“Okay, I get it.”
“Who ordinarily wields this power?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at it from the point of view of some nomadic herders of ten thousand years ago. Who decides who lives and dies on this planet?”
“The gods.”
“Of course. Now, the way the Zeugen imagined it, the gods have a special knowledge that enables them to rule the world. This knowledge includes the knowledge of who should live and who should die, but it embraces much more than that. This is the general knowledge the gods employ in every choice they make. What the Zeugen perceived is this, that every choice the gods make is good for one creature but evil for another, and if you think about it, it really can’t be otherwise. If the quail goes out to hunt and the gods send it a grasshopper, then this is good for the quail but evil for the grasshopper. And if the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods send it a quail, then this is good for the fox but evil for the quail. And vice versa, of course. If the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods withhold the quail, then this is good for the quail but evil for the fox. Do you see what I mean?”
“Of course.”
“When the Zeugen saw what the Tak were up to, they said to themselves, ‘These people have eaten at the gods’ own tree of wisdom, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’”
I said, “Yipes.” I’m not sure I ever uttered that syllable before in my life, but I did then. “Where did you get this?”
“This is one of Ishmael’s contributions.”
“Have you ever tried it out on a biblical scholar?”
B nodded. “Biblical scholars have seen it, and so far none has found any reason to quarrel with it. One said it was the only explanation he’d ever seen that makes sense.”
“It’s the only one I’ve seen that makes sense, and I’ve seen them all.”
I remember sitting there frozen for two or three minutes while I tried to work out all the implications of this new interpretation of the story of the Fall. When at last I shook my head and gave up, B went on.
“I felt I had to bring this out in order to drive home the point I’ve been trying to make about this revolution. Even the authors of the story in Genesis described it as a matter of changed minds. What they saw being born in their neighbors was not a new lifestyle but a new mind-set, a mind-set that made us out to be as wise as the gods, that made the world out to be a piece of human property, that gave us the power of life and death over the world. They thought this new mindset would be the death of Adam—and events are proving them right.”
I threw down my napkin and said, “I’m full up.”
B gave me a look of frowning puzzlement.
“That’s all I can take for tonight,” I told him.
“But it’s early!”
“I know, and I’m sorry, but I can’t take in any more, and I’ve got to figure out how this is going to be transmitted to Fr. Lulfre. I can’t just send him a transcript of the tape. If he got the idea that I was becoming the sorcerer’s apprentice, he’d pull me out in an instant.”
B shrugged. “I agree. We can’t risk that.”
We arranged to meet for dinner the next day.
When I got back to my room, I resisted the temptation offered by the bed. I wanted to get a fax off to Fr. Lulfre by three or four in the morning so as to maintain the pattern I’d established in previous days.
It was my thought to translate my conversation with B into a series of vignettes in the style of the gospels—“A man came up to Jesus and said …” or “Jesus was met by a large crowd, one of whom shouted …” I’m not sure I produced anything very convincing. On the other hand, why would Fr. Lulfre suspect me of fabrication? (Answer: Because his thought processes are nothing remotely like mine.)
It’s five A.M. and I feel wired as tight as a harpsichord. I hope a slug of whiskey will let me sleep.
Tuesday, May 21
Faith and its degrees
The phone rang at nine, and I crawled up out of a stupor miles deep to answer it. It was Shirin, explaining something far too intricate for me to comprehend on less than four hours of sleep. I asked her to go over it again, slowly, and finally got it straight. There was one speaking engagement B had been unable to talk his way out of, and it was today in Stuttgart. In order to reach it on time, we would have to board a train at eleven, and I was welcome to come with them to Stuttgart or to stay in Radenau, it was up to me. I told her I’d meet them at the Bahnhof at ten-fifty. I hung up and quickly decided that a shower and breakfast were more important than another hour of sleep.
There was something on my mind that I needed to explore on paper, so I took a notebook down to the dining room with me and wrote as follows:
There is only one degree of having faith, but there are fifty degrees of losing it. I feel I should carry this weighty observation on a separate piece of paper so I can whip it out for study whenever I feel the need: Only one degree of having faith, but fifty of losing it.
I think I know one priest who has faith in that one degree that deserves the name of faith. All the rest, including me, are at one of those fifty degrees of losing it. Most of my parishioners would probably consider this a shocking admission, but I don’t think it is. Of course there are priests who have gone beyond the fifty degrees and have walked away from the ministry. Everyone knows that, and I’ve known half a dozen of them myself. But the rest of us are still hanging on, by knees and elbows and fingertips and eyelashes and teeth and fingernails. This is actually reassuring, I think, because it shows that none of us wants to lose his faith or wants to think of himself as having lost it. Admittedly, this is partly just cowardice; we know that, once our faith is gone, the religious life will become utterly intolerable and we’ll have to move on, out into an unknown world. But it’s also partly because we have enough faith to want to go on having faith. When that amount of faith is gone, however, then it’s all gone, and you’re at the fifty-first degree. You’re out, you’re finished.
