36 Arguments for the Existence of God (17 page)

“I
thought for your amusement I would provide you with a snippet of James’s rendering of Memorial Hall to deepen your own apperception when you attend on Tuesday coming. I shall recite, as is my wont, from memory:

“‘ “Now there is one place where perhaps it would be indelicate to take a Mississippian,” Verena said, after this episode. “I mean the great place that towers above the others—that big building with the beautiful pinnacles which you see from every point.” But Basil Ransom had heard of the great Memorial Hall; he knew what memories it enshrined, and the worst that he should have to suffer there; and the ornate, overtopping structure, which was the finest piece of architecture he had ever seen, had moreover solicited his enlarged curiosity for the last half hour. He thought there was rather too much brick about it, but it was buttressed,
cloistered, turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had never seen anything; though it didn’t look old, it looked significant, it covered a large area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. It was detached from the rest of the collegiate groups, and it stood in a grassy triangle of its own.’ I skip a few paragraphs now, for I have taught long and must wonder myself at how I am managing to persevere. I shall conclude with this: ‘The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart.’ The expatriated Henry James, who, returning to his native shores, finds much to strike him as tawdry, inferior, and small, is being ironical, of course. But the Jamesian irony negates the negation into contrapuntal affirmation. You, too, shall, I rather think, find contrapuntal affirmation within the bombastic Ruskinian Gothic extravaganza of Memorial Hall, as, too, within the quieter interior of its Sanders Theatre.”

After hearing Memorial Hall so brilliantly described, Cass felt stupid that he hadn’t been able to find it. He kept passing it by, thinking it was a church. He was misled, too, by its no longer sitting on a grassy triangle, separated from the collegiate groups. The university had grown up around it. By the time he finally figured out what a bombastic Ruskinian Gothic extravaganza looked like, and located Sanders Theatre within it, there were no more seats to be had in the vast interior.

The theater fanned out from the stage, and he was just able to squeeze himself onto a cold stone bench that was inside the entrance and up against a wall. A couple of moments later, a tall girl in dreadlocks entered and asked if she could squeeze in beside him. Somehow they managed.

“Did I miss anything?” she whispered.

“I don’t think so. I just got here myself,” he whispered back.

There was a chain of introducers, a Harvard faculty member introducing a Harvard dean who introduced another Harvard faculty member who finally introduced Jonas Elijah Klapper.

“Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum,” Cass’s neighbor whispered.

He was worried that she was going to be a problem. First of all, she was almost in his lap, which was distracting. Second, she was one of those people who consider attendance at a lecture a participatory sport. Cass
preferred, under any circumstances, less activist lecture neighbors. And this was Jonas Elijah Klapper’s Prufrock Lecture! He needed to concentrate.

“Professor Klapper was for many years referred to as the ‘Sage of Morningside Heights.’ New York’s loss is our gain, and I take this opportunity to formally rechristen him the ‘Wise Man of Weedham.’ And now, without any further ado, I give you the Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values at Frankfurter University, Jonas Elijah Klapper, who will enlighten us all tonight on the subject of ‘The Eternity of Irony: The Messianic Ideal, 750 B.C.E. to 1987 C.E.’”

Cass gasped aloud, so that the girl sitting next to him gave him a quizzical look.

“It’s ‘The Irony of Eternity,’” he told her, because that was the correct title of Professor Klapper’s talk. But the girl thought Cass was making a joke and dissolved into giggles, which were fortunately drowned out by applause as Professor Klapper mounted the stage. Klapper kept his eyes cast down, his expression inscrutable, as if determined to let the acclaim make its way around him unheeded. A great man, thought Cass, swelling with an overpowering emotion, a joy splanchnic (that is from one’s inner parts, from the Greek for “organ;” Cass’s vocabulary had been undergoing a rapid expansion,
pari passu
with his soul’s—
“pari passu”
was new, too).

“I thank you for that introduction. I shall indeed essay to live up to the sobriquet of the Wise Man of Weedham, so eloquently bestowed upon me by Professor Knudsen, who is our premier guide through the thickets of Norwegian folk tales.

