36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [8]

couldn’t belong to him, to the man who stands on Weeks Bridge, wrapped round in a scarf his once-beloved ex-wife Pascale had knit for him for some necessary reason that he would never know, perhaps to offer him some protection against the desolation she knew would soon be his, and was, but is no longer, suspended here above sublimity, his cheeks aflame with either euphoria or frostbite, a letter in his zippered pocket with the imprimatur of Veritas and a Lucinda Mandelbaum with whom to share it all.

II The Argument from Lucinda

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 5:37 a.m.

subject: possible argument #37

You awake?

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 5:38 a.m.

subject: re: possible argument #37

Awake.

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 5:39 AM

subject: re: re: possible argument #37

I think I may have come up with another argument. A really good one. Tell me I’m crazy but I think this one might be it. Tell me I’m crazy but I think this one is different.

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 5:40 a.m.

subject: re: re: re: possible argument #37

All right, you’re crazy.

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 6:00 a.m.

subject: re: re: re: re: possible argument #37

But I still want to hear it.

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 6:01 a.m.

subject: re: re: re: re: re: possible argument #37

It went away. I tried to formulate it and it completely went away. I think I miss Lucinda.

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 6:08 a.m.

subject: the argument from Lucinda

Of course you do. But that’s no reason to believe in God.

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 6:10 a.m.

subject: re: the argument from Lucinda

:-) Good night.

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 26 2008 6:13 a.m.

subject: re: re: the argument from Lucinda

Good morning.

III The Argument from Dappled Things

When Lucinda Mandelbaum entered the crowded auditorium of the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center at Frankfurter University for the inaugural Friday-afternoon Psychology Outside Speaker lecture of the new semester and rejected an aisle seat, instead clambering lithely over the legs, laps, and laptops of the assorted faculty members and graduate students, all of whom had been impatiently awaiting her maiden entrance, even though it was not she but, rather, Harold Lipkin of Rutgers University who was the invited speaker; and when she then slipped into the empty seat next to Cass Seltzer, bestowing on him a sweet little shrug of coy chagrin at coming in late and making a bit of a commotion in getting to him; and when she then proceeded, all through Lipkin’s lecture, entitled “The Myth of Moral Reason,” to address her running commentary on Lipkin’s efforts exclusively to Cass, so that Cass, who had in fact been looking forward to Lipkin’s lecture, seeing how the psychology of morality dovetailed with his own research on the psychology of religion, ended up missing a good part of it, instead chuckling appreciatively at Lucinda’s zingers and even managing to launch one himself that had made Lucinda snigger so enthusiastically that his good friend and colleague Mona Ganz, sitting several rows in front of them, her well-groomed girth just able to settle itself into the seat she always claimed for herself, front and center, swiveled her head around and then, determining the identity of the sniggerer, reversed the motion just as sharply-“like that kid in The Exorcist,” Lucinda observed, making Cass give vent to a chortle so disloyal that it certainly ought to have been swiftly followed by a stab of guilt, considering Mona’s devoted mindfulness toward him, especially during the ravaged weeks and months that had followed the post-aphasic Pascale’s first words to him from her hospital bed, which, in their percussive rhythm and impeccable precision, “I must of necessity break your heart,” were as reflective of the poet that Pascale was (La Sauvagerie et la certitude, Prix Femina, 1987) as they were effective in dampening the desire of her husband to live out any and all possible forms of his future-it had been entirely by mistake.

Lucinda had thought that Cass Seltzer was someone else entirely. To be precise, she had thought that Cass Seltzer was their mutual colleague Sebastian Held, to whom she had been introduced last week at the welcome party that she thought the university had thrown for her. (Actually, she had been wrong. The party had been in honor of all the newly arrived faculty.)

Lipkin, a small man with a booming, pedantic, overenunciating style, was an excitable lecturer, who rose onto his well-shod tiny tiptoes as he hammered home his points. He was already launched at full steam in his oratorical trajectory, irrigating the first row with his spittle, speed-clicking his way through the PowerPoint presentation that swerved abruptly from brain scans of sophomores, neuroimaged in the throes of moral deliberation over whether they should, in theory, toss a hapless fat man onto the tracks in order to use his bulk to save five other men from an oncoming trolley, to sweeping conclusions that claimed to deliver final justice to John Rawls, not to speak of categorically laying to rest the imperative-rattling ghost of Immanuel Kant.