36 Arguments for the Existence of God (10 page)

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.”

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:

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.”