“I must, embarrassingly enough, begin with an emendation in regard to the title of my lecture tonight,” and Cass turned to the girl beside him and gave her a vigorous nod. “I must add to the span of years I shall traverse a full millennium. Should I have said that we must travel backward in time to 1750 B.C.E. I feared you might have thought the task too daunting.”

Cass figured that Professor Klapper hadn’t wanted to embarrass Professor Knudsen with the more substantive emendation. As for Cass’s too-near neighbor, she was muttering, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Cass’s fears regarding his bench-mate were realized. She never let up. His desire to shush her struggled with his deeply ingrained sense of politeness. As usual, the latter prevailed. He lost the thread at 1750 B.C.E, with that “figure shrouded in legend whom we call by the Greek name Zoroaster, though ‘Zarathustra’ was the name much preferred by Nietzsche,” unable to follow the labyrinthine trail as it wound its way to the “omen-encrusted moment of the chosen now, when it is becoming awkward for even the most scientistic non-seers of the hardened Materialist Mafia, with their stranglehold on our great institutions of learning, to deny the liminal sublime before us.”

“Well, were you able to follow that?” the dreadful girl asked him when it was all over. She was grinning.

Cass shook his head no.

“Where you headed now?”

“To the reception for Professor Klapper at the Faculty Club.”

“You are? Me, too!”

It was a private reception with various big shots invited, but Jonas Elijah Klapper had secured invitations for the seven graduate students of his own department.

“We might as well head on over,” the girl announced. “Do you know the way?”

“No, not really.”

“You’re not Harvard?”

“No, I’m Frankfurter.”

“No kidding! I went there as an undergraduate! What are you there?”

“Graduate student.”

“What department?”

“Faith, Literature, and Values.”

“That’s a department?”

“That’s Jonas Elijah Klapper’s department.”

“I don’t think they had it when I was there.”

“No, they didn’t. They just created it this year in order to get him to come.” He knew he was bragging.

“So he’s the first professor in the Department of Faith, Religion, and whatsit?”

“Faith, Literature, and Values. That’s right. He’s the whole department.”

“Well, I know he loves his colleagues.”

The girl laughed at her own joke, and Cass smiled politely.

“What did you major in at Frankfurter?” he asked.

“Anthropology.”

“How was that?”

“Total bullshit.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, it worked out great. I needed to detox from all that verbiage, so what do you think I did?”

“What did you do?”

“I went to the Amazon to study the Onuma. That was as far away as I could get from bullshit and still remain in academia.”

“Who are the Onuma?”

“They live in the rain forest, and they’re often described as the last of the hunter-gatherers, although, technically speaking, that’s not exactly right, since they garden. They’re one of the last cultures to come in contact with modern civilization.”

“But now they’ve come in contact with you.”

“And they’ll never be the same!”

“Isn’t that a problem?”

“You mean like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but with bigger particles?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Well, actually, Absalom has thought about that quite a lot.”

“Absalom?”

“Absalom Garibaldi. I work under him. He started studying the Onuma in 1964. He walks a fine line between a hands-off policy and humanitarian intervention. Just think about sickness. Their view is that disease is caused by the curses of their enemies and the only way to combat the curses is to blow ebene up their nostrils, which is one hell of a hallucinogenic drug, and go into a trance where you can undo the curse, and that view is not anything that we’re going to try and talk them out of. But if Absalom sees a child dying of a bacterial infection, he’s going to slip the kid some antibiotic to go along with the ebene and the witch doctor’s charms. Obviously, our being there leaves a footprint, but that isn’t really
an argument against our studying them, especially since it can shed so much light on our evolutionary past.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. I was just being facile.”

“It’s nice that you can admit that. I assume you haven’t been an academic for long.”

“No. I’m a first-year grad student.”

“What made you decide to go to Frankfurter?”

“Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

“Yeah, like me. I just went where Absalom was.”

“To the Amazon.”

“Yes, but I meant my institutional affiliation.”

“Which is here?”

“Harvard? No. I’m at Berkeley. When I first started working with Absalom he was at Tulane, but I just switched when he did.”

“Yeah, some of Professor Klapper’s grad students did the same when he came from Columbia to Frankfurter.”

“Were you a Frankfurter undergrad?”

