Living With a Wild God

  So I would get to the answers by thinking—not by dreaming or imagining and of course not by praying or pleading to imaginary others. “The situation” would yield to sheer force of mind. As I wrote to myself, I had decided on “an orderly plan of attack, systematic, geometrical.” If A, then B, and so forth. I was so confident that this method would work that when I raised the question of how we “can live happily knowing or thinking that our existence as individuals is so brief and futile,” I could go on to promise in the same journal entry that “I shall try and write the answer to that question when my present ideas are straightened out.”

  The first problem was to identify the minimum of bare, incontestable facts that any philosophical inquiry has to begin with, and this brought me up immediately against the problem of the reliability of other people. Did they have anything useful to say, anything that could be built upon? All in all, school was not proving to be a reliable source of information. There was, for example, the science teacher who drew his biology lessons from the book of Genesis and exhibited a sneering contempt for anyone who imagined that rocks had been around for more than six thousand years. I entertained myself in his class by concentrating on developing an empathic relationship with the trash can that sat between his desk and my seat. It was gray and squat and humble, not a cylinder but a slice of a cone, hinting at the existence of an invisible person or people whose job was to empty it every night. Just as I could intuit the subjective state of every person I encountered, there was nothing to stop me from imagining that, in their own way, even objects were alive. What did it feel like, assuming that a trash can could feel, to be a receptacle for every bit of garbage that came your way? Did it choke on each piece of refuse that came flying into it, or did it take an austere pride in its silent self-abnegation?

  Or I might mention the eighth-grade English teacher who kept me after class to accuse me of plagiarizing my paper on The Iliad, since it was obviously something I could not have written myself. Perhaps in an attempt to make me feel the wrath of Achilles pounding in my temples, right then and there, she announced that my grade for the paper would be F. Also in the eighth grade, Mr. Cummings, the kindly martinet who served as principal—or as he liked to put it, headmaster—of Moody Junior High School in Lowell, intercepted me in the corridor one day to inform me gravely that my IQ, so stellar a year ago, had taken a sudden dive. This was not surprising to me, given the other mutilations being inflicted by puberty. If my body was going to get all leaky and mossy, why not my mind? Although it occurred to me after a few days of reflection that the real sign of mental deterioration was that I had allowed myself to be dismayed even briefly by the news, because it was not my intelligence but the very idea of “IQ” that had been discredited by the latest test result.

  Math, which had been a source of consolation when the subject was geometry or algebra, offered a fresh reason for wariness when the topic turned to imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers? How could anyone introduce the concept with a straight face? Would a history teacher who’d been lecturing about generals and kings suddenly announce that the next topic would be pixies and elves? As it happened, I already knew about these odd creatures, probably from the science writer Isaac Asimov, and knew that they were an affront to human reason. Think about it: Imaginary numbers are defined as multiples of the square root of −1, but there can be no number corresponding to the “square root of −1,” because if you multiply −1 by −1, you get, of course, +1, which is why Descartes in the seventeenth century had derided them as “imaginary” and refused to accept their existence. And who c