I figure I’m at something like the thirty-fourth degree. When I was fifteen, I was at the one degree that means faith. When I entered the seminary, I was at the third degree of losing faith. At my ordination, I was at the twelfth degree. When I walked into Fr. Lulfre’s office three weeks ago, I was at the twenty-fifth. The fact that I’m at the thirty-fourth now probably sounds pretty bad, but actually it isn’t. I was afraid (when I sat down here to do this soul-searching) that I was going to turn out to be at some really scary degree like forty-seven. I mean, when you’re at forty-seven, you’re really at the precipice. Three more degrees, and over you go!
To Stuttgart
The party of travelers consisted of B, Shirin, Michael, and me. As we shook hands, Michael for the first time gave me a surname by which to know him, though I can only guess at its spelling. It sounded like Dershinsky. Shirin was businesslike and neutral. B seemed gloomy and preoccupied.
No one was in a conversational mood, except possibly Michael, who kept giving me friendly nods and winks but otherwise seemed to be reining in his good mood out of deference to Shirin and B. After we were under way for ten minutes, I piped up to ask what the speaking engagement was. No one seemed keen to tell me. Finally B explained that it had been organized by a man and a woman at the university there who knew and wanted to promote B’s views on population.
“You don’t seem wildly enthusiastic about it,” I said.
“My views on this subject always generate a lot of rage.”
“Rage among whom? The Catholics?”
“No, not at all. The Marxists.”
“Why the Marxists?”
He shrugged and turned his gaze out the window. Michael and Shirin each gave me a little shake of the head to warn me off.
In Hamburg we changed trains to something faster and slightly less austere, but the atmosphere remained bleak and didn’t improve when we broke out the box lunches Michael had picked up for us at the Hamburg station.
Halfway to Stuttgart, B said to Sh
irin, “Why don’t you tell Jared the story of the Imperial Chill?”
If I read the progress of her thoughts right, she didn’t much care for the suggestion but was as bored as everyone else. To add a bit of encouragement, I unpacked my tape recorder and got it going.
Surprisingly, she betrayed no signs of self-consciousness or embarrassment (I certainly would have betrayed some). Instead, she spent a minute gathering herself, then launched into it like a professional actress.
The Imperial Chill
“The Imperial Chill had been an imperial preoccupation for so long that no one was counting centuries anymore. That it was genetic was obvious, of course, but this knowledge helped no one—certainly not the shivering Emperor. Every academic and scientific discipline in the realm had a chilly aspect. Every scholar and scientist was to some degree or in some sense working on the problem, which was generally agreed to be metabolic and probably dietary. There was of course nothing wrong with the emperor’s diet, but it was assumed that some adjustment (possibly quite infinitesimal) would turn the trick and give His Highness relief. There were acorn diets and apple diets—and watercress diets and zucchini diets at the other end of the alphabet. Every university depended on its subsidy for research on the tempering effects of diet and food—research that everyone knew could be effortlessly spun out till the end of time.
“One day, however, the Prime Minister called a press conference and announced that a breakthrough had been made. Of course, breakthroughs had been announced before and had always come to nothing, so no one was really worried—till they saw the look on the Prime Minister’s face. This time (that look told them) something uncomfortably new was in the offing.”
Shirin paused and asked B whether she should finish it then or wait till later.
“Oh, finish it now,” B said grumpily. “Then he can be thinking about it.”
Shirin continued.
“The Prime Minister’s announcement (that the cause of the Imperial Chill had been found) was shockingly brief—and was followed by a shocked silence, which soon became a murmur of horror, disbelief, and denial. The truth of the minister’s words was not what outraged his listeners. What outraged them was the idea that, after defeating the best minds of a dozen generations, the Emperor’s chilliness could be explained so simply. The feeling seemed to be that critical problems (like the Emperor’s chill) must absolutely have complex and impenetrable causes, and they must absolutely be difficult (and perhaps even impossible) to solve. As he wandered aimlessly through the crowd, one dazed scholar was heard to mutter over and over, ‘There are no easy answers, there are no easy answers, there are no easy answers’—not with any real conviction now but rather as if repetition might restore vitality to these familiar, comforting words.
“What was distressing them was not the fact that the cause of the chill was now known but rather the fact that it had always been known—but never as a cause. It had stared them in the face, and looking beyond it to remote and unintelligible causes, they had missed its significance. Throughout the empire, there was literally no one who was ignorant of the fact that their shivering monarch … had … no … clothes.”
• • •
To say that I didn’t know what to say to this would be an understatement. Luckily, it seemed that no response was expected. B continued to stare listlessly out the window. Without so much as a glance at her audience, Shirin picked up the book she’d been reading. Only Michael acknowledged that anything at all had occurred, winking me some of his abundant reassurance.
It hadn’t even been much of a break. I snuck my tape recorder away, feeling rather like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who had so many experiences of this sort, getting herself all set up for exciting entertainments that didn’t turn out to be entertainments at all.
Fun with Marxists and others
We were met at the station by our hosts, a middle-aged couple with a car into which five might conceivably squeeze, but not six by any means short of dismemberment. The problem was easily solved: Michael and I followed in a taxi. This ride gave me a new insight into him; he’d not been silent in the train out of deference to B and Shirin, he’d been silent out of sheer, desperate shyness—even more acutely projected now, when he might have talked as much as he liked. I made a couple efforts to draw him out but soon understood that he really preferred to remain in the background and never step forward into the light.
The taxi deposited us in front of a vast, neo-Gothic prison of a school, and we were led upstairs to a classroom that would have depressed a barrelful of monkeys. My heart sank as I saw it. Some twenty silent spectators were scattered through the room, half of them with the air of actors psyching themselves up to read for the role of Cassius in Julius Caesar. B, Shirin, and the host couple were at the front, chatting—or trying to give the impression of chatting.
Michael and I shuffled off to the back. A few minutes later Shirin took a seat in the front row, and B was introduced at length (and in German). I’d decided not to tape B’s speech, since I’d eventually have to transcribe it anyway, but I hadn’t counted on its being his longest presentation to date.*
I wasn’t prepared for what I heard—not that I ever was when it came to B. This material was extraordinary, unlike anything I’d ever heard or read on the subject, and as it unfolded I began to see the point of the story of the Imperial Chill. B was bringing to light crucial facts as far beyond argument as the Emperor’s nakedness (or so I naively imagined). When he was finished, about seven people applauded, two of them being our hosts and three of them being Shirin, Michael, and me.
Looking drained to the point of collapse, B began fielding questions—or rather disquisitions and rebuttals, all in German. Michael leaned in my direction to explain that by declining to use English (which they obviously understood), they were demonstrating their contempt for B’s views.
Before answering them, B summarized their questions in English (presumably for my benefit). As far as I could understand them, they simply denied everything B had said—an interesting approach, I thought. At the end of it (or when he got tired of it), he concluded with a little epilogue to the Imperial Chill, which he directed to me:
“When the scholars in the capital of the Chilly Emperor had had a few days to think things over, they began to recover their wits and to see that all was not lost to them after all. They called a press conference that was twice as solemn as the Prime Minister’s and three times as well attended. After the various media representatives had been wined and dined regally, the head of the Royal Commission for Chilly Research called the meeting to order and made the following announcement. ‘It’s perfectly true that the Emperor is naked,’ he said. ‘We have always known this and have always chosen to ignore it, because it’s a red herring. The causes of the Emperor’s condition are many, complex, and difficult for laymen to understand—and they cannot be reduced to this single, childish notion: that he is cold because he’s wearing nothing but his birthday suit. The suggestion that warm clothing might alleviate the Emperor’s discomfort is charming and well meant but will not be recommended for implementation or further study.’ Following this announcement, the Prime Minister was dismissed for incompetence, the scholars’ grants were all renewed, and the Emperor went on shivering into a snowy old age.”
B thanked his listeners and stepped away in the midst of a bemused silence. Evidently some sort of polite social follow-up had been planned for us, but we skipped it in order to catch a train back to Hamburg. As luck would have it, this late-night train was of the cozy, old-fashioned sort, with separate compartments.
Between Stuttgart and Frankfurt
“Remind me never to do this again,” B said once we were settled in.
“I reminded you before you agreed to go in the first place,” Shirin noted dryly.
“You didn’t do it forcefully enough.”
Michael cleared his throat and said, “You never know when you might have planted a seed,” and then turned an amazing shade of s
carlet.
“It’s kind of you to say that, Michael,” B said gently, “but that was mighty hard ground.”
“It was indeed.”
“Where did we leave off last night?” B asked me a few minutes later.
I thought for a bit and said, “You’d just made this point, that what the authors of the story of the Fall saw in our agricultural revolution was not a new technology but a new worldview that makes us out to be as wise as the gods—wise enough to wield the power of life and death over the world.”
B nodded. “I’m glad we got that far, but that’s the easy part of what we have to accomplish.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s easy enough to imagine what was going on when the universe was born, because we see the universe every time we lift our eyes to the sky. But it’s very, very difficult to imagine what was going on before the universe was born.”
“Nothing was going on before the universe was born. By definition.”
“Precisely.”
I shook my head. “You’ll have to relate this to our subject here.”
“It’s easy for us to understand what those first farmers had in mind when they settled down to live in villages. It’s easy for us to understand what bronze-age traders had in mind as they caravanned their wares over hundreds of miles between Thebes and Heracleopolis and Damascus and Assur and Ur. It’s easy for us to understand what the empire builders of Akkad and Sumer had in mind, what the builders of the Great Wall of China had in mind, what the builders of the colossal pyramids of Egypt had in mind. I trust you see what I mean—I could obviously go on piling up examples for hours.”