Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

All of Klapper’s students obsessed unhealthily on the nature of genius, its signs and siphorot , the Kabbalistic term for emanations-Jonas had been introducing Kabbalistic terms more and more frequently-though in obsession, as in all things, Gideon outstripped Klapper’s other students. They recognized the unwholesomeness of their preoccupation, its self-destructive futility and navel-gazing focus, but that was hardly a deterrent. Genius itself is diseased and self-destructive, antisocial and ill-mannered. It’s also the only thing that redeems us.

In the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being, man is assigned a place between the angels and the animals, but that isn’t exactly right. Between man and the angels there’s another ontological stratum, vanishingly slim and eternally endangered, occupied by the men and the women of genius. As the angels communicate only with the angels, and the animals with the animals, so the geniuses speak each to each, sometimes overhearing phrases fallen from the angels up above them, as we, in turn, overhear them.

I do not think they will speak to me.

There you go again, schmuck. That’s the whole problem. You can’t even talk to yourself without sounding like someone else.

Nothing came to Gideon pure and unblemished. He was sophisticated, in the original meaning, defiled and desecrated. If he didn’t love Lizzie so much, he’d have offed himself last week.

And he’d never write poetry again. He’d never get out an original line again. Every line he heard could be traced back to someone. The perversity of persuasion had slimed everything.

The more Cass got to know Gideon, the more aware he grew of the man’s tunneling despair. It was strange, since Cass admired Gideon so much. Aside from Jonas Elijah Klapper-who inhabited another category of being altogether-Gideon was the most extraordinary person Cass knew.

“I know this is going to sound naïve to you, from your point of view and all, but I don’t want to be a genius,” Cass confessed to Gideon one night after a few pitchers. “All I really want is to be able to understand the geniuses. Understand a little bit of what they say when they talk back and forth across the millennia to each other. I’d be happy if I could just follow the ideas of men like Hegel and Goethe and Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

They were in The View from Nowhere, just Gideon and Cass, though some of the others were supposed to join them after midnight. The seminar had closed ranks now. All of the outsiders from the other departments had dropped out, so it was just Klapper’s seven. In addition to Gideon and Cass, there were Nathan Suarez, Miriam Chan, Ezra Lull, Zack Kreiser, and Joel Lebow. The mean number of years they’d spent as graduate students, averaging in Gideon’s 12 and Cass’s 0, was 7.2. But attendance at any seminar taught by Jonas Elijah Klapper was a tacit requirement that nobody had ever thought to challenge. After all, why would one? Miriam had shown up at the seminar last week with a raging fever, which hadn’t surprised anyone, though Professor Klapper had firmly ordered her home, reminding her that there was no need for her to expose others to her misbehaving microbes.

“To bed, Miss Ching, with pots of tea, and no reading to overly tax your strength. A little Robert Frost perhaps. Whitman, in moderation, when you’re feeling more robust.”

Cass had reacted to the preoccupation with genius in his own way. He had taken out books on famous minds, as interested in their lives as in their ideas (maybe even a little more). Right now he was reading E. T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics , which was the best yet, even though it had real mathematics to slow him down. Some of these people sounded as if they had to be changelings, non-human visitors from some other sphere, with powers so prodigious they burst the boundaries of developmental psychology, lisping out profundities while other children were playing with their toes. Gauss, for example, who struck Cass as the most amazing one yet, which was no wonder, since, according to Bell, Carl Friedrich Gauss was one of the three greatest mathematicians of all recorded history, the other two being Archimedes of Syracuse and Sir Isaac Newton.

Gauss was German, born in 1777, and the stories that Bell told about him defied belief. His father couldn’t appreciate what his son was, and if he’d had his way the prodigy would have become a gardener or a bricklayer like him. His mother, though semi-literate, had been his protector when he was young and vulnerable, making sure that he was able to get schooling. Gauss’s genius had shown itself when he was barely out of infancy.

“People who witnessed it said it was like something otherworldly,” Cass said, quoting Bell.

Gideon had patiently heard out Cass about the child Gauss, including the story involving the stern schoolmaster who, out of mean-spirited spite, had given his pupils the exercise of adding up all the integers from 1 to 100. Within seconds Gauss had returned the answer, seeing, in a flash, that adding pairs from opposite ends of the list gave the same sum: 1 + 100 = 101, and 2 + 99 = 101, and 3 + 98 = 101, so all he had to do was take 101 fifty times and he had the answer.

“The children were supposed to work out the solution on a slate and then put it on the teacher’s desk, piled one on top of the other. Gauss, who was ten, wrote it down as soon as the teacher got the words out and said in his peasant dialect, ‘Ligget se,’ ‘There it lies.’ Of course, the teacher thought the kid was a lazy lout. After all the slates got piled on top, hours later, all of the answers wrong, the teacher found Gauss’s with just the number 5,050. And then he realized what he had.”

Gideon nodded. “I see why you find these stories interesting, from the point of view of psychological curiosities, but they just don’t engage me the way literary genius does. It’s not even genius in the same sense. These computational tricks don’t indicate a special order of soul. They’re like machines, these kids. Sometimes they’re even functionally retarded.”

“Gauss wasn’t an idiot savant. These aren’t little computing tricks. Gauss was comparable to Goethe.”

“I don’t accept that. Gauss’s talents were from the brain, not the soul. I’m not saying he was an asshole-I don’t know anything about the guy-but theoretically he could have been, and that’s the point. He could have been a total asshole when it came to all human concerns and just had some single part of his brain overdeveloped. Isaac Newton was simple-minded to the point of semi-retarded when it came to spiritual matters. He used his cerebral calculating machine to calculate the date of the end of days. They’re the Gump Worsleys of thinking.”

“Who’s Gump Worsley?”

“He was a goalie for the Canadiens.” Gideon was from Montreal, and if the names he bandied didn’t come from the canon, chances were they came from the Canadiens. “He was this short, pudgy guy, looked like he’d keel over if you asked him to drop down and do twenty, with a hanging beer belly and a goofy mug of a face. He never played with a mask. He said his face was his mask. And he threw up before every game, his good-luck ritual. But he was a great goalie. At his height, in 1968, he went undefeated in the playoffs with eleven straight wins.”

“Gauss wasn’t a Gump.”

“Coulda been. But Goethe? No way a Gump.”

“I don’t know how you can be so sure.”

“Here’s how: literature works the whole soul, and mathematics doesn’t. It’s as easy as that. That’s why Gauss could be a prodigy at two, before he’d even acquired a self.”

The need to acquire a self had been a sustained theme in the thought of Jonas Elijah Klapper, surviving every paradox shift. All of Klapper’s students understood that education is a desperate business, psychopoiesis, the making of the soul of which they would have been otherwise bereft. Psychopoiesis requires that one be in the right place at the right time, one of the hot spots, occasionally located at our better universities, where the overhang is porous, and scraps from the higher conversation rain down. Thus we acquire an education; thus the species lurches on.