36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [23]

“It’s taken me long enough.”

Roz doesn’t answer, and Cass, glancing over, sees that she’s got him under a scrutinizing stare.

“What is it?”

“I’m taking to heart your implied admonition that I should think before I speak.”

“You’re an old retired dame. You’re not about to change your ways now. Go on and say it.”

“Well, I was just thinking what a deeply personal book The Varieties of Religious Illusion-which by the way I loved-actually is. Every one of us is in it, in a way. Klapper and Azarya and Gideon and me. You’ve worked us all into what everybody thinks is a psychologist’s learned discussion of religion.”

They’re pulling off onto the road that leads to Frankfurter’s campus, making the sharp right that will bring them up the steep hill on which the university is laid out, and Cass is considering the surprising thing that Roz has just said, trying to judge if there’s any truth in it, and feeling the queasiness of suspecting that there is, and wondering why that should induce queasiness, when Roz gives a yell.

“What’s that?” She’s pointing out her window. “Wait a minute! It can’t be! It’s a genuine protester! Whooohoo! The sixties live!”

Sure enough, there’s a kid with a hand-lettered placard on the side of the plowed road.

“What does his sign say? I couldn’t make it out with all the glare from the snow. Let’s go back, Cass! Let’s see what kind of action’s going down in good old Frankfurter.”

“Are you kidding, Roz? I’m late. And anyway, this road is one-way and slippery as hell.”

“Oh, Cass, you’re no fun at all! Just slow down and I’ll bail!”

And so he does, and so she does, which is no mean athletic feat in those high-heeled boots. His eyes on the rearview mirror, he watches her slip-sliding away, and he can’t help laughing out loud as she plops her fur hat down on her head, imagining that he can actually hear her muttering, “The hell with hat-head!”-which is, in fact, exactly what she’s muttering.

V The Argument from Reversal of Fortune

There had always been the hothouse atmosphere of a mystery religion enclosing Jonas Elijah Klapper and his band of disciples. Entrance into his circle had the feel of an initiation. “I sense the aura of election upon you,” he would pronounce in a hushed voice to some severely young person, who, unsurprisingly, rarely disagreed. Cass had not disagreed when confided the news about himself.

Cass had first arrived at Frankfurter as a graduate student in order to study with Jonas Elijah Klapper, who himself was then only newly arrived on campus, the single professor composing the Department of Faith, Literature, and Values that Frankfurter had constructed around him in order to lure him away from the English Department at Columbia University, which is where Cass had first come under his sway.

As a pre-med, intending to be a doctor like his father (though not necessarily a gastroenterologist), Cass had had little time to take courses outside his requirements. It was his last semester of college when he attended Jonas Elijah Klapper’s oversubscribed course, “The Manic, the Mantic, and the Mimetic,” and his life has never been the same.

Rumpled as he came shambling into the lecture room, a Jewish walrus in a shabby tweed jacket, by the time Jonas Elijah Klapper was fifteen minutes into the hour he looked in need of a tranquilizer dart, the few wisps of his frizzed gray hair sticking out in every direction as he mussed it in his inspired distraction, his eyes rolling around in daemonic frenzy, tears trailing his declivitous jowls as he brought forth the riches of his prodigious memory. With his eyes staring off to just above the head of the tallest student in the class-that would be Cass-it was as if the words were imprinted on the drifting dust motes of Hamilton Hall, and he had simply to read them off from midair, great long paragraphs ranging from Augustine confessing to Zarathustra thus spaking.

This is what it is to be a mind, a real mind, a cultivated mind. This is what it is to lay claim to the entire intellectual corpus, all of it filed within the capacious precincts of one’s own inviolably sacred inner life.

An inner life! That’s what Cass wanted! A self! Professor Klapper’s asides, which sometimes expanded to the size of the hour, were often variations on the theme of “get thyself a self.” Cass hadn’t even known before this semester that he didn’t have a self to call his own.

“Thinkers treat theories like fashionable women treat clothes. They must always have one, and it has to be sufficiently avant-garde so that the lower orders have not yet acquired it, are not buying cheap knockoffs at Macy’s and Gimbels. So, if you are taking this course to find out what the well-dressed theoretician is wearing this year, then I shall have to disappoint you. There is only one theory, and it is the theory you shall pull bloody from the afterbirth of your own self.”

This was heady stuff. This was disruptive, destabilizing, and absolutely necessary stuff.

“We are no more born into the self than we are born into the truth. Both must be acquired with a labor and a love that call forth powers few possess, with the consequence that the earth is populated by veritable zombies, whose inner emptiness would elicit a chorus of execretion if exposed to the eyes of the few carriers of consciousness among us.”