Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought ,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea .

The Sea of Faith

He whispered in that charged hush that could rise to the rafters of a crowded undergraduate lecture hall, and had no difficulty now projecting to the farthest reaches of the seminar room.

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d .

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar ,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world .

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams ,

So various, so beautiful, so new ,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light ,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight ,

Where ignorant armies clash by night .

It was such an astounding rendition, the last stanza recited at an accelerated pace, quickened with a kind of arcing, aching desperation. Just as the eternal note of sonorous sadness had always been there in the waves’ pounding, even before the poet had heard it, so, too, the rhetorical urgency of that last stanza had been in the poem, only Cass had been deaf until this moment.

Jonas Elijah Klapper himself seemed unspeakably moved, to the point of prostration, by his own performance. He placed his right elbow, swathed in the brown suede patch ornamenting the dusky tweed, onto the table and buried his furrowed brow into his fleshy open palm.

And from that forlorn posture, his face hidden from sight, he sent forth a query.

“‘Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’ Why the ‘melancholy’? Why the ‘long’? Why the ‘withdrawing roar’?”

His voice was so weakened that he could barely muster the rolling r’s that he had elocuted to perfection moments before.

A sustained and uneasy silence followed the withdrawing roar. The lack of a response stretched itself out, until the silence itself seemed like a metaphysical presence that had quietly crept in and taken a seat at the seminar table. Even Gideon Raven stared down at the gnawed fingers of his left hand, which were playing keyboard on the left thigh of his crossed legs.

Cass was amazed by the vacancy that had suddenly invaded the room. Though Cass’s understanding of the poem had been immeasurably deepened by the professor’s recitation, no great insight was required to answer the question on the table. Obviously, Professor Klapper had thrown it out just to get the ball rolling.

And there sat Jonas Elijah Klapper, his outspread palm still cushioning his mighty brow. The very sunbeams splattering on the grainy wooden table seemed to tremble with the tension. They were all, even the sunbeams, letting Jonas Elijah Klapper down; and in letting Jonas Elijah Klapper down, they were doing nothing less than disappointing the whole of Western civilization, its faith, its literature, its values.

Could Cass, callow as he was, allow this to happen? He knew that, among all the people in that breathlessly strained room, he was, without a doubt, the least qualified to speak. He included here the toothsome undergraduates, who had probably been studying poetry longer than he, who was, after all, only an importunate petitioner from pre-med.

Cass felt physically incapable of maintaining his silence, not only because of Jonas Elijah Klapper, and all he stood for, but also because of how “Dover Beach” had laid its palpating finger on the something soft and inchoate inside him, the thing he hardly dared to call his soul. Just like the lyrical narrator, he, too, had been paddling around oblivious on the surface of a sea of faith that he had presumed was infinitely benign, only to submerge his ears below the waves and hear the eternal note of sadness, like the mermaids singing each to each that Alfred Prufrock says he had heard once-no, maybe not like Prufrock’s mermaids-and to wonder, along with the poet, what’s left to believe in? and to grasp at the same answer that the poet had seized on: love and love alone. Love is the only solace. Not just any love, of course, not an easy, superficial love, but the love of the like-minded, the like-souled, the one who hears the eternal note of sadness in the same key and register as you. Together with such a love, clasping each other tightly round for dear life, you can gaze out the window at the dream-stripped harshness and bear the awful sight of it.

Jonas Elijah Klapper, sunk in his blinded pose, didn’t see the lone hand raised aloft. And so, in service to the poet, to the seminar, to Faith and Literature and Values, but, first and foremost, to Jonas Elijah Klapper himself, Cass tentatively began to speak into the void, of how the absolute faith of the childhood of man, in both the individual and the species, “which I guess would be the Middle Ages, when belief in an ultimate divine presence was full and calm and sweet, was wrenched away in a long, withdrawing roar, as we grow up and discover the way the world really is, through science and most especially the theory of evolution.

“Darwin’s fingerprints are all over this poem. The Origin of Species had been published just a few years before ‘Dover Beach’ was published.”

Cass had done his homework, not only perusing the poem at least thirty times-he himself had it memorized by the eighth or ninth read- but going to the Lipschitz Library and reading everything about the poem he could get his hands on.

“The central metaphor in ‘Dover Beach’ is the ocean, and the poem itself is like a bridge passing from lush Romanticism to the brave new world of Modernism, where we aren’t shaded from the hard truths of the natural world, and we have to create what meaning we can get from our relations with one another. That’s all we have, in the end. The sublime has abandoned us, and what sublimity we have remaining we have to make for ourselves, subliminally, from the material of our own self.”

Cass had been surprised by the surge of his own insights. That thing about the sublime, the subliminal, and the self-what this whole seminar was about!-had just hit him like a wallop between the eyes while he was talking.

Professor Klapper’s eyes, which were shaped to the contours of sadness, slanting downward like two arrows taking aim at his lower face, had kept themselves unseen, obscured in the iconic thinker’s pose.

There was silence in the classroom, the fraught silence of billions of agitated neurons soundlessly firing, until, at last, Jonas Elijah Klapper lifted his brow from off of his palm and revealed his face, which was contorted in silent-film fashion with the unmistakable mien of unmitigated aghastment and dismay. His lips were twisted, and his nose, a fleshy mound piled high on his face, was crinkled up as if some gaggingly offensive smell had entered the room.

“No, no, no! That’s not what I was talking about at all!” He held up his two hands in an apotropaic gesture. “Not at all, not at all! Spare me, spare us all, such bromides. And above all keep the bad fictions of Charles Darwin out of my classroom. Darwin’s fingerprints are all over this poem, indeed! I will not have such infantile slobberings upon the sacred body of literature”-he pronounced it, as always, “lit-er-a-toor”-“not even upon a poem of Matthew Arnold’s. And since, Mr. Seltzer, you are a committed Darwinist”-the word came pushed out of his lips as if by peristalsis- “let me inform you that, though Arnold may have published ‘Dover Beach’ in 1867, he had actually written it sometime between 1849 and 1852. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. If you want to point to such precursors and influences, then do at least check the dates. You’d have been better off citing the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , published anonymously in 1844, by Robert Chambers, a radical journalist. But do, please, have a care for my suffering sensibilities! Now it is Darwinism with which I must contend.” He turned his head away so that his mournful countenance fell upon the non-Darwinians in the room. “As I have oft warned those of you who have any proclivity to receive my instruction, most of what passes for science is merest scientism.”