Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“He took in a lot of better minds than mine.”

“All except the British!”

“Who seem to have lost, together with their empire, the ability to appreciate Jonas Elijah Klapper!”

Cass can barely get out the words from the laughter that’s choking him. Only Roz can get him choking on laughter.

“I’m glad to see that you can laugh about him now. That’s healthy!”

“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.

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.”

Cass had almost gotten through college, had all but wasted irretrievable years of his life, without having realized that he was about to take the next step having never embarked on the first. He had done nothing toward acquiring a unique and inviolable being. That is what he was being shown that he wanted-only everything!-as he sat in that classroom wandering breathless in the rarefied landscape that opened up within the sculpted syllables of Jonas Elijah Klapper’s lectures, which were rendered in the very voice of Western civilization, sweeping in a matter of mere sentences from frolicking disquisitions to stentorious exhortations to whispering tremolos, a voice that astonished even itself with its impartings, moving the speaker to tears that traced their torturous way down the pleated jowls of ageless genius.

Listening to the immensity which was Jonas Elijah Klapper grappling with the immensities of Goethe and Nietzsche and Swedenborg and Blake, not to speak of Yahweh Himself, had induced the out-of-person giddiness of his childhood lower bunk bed: Jesse there, Cass here . What transpired in Room 201 of Hamilton Hall also veered vertiginously toward disempersonment, at least for Cass Seltzer, beholding for the very first time the world-spurning, worlds-spawning nature of pure genius, and something even-yes, something even beyond genius . That was the greatest astonishment that Cass had taken away from Jonas Elijah Klapper’s class on “The Manic, the Mantic, and the Mimetic.” Professor Klapper himself implied that genius, exalted as it is, can amount to a dereliction of duty. Goethe had settled for being a genius, the professor had whispered, and Cass’s spine had tingled, as it always tingled when the professor’s voice dropped down to a quavering hush, even when Cass had no idea what Professor Klapper meant, as he so often had no idea what Professor Klapper meant.

Cass had gone to speak with Professor Klapper during office hours, and he had been made privy to an enthralling exposition on the evolution of Professor Klapper’s thinking through the successive developments that he called “paradox shifts,” and at the end of the two-hour private session, the great man had murmured to him, “I sense the aura of election upon you.”