according to these guys, even Nietzsche isn’t a real philosopher, and that—to use one of their own favorite ploys—is a
reductio ad absurdum
if ever there was one.”

“Why didn’t we set the guy straight? Shouldn’t we have defended Professor Klapper?”

“There’s no point. These guys are ideologues. Their worldviews would crumble if you got them to give up their positivistic, nihilistic scientism. The English departments are mired in political ideology, and the philosophers are buried in scientistic ideology. Jonas is the sole defender of the faith.”

“I still think we should have defended him. It doesn’t seem honorable. I feel like we’ve let Professor Klapper down. It just isn’t right to let him be smeared that way. It’s like letting truth be smeared.”

“It’s okay.” Gideon laughed. He laughed for a while, and he laughed hard, and Cass figured it was, as Gideon was likely to say, the beer that
was laughing. “We don’t need to set guys like that straight,” he finally said. “What we need is a new pitcher. You look like you could use a little protein, too. I’ll wait a few minutes—I don’t want to run into that Blockhead again—and then I’ll go get you a nice nourishing plate of jerky.”

It was reassuring to Cass that Gideon wasn’t ruffled by the philosophy student’s riff. Cass had felt a cold, numbing shock of disbelief go through him as Jordan Block defamed Jonas Elijah Klapper. But Gideon’s explanation made sense. Of course, if Professor Klapper had picked up the lit taper of philosophy after the professional philosophers had tried to stamp it out with scorn and scientism, they would resent him and try to make him a laughingstock. Jonas Elijah Klapper often remarked that professionalism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Though the Blockheads might scoff, the undeniable truth was that Klapper’s standing in the world was as high as, if not higher than, it had ever been. As proof, he had been invited to deliver one of the most prestigious endowed lectureships in the civilized world, the Prufrock Lecture in the Humanities and Human Values at Harvard University.

Cass had gone over to Cambridge by himself, taking the two-car commuter train to Porter Square. He hadn’t yet seen Harvard, and he’d wanted to get there early to wander around the iconic institution of higher learning.

Cass had loved the whole feel of the place. The self-enclosed Yard, with the homey iron fence around it as if to protect grazing cattle; the freshman dormitories framing the green in brotherly, and now sisterly, communion; the understated Puritan architecture, the prim red brick with white trim, content to be as it is without ostentation; and then, in another frame of self-containment, side by side with the communing dormitories, there was another open expanse, anchored at one end by the neoclassical grandeur of the Widener Library and at the other by the nobility of the Memorial Church, the simplicity of the red-brick-and-white-trim theme taking on an inspired transcendence with that soaring white spire. This scene, this Yard, this fenced oasis of American genius, is where Jonas Elijah Klapper belonged.

Professor Klapper had touched on this circumstance himself, toward the end of last week’s seminar—devoted to
On the Genealogy of Morals
, Nietz sche’s most incandescent work, Klapper had said, and he himself had burned with a rare flame, prolonging the seminar by twenty minutes, which happened seldom, since teaching was, for him, an all-consuming fire in which he was, as he put it, the
korban
, the burnt offering, so that
by the end of the two-and-a-half-hour seminar he would be utterly spent, instantaneously passing from inferno to ash. But for Nietzsche there had been an extra twenty minutes of divine afflatus, which had carried Jonas Elijah Klapper to an inspired recitation of the famous words from
Götzen-Dämmerung
, or
Twilight of the Idols:
“Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried. Whatever we have words for, that is already dead in our hearts. In all talk there is a grain of contempt.” He had, appropriately, gone silent, staring off beyond the head of the tallest person, who was, of course, Cass, and then, all at once, Jonas Elijah Klapper had crumpled, the bulk of his upper body slumping, his massive head’s precipitous descent fortuitously broken by his open palm, into which his face was then buried, and he had sat prostrate and immobile, which could be alarming if one hadn’t seen it before, but they all had, and they waited until he would recover himself and would, with the weariness of the woe-besotted world, gather up his papers and books and shuffle out, only this time he had bestirred himself to remind the class of the upcoming Prufrock Lecture and, more specifically, of the literary illustriousness of the hall where the lecture would take place, “since, my cherubim”—his endearments to the class had grown ever fonder as the semester had progressed—“the masterful Henry James had chosen that precise stage for the pivotal scene in
The Bostonians
.