Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Arriving in Frankfurter as a graduate student of Jonas Elijah Klapper, Cass felt stunningly ill-prepared to take on faith and literature, not to speak of values. He had learned on his acceptance that he was one of only twelve students sharing the honor, and the other eleven were all far more advanced than he. Gideon Raven was the number-one student among them. He had already been a graduate student for twelve years.

Cass had spent the summer at his parents’ home in Persnippity, New Jersey, sitting on the back deck and reading his way through the professor’s extensive corpus, some twenty-eight tomes in all. His parents had taken the news calmly. His mother, who tended toward strong views, was constrained in this case by her strong views on personal autonomy. She was also a bit distracted by Jesse’s decision to move out of the NYU dorms into an apartment that she couldn’t figure out how he could afford. His father had only once raised the subject of Cass’s giving up his plan to go to medical school. It had to be somewhat of a disappointment for Ben Seltzer. He had loved to talk over Cass’s pre-med courses with him, and was himself a happy gastroenterologist, as he was a happy husband, a happy father, a happy weekend squash player. His wife, Deb, was more the intellectual-a “culture vulture,” as Ben fondly called her-and he was always more than happy to accompany her to operas and symphonies, lectures, art exhibits. “More than happy to…” more often than not characterized Ben Seltzer’s attitude. It was from him that Cass had gotten his height, as well as the implicit apology in his bearing for taking up too much space. When his father asked him whether he was sure about giving up on medical school, it sounded almost as if the man knew that it was written in the handbook of Jewish parents that he was required to ask, and he was just trying to get it over with. Cass was accommodating. He wanted to get it over with, too. He held up his current book, which happened to be Jonas Elijah Klapper’s The Perversity of Persuasion , and said, “This is sheer genius, Dad.” His father’s response, after a considerable pause, was to say that maybe he’d give it a read, “or, better yet, your mother can read it and then explain it to me.”

Cass had started at the beginning, with the transparent brilliance of the early works, including the groundbreaking Goethedämmerung , proceeded steadfastly onto the undisputed genius of the middle works, most notably The Perversity of Persuasion , and groped his way as best he could through the opaque splendor of the latter works, including Wandering Between Two Worlds , the last volume that Professor Klapper had published to date. Cass had conscientiously read it through to its very last sentence, even though the only thing he had truly understood had been the quote from Matthew Arnold, a poet whom Jonas Elijah Klapper did not revere- the professor gave out grades and Matthew Arnold had received an ignominious B-minus-but whose “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” had supplied him his title:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head,

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

Cass’s mother did read The Perversity of Persuasion , though whether she ever explained it to his father Cass didn’t know.

“What do you think?” Cass had asked her, as she sat beside him on the deck, midway into the book.

“He’s quite oracular,” she had answered.

Cass had nodded and then smiled, pleased with her answer.

After a few more minutes of reading had passed for both of them, he looked up and asked, “When you say ‘oracular,’ do you mean that in a good way or a bad way?”

She had yielded one of her more inscrutable smiles.

“I couldn’t really say. I guess you’ll find out for yourself when you get to Frankfurter.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper’s sole course offering during this first year at Frankfurter was to be the two-semestered “The Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self,” a seminar that had a pre-registration of twenty-three students, which was high for a graduate seminar. There were the professor’s own graduate students, now down to seven. The departed five had ultimately decided, after passing through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, not to move to Massachusetts, which Klapper had made a non-negotiable condition for their continuing to be supervised by him. “The Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self” also had six graduate students from Frankfurter’s English Department, another six from Religion, one from Philosophy, and three undergraduates who had managed to garner the elusive permission of the instructor.

The three were all, Cass couldn’t help noticing, extremely comely girls, who entered the room that first day in a clutch of bosomy frolicsome-ness. But even they soon fell into the nervous silence that was de rigueur among the professor’s chosen students.

The tone was set by Gideon Raven, whose brilliance and intensity were disguised within the mien of a hyper-alert baby. His head was round, his face-especially in relation to his fleshless body-full. His eyes were circular as well, their shape enforcing an impression of innocence, no matter the conflagrations raging behind them. It was the gaunt jitteriness-the fingers gnawed to the quick, the dissent pooling in his philtrum-that gave him away. Although Gideon had been studying with Jonas Elijah Klapper for an apostolic twelve years, and was teaching his own courses at Frankfurter this semester on the metaphysical poets, still, here he was in attendance, just as he had attended every one of the professor’s Columbia classes, graduate and undergraduate, since becoming his student.

Jonas Elijah Klapper shuffled in and settled his heft into the chair with a soft sigh, while plopping his bulging satchel onto the gleaming oval of the table. Gathering himself together, he proceeded to go round the table, starting from his immediate left, to stare each of the twenty-three students full in the face, an excruciating exercise for the subjects. One girl, Asian, got up in the middle of her turn and wordlessly left. The professor, taking no notice, had simply let his eyes proceed to the next.

This first item of business concluded, Jonas Elijah Klapper cleared his throat and began to recite, from memory, in his beautiful Anglicized voice, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which had been assigned for this first meeting.

The sea is calm to-night .

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand ,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay .

Professor Klapper’s voice, his smile, his entire being, embodied the becalmed stasis of the first stanza.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Klapper was personifying youthful vigor, a reckless bounding into hope. His shoulders even gave a bit of a jump.

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land…

An ominous warning was being sounded, the slightest shiver of the sinister disturbing the surface of sonority.

Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling ,

At their return, up the high strand ,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin ,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in .

And the promise of joy that had flickered only a moment before in Klapper’s voice and playful shoulders, withdrew itself.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought