Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Faith’s mouth hung open so wide a bird could have flown down her throat. Barrett noticed this. “Let me put it another way. What is the relation between thought and being? Does what you think direct what is, or is it that what is controls what you think ?” He tugged at his lower lip, looking at his sore thumb all the while, and wheezed. “If you chose the first way, you become a magician — like Nostradamus; if the second way — a metal ball on an inclined plane. An automaton !”

Tippis’s face flashed before Faith’s eyes. She blinked to dismiss it, raised her cup, and grimaced. It was empty. She grabbed her coat, a cheap article of wet-look leather she’d purchased in a thrift shop, and said, “I’m thirsty. Let’s go out.”

“The book,” Barrett mumbled. “Where is it?”

Faith stuck it beneath her arm and started out into the hallway, Barrett at her heels. His voice echoed in the lobby and out into the street.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, his head was pulled in, and he peeked over his turned-up collar, his eyes darting from her face to the shattered cement of the sidewalk. “When I was a boy, long before your time, in Pennsylvania, there was no doubt in my mind that there had to be a greater good than any man could conceive. Why? Because that greatest good would have to be because part of being good is being actual, right?”

“I guess,” Faith said, but she wasn’t sure.

“And I nurtured that tenuous belief all my life, child. Everything paled beside it. I could be enjoying myself immensely — I could be drunk — literally — with joy, or in the middle of sex, but suddenly I’d become conscious of myself. I’d sober up immediately, or lose my erection, and something in my head would say, ‘Is this really the greatest good?’ And once you’ve asked that, you’ve ruined it. You’ve destroyed that particular joy with questioning.” Barrett stopped to look at his thumb; he frowned and shoved it back into his pocket. “Years later, after I’d experimented with everything under the sun, settled down, married, and began teaching at Princeton, the questions still persisted: is this it? And always it was — No. My colleagues pooh-poohed the entire idea. They were good fellows, I suppose, but like my parents, schoolmates — even my wife and children — they were unable to understand my desire, my need for this thing. One even asked me, ‘Dick, suppose I imagine the most beautiful, the most perfect woman in the world — does that mean she has to be?’ ” Barrett snorted and rubbed his nose. “ Petitio principii! They didn’t understand. ”

Faith discovered she was growing fond of him. The man beside her and the one who stole her money seemed entirely different. In fact, he seemed different from most people, like the Swamp Woman, like Big Todd. “What did you do?” she said.

Barrett blinked and rubbed his eyes as he and Faith stood under a streetlight. His hesitations bothered her for an instant — they were either from failing memory, or the respite needed to think up some good lie. “I investigated the problem,” he said. “I wrote books and articles about it until that approach ran dry. That is, until the quality of my research became suspect. Which was a sham! They simply wanted to get rid of me.” He glared at Faith as though she had been responsible. “Any imbecile knows that all scholarship begins, like science, in passion, in the lust for certainty, virtue, what have you. Anyway, I tried a last-ditch effort; I tried to build a following among my students. It didn’t work — I was fired.” His eyes lit up with anger, then watered. “Can you imagine what happened? A logical positivist took my place!” Faith could see that the affront hurt him still. He gazed far away, beyond her, in grief. “My wife left me, of course, when my salary was gone — ah, but I pressed on, Faith. Yes, and I press on still. ”

“Yes?” Faith said excitedly. “And—”

“And,” Barrett said sadly, turning to her, “here I am today — old, sick (these aren’t spare tires bulging my midriff, child: they’re tumors), yet not quite as foolish, I remind you, as I look.”

Faith, disappointed, started across the empty street toward the entrance of a tavern. “So the story isn’t over?”

“Is it ever over?” Barrett sighed. “People are somewhat like novels (don’t make too much of that simile) — we operate on beginnings, middles, and ends; subjective aims deposited in ongoing history to be prehended by other subjective aims. When you reach the end of one road, say, as a professor, you begin another.” Barrett smiled to himself as they entered the dark tavern. “I fancy myself to be a didactic poem now, and you, Faith?”

“Pornography,” she said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

Barrett’s mouth, as they waited on their drinks, sagged in silence, as if pins in his jaws had been removed. After two sips of his drink he was again animated. “We’re co-workers, child — I knew that from the moment I saw you tonight. You and I are after, I sense, the same thing. Yet my age gives me the upper hand. I’ve been through more and, perhaps, can spare you a few unnecessary and unfortunate pitfalls.”

Faith tried to concentrate on what he said, but found herself nodding from lack of sleep. Her mind couldn’t seem to get hold of what he meant.

“We all need a guiding principle — we must have one, or our world falls apart. But the catch is that when we start seeking that principle it must first, in every instance, be wholly removed from us and exist in some absolute, unsullied, perfect form. Yes, I know the principle originates in us— yes! — but it’s better to say it’s realized through us. But to be what we desire, that principle must seem completely other, greater than we are — something tangible, a thing of some sort like wood from the Cross at Calvary, or the grail, or a shred of the Saviour’s robe.” Barrett sipped at his drink, dipped his thumb therein, and sighed. “I’m trying to say something important—”

“You left off with the Saviour’s robe,” Faith said, surprised at her own attentiveness.

“Ah — yes!” Barrett wagged his head, getting back into the swing of it all. “But that has problems. If it’s a thing we’re after, and if that thing is absolute goodness and perfection, then we’ll never have it. It’ll escape us at every turn — that is, until we bring it a little closer to us. ”

Something went tight in Faith’s stomach. She cautiously said, “How?”

Barrett gestured, dribbling alcohol down his pointed chin. “Historically, men could turn to good works to find the realization of that principle; in your case that might be difficult, but I suspect that even as constricted by circumstances as you are, you can do a little good in this world.”

Faith tuned Barrett out, studying him from the great distance of objectivity, the way one reads a novel about philosophical ideas, with haste and indifference. She decided he was dead wrong. She knew what she needed and could see it in the possible, pleasing image of a younger man, someone who would wait on her as she now waited on others, a man who would save her from the sick, tossed thing she saw each day in the mirror above her sink: Faith Cross. “Let’s go,” she said, weary of words. Her patience was at its end, and her mind made up. One had to survive; only that was certain.

“This Good Thing of yours,” Barrett muttered as he slouched along beside her, “it is a reality like so many things on the horizon of faith and reason, but it’s certainly not a. thing. ”