“No, Columbia.”

“So basically neither of us knows where the hell we’re going right now.”

They had walked determinedly across Harvard Yard, each following the other, and now exited onto a street, which they crossed.

“That looks like the right place,” the girl announced, pointing to a redbrick building not noticeably different from any of the others around it. “Excuse me, is that the Faculty Club?” the girl asked a woman passing by.

“Yes, it is.”

“I always find my way,” she said, turning back to Cass, “even when I have no idea where I’m going. It’s inexplicable.”

“It must come in handy in the rain forest. What country do the Onuma live in?”

“The borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela. I’m mostly in Venezuela. I lived in a village called Meesa-teri.
Teri
just means ‘village.’”

“Do you speak … what’s the language they speak?”

“They speak Onuma. That’s what we call it. They don’t have a name for themselves. ‘Onuma’ is a name from the Kentubas, another tribe, and it
means ‘dirty feet.’ Is this the reception for Klapper?” she asked a woman inside the Faculty Club who was sitting behind a table.

“Yes, it is.” She smiled in a transparently perfunctory way. “Your name, please?”

The girl turned to Cass with a flourish, gesturing for him to go first.

“Um, yes, I’m Cass Seltzer.”

“I have it, Cass,” the woman said, her traveling finger stopping at a name on her list. She handed him a name tag. “And your name, miss?”

“I’m with him,” the girl said.

“I still need your name.” The perfunctory smile was growing rigid round the corners. The woman had an upper lip so stiff it looked as if it could make puncture wounds.

“Roslyn Margolis.”

“I don’t seem to have you on the list, Ms. Margolis.”

“Are you sure? Didn’t you inform them I was coming, Cass?”

“I don’t know.”

Roslyn Margolis smiled at the gatekeeper.

“Absentminded professors!”

“Oh, are you a professor, Professor Cass, I mean, Professor Seltzer? Excuse me. I hadn’t realized. You look so young.”

“He is young! He’s a prodigy! That’s why he’s so absentminded! Cass, how could you have forgotten to let the club know I was coming with you?”

“Oh well, not to worry. This can be remedied lickety-split,” said the gatekeeper, producing a magic marker and the fixings for a name tag. “You know,” she said to Roslyn in a confidential tone, “we have quite a few professors who forget to mention their significant others.”

“Oh, thanks. I appreciate it. We could have used your help the last time this happened. I was almost kept out of seeing him inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” said Roslyn Margolis, pinning on her name tag.

“Oh my! The Academy! And so young! Well, wonderful to have met you both!”

Cass stared at Roslyn Margolis. He had begun to doubt everything she had said up until this moment, not excluding that her name was Roslyn Margolis.

“Anyway,” the girl continued, as they headed into the reception area, “so far as my speaking Onuma, I do speak some. There are lots of dialects. Sometimes people from one village can’t understand the people from another village. They can be pretty isolated from each other. There are still lots of villages that haven’t had any contact with outsiders.”

“Are they noble savages?”

“Noble savages?”

“You know, uncorrupted by society’s venality.”

“Frolicking like bunnies in Rousseau’s Never-Never Land? Funny you should ask. When I first applied to be Absalom’s student—he was wary of me, since I was coming from studying the kind of anthropology he doesn’t have much use for, but, then, I didn’t either, so it worked out great—but when I first met him, I asked him what they were really like, the Onuma, and he said, ‘They’re assholes.’”

She laughed. She had a wonderfully lusty laugh. Cass couldn’t hear it without grinning himself.

“And are they?”

“Assholes? It’s against the anthropologist religion to say anything judgmental, so if it strikes you as judgmental then don’t repeat it, or Absalom or I will have to kill you, which we’re capable of, but, yeah, basically they’re assholes. They’re not noble-savage pretty. The Onuma are about as good a counterexample as you’re going to find for a universal moral instinct. They don’t seem to have any compunctions about lying or stealing, the men can beat their wives whenever they feel the need to, they’re constantly raiding each other’s women, which is how their wars start, it’s always about kidnapping women, and then the raided go raiding to get them back, preferably taking a few extra women with them as long as they’re going to the trouble, and they have an unquenchable thirst for revenge.”