36 Arguments for the Existence of God (12 page)

The village was to have been called New Valden, but through a county clerk’s typing error it had been Americanized to New Walden. The Valdeners had no idea that the spelling mistake brought them into nominal intimacy with the ghost of Henry David Thoreau, sounding the chord of American transcendentalism—visionary, romantic, self-reliantly impractical. The Valdeners knew from Thoreau like they knew from clam chowder.

Cass had only visited New Walden a few times, since his mother hated the village and would go unusually quiet for days before a visit. It was a strange place, where he and Jesse were made to feel outlandish because they didn’t dress in short black pants and large black felt hats, didn’t have long side curls and speak the language of the place, which was Yiddish. Cass remembered some little boy, maybe a cousin—there were throngs of them, many of them with Cass’s and Jesse’s red hair—laughing with scorn when they were introduced, some kid named Shloimy or Moishy or Yankel finding the name “Cass” hilarious.

Even though his mother went strange around her, Cass had loved his widowed bubbe. Another thing that was hard to ignore was that his bubbe didn’t treat Jesse as nicely as she treated him. It wasn’t even clear that Bubbe knew Jesse’s name. She called him “little boy.” If Jesse came over and tried to climb onto her lap—a space freely offered to Cass—Bubbe would push him away.

“Feh, here he is again. The second
tog”
—day—“of
yom tov”
—a holiday— “always schlepping after the first. Why don’t you go find your mommy, little boy, and let your older brother enjoy in peace a little?”

Jesse was so shocked by Bubbe’s behavior that he would go off without a word of protest, an unusual response for Cass’s brother, who could fly off the handle if Cass or his mother or father failed to read his mind concerning something he wanted. Cass always saved for Jesse at least half the babka that Bubbe gave him, even though she would impress upon him that she had made the delicious yeast cake for him “special,” as if she had foreseen he might want to share it with the little boy, his brother.

He wasn’t allowed to taste the babka, or anything else, until he had made the right blessing, the
bracha
. If he ever forgot, which he rarely did, his bubbe would purse her lips and say, “Feh! Like an animal, a
vilda chaya
, he’s being brought up.
A shanda fur da Yidden.” A
disgrace for the Jews.

His bubbe had taught him all the
brachas
that had to be made before eating. There was one for fruit, but another one specifically for grapes, and one for vegetables and one for bread and one that was for a grab bag of things. And, of course, there was a
bracha
for baked goods,
mazoynos
, including Bubbe’s babka. Bubbe would quiz him closely every time he visited. It wasn’t as straightforward as just knowing the general types, since foods could be mixtures, and some of the categories trumped the others. The
bracha
also depended on how much of something there was and also whether something had been done to the food to make it change its type: the apples in apple juice didn’t count as fruit. It was complicated. What if there were raisins in the babka that Bubbe had baked for her little Hasid, her little pious one? Should Chaim make the
bracha
for the baked good or for the fruit? (The baked good!) And what about cereal? If
it was corn flakes, then you have to make the one for vegetables,
haadama
, for things that grow in the ground. But it if was Cheerios, then you said
mazoynos
.

You also had to be careful about silverware and dishes, never mixing up the dairy with the meat. It had been poor Jesse’s fate to have mixed some Bosco into his milk with a teaspoon from the wrong drawer, and Bubbe’s wrath had been biblical. She had taken both boys out to the backyard and shown them how now she had to stick the spoon in the dirt to clean it. Dirt to clean? When they had asked their mother, she had answered in a way uncharacteristically terse: “If it seems crazy to you, you understand it perfectly.”

Cass could have asked his mother to review the
brachas
with him. She still knew everything, including Yiddish. But he could tell that she would rather he didn’t master his
brachas
too well.

Funny that he could still miss his bubbe, even though by now he understood a lot more about the personality disorder that had made her decide that Chaim was
git
—good—and the “little boy” who was his brother was
nish git
. She had died when Cass was a junior in college, but she had been banished from their lives long before then, with the full approval of BOIL.

When he came back after the interval that Aviva Landesmann had specified to him, she had something better to offer him than babka. It was
The View from Nowhere
, by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Cass thanked Aviva much more than she was probably used to being thanked and went off to his carrel, three flights below ground level in the Lipschitz Library.

The basic idea in
The View from Nowhere
is that we humans have the unique capacity to detach ourselves from our own particular point of view, achieving degrees of objectivity, all the way up to and including the view of how things are in themselves, from no particular viewpoint at all. This is what Nagel calls the View from Nowhere, and he analyzes all sorts of philosophical problems by showing how they arise out of the clash of the subjective point of view with the View from Nowhere.

The View from Nowhere
was hard going, but Cass kept plugging along, at first motivated simply by his burning desire to get to the bottom of
Gideon Raven’s gnomic message. But then Cass got to a section that made him forget all about gleaning any clues to his afternoon’s ordeal.

Cass only realized he had been holding his breath when he let it out. Here was the bedtime metaphysics that used to exercise him to the point of hyperventilation being described with precision by a prominent philosopher. (Thomas Nagel sounded prominent from the book jacket.)
Cass here, Jesse there
. The ritual used to send him hurtling so far outside himself that, night after night, he had become frightened that he might never find his way back in again, might never be able to take for granted that he was who he was. Cass had never hoped to find another person who could understand the strange state he used to induce in himself, and he had certainly never guessed that it might be shared by a philosopher.

He became so caught up in
The View from Nowhere
, the dense mass of its distinctions parting for him like the sea, that he forgot the whole point of why he was reading it.

He wasn’t sure whether Professor Klapper would approve of Thomas Nagel. The style of
The View from Nowhere
was of the sort to send Jonas Elijah Klapper fleeing for protection from “the talismanic attachment of certain philosophers to logic. No thinker worth our contemplation is going to be held back by the Law of Non-Contradiction, which I do not recall being ratified with my approval.”

Cass heard the gong of the ten-minute warning and crash-landed back into
Cass here
. He thought he understood the reason why Gideon Raven had tossed him a spitball commending
The View from Nowhere
. It was precisely so that what had happened to him over the course of the last few hours would happen. Somehow or other, maybe even because Gideon Raven had gone through a similar baptism by fire, he’d known the right salve. Nothing but extra-strength objectivity could help.

Cass emerged from his narrow cell a minute or two before the library was going to close at midnight. The rows of carrels lining the walls down here in the bowels of the library were disgorging a thin stream of pale and brooding graduate students. Just a few carrels down from Cass was Gideon Raven, sliding his door shut behind him, giving the combination lock an extra, paranoid twist.

Raven spotted him and came over, taking the book out of Cass’s hand and reading the title with raised eyebrows.

“Might as well just walk over there together” is what he said as he handed Nagel back to Cass.

“The View from Nowhere,” it turned out, referred to a working-class bar in downtown Weedham that had a certain cachet with the graduate students. Its given name, at least as it was represented on the dimmed blue neon sign that had given out a long time ago, was “The View,” for no discernible reason, since it was just a dive on one of the side streets off moribund Maudlin Street, a wooden shanty no different from any on the decaying block. Some student wag had dubbed it “The View from Nowhere,” and the name had stuck among the cognoscenti.

There was a slight rain falling as they descended the steep hill that led
out of the Frankfurter campus and headed into the down-at-the-heels center of Weedham, the sidewalk glinting whenever they passed a streetlight.

Cass had never spoken with Gideon before, and so he was surprised at the confidential tone that Gideon assumed from the very beginning, as if they had already gotten over the preliminaries.

“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.