The Atheist in the Attic

  He repeated, “… Deus sive Natura.” He had said it once before, but now I could understand what it meant: God or in other words nature … “I am really looking forward to continuing our conversation tomorrow, even if we go on from what we talked about today, or simply go back over what we’ve already talked about, perhaps deepening our understanding of it, enriching it with more examples, more details.”

  Was it a different Jew? Was it the same? Was it unimportant … ?

  “I expect,” he said, “there will be some of both—going on and going over. I am sure you have learned by now that that is the only way any real learning worth the word can proceed.” We stood, ready to leave each other now that we had set a time for the two of us to meet again. I felt his book in the pocket of my greatcoat—and at the same time, he sighed and said, “I wish my eyes were good enough for me to read my old texts—just to enjoy the clarity of my own thinking. I mean other than when I sit down for a real work session, with a lens for reading, a lens for writing, the sunlight or a lamp. I am not a practical inventor, as I have heard rumors that you are. Rumors of your calculating machines have preceded you.”

  I thought of the one in my trunk I’d been planning to give Gunter. “When I come tomorrow, I can bring one to show you. They are cunning. I’ve given away a few to really important men of the world. But they’re very costly to have made, so that one—”

  “—hesitates to give one to a half-blind old man of forty, who will clearly not be able to return the favor with anything of equal worth?”

  I did not frown. But I was thrown back to the not very propitious start to our still—in my mind—pleasant encounter, and wondered if the beginning (and the end) were doomed not to be its strong points. (There are reasons civilized people don’t talk of money. But, of course, I was the one who’d brought it up.)

  “Please,” he said. “You mustn’t worry. Keep it. I’m sure others would appreciate it more. And I’m not wanting for one, sir.”

  “Philosophers have been famous,” I said, “for saying the obvious and giving us a laugh by it—Diogenes—or getting killed for it, as when Archimedes told the soldier to stand away from his sunlight.”

  We both laughed.

  And the landlord knocked, entered, and, shrugging up her shawl, told us that my carriage was ready. My driver had awakened. She had brought him a roll and a bowl. He was now finished. “And our friend here, once noon’s past, does get tired …”

  “Of course,” I said. And rose.

  “You mustn’t worry about me,” he said. “If they try to arrest me for atheism because God, if it’s anything, must be a being separate from the world who controls it from without, rather than a system of forces controlling it from within, I will simply have our friend here tell them I am hiding in the attic, when in fact I have gone out into the world to walk among the winter drifts by the canals, among the summer leaves of the garden that sigh and sag under the rains.” At least—I will admit it to this journal—that’s the best job I could do reconstructing it.

  For a moment I thought of the lace makers in the dim polishing room at Gunter’s, weaving thread and fabric as though thread were language and they were poets. I’d quipped then that they’d seemed to be weaving for their lives. Now, from what I’d learned of the rampjaar, I wondered if perhaps they were—as, indeed, I now knew this Jew was no poet of Latin, but spoke from as great a sense of crisis as any poet could.

  At one point I’d told him a proof I’d worked out for the existence of God.

  “That’s actually rather clever.” He looked quite pleased. “Do you think you could jot that down for me?”

  “It’s not that clever,” I told him. “I wouldn’t stand by it today. I thought enough of it when I first did it, however.”

  “Still, I’d like to think about it a bit and make sure arguments of that structure are addressed, at least indirectly, in the work I’m just finishing up.”

  “Certainly,” I said. And did—twice. And took one with me so I’d remember its details as well.

  Possibly because of that, I include one more tale he told. I put it here, paradoxically enough, at the end of the things I remember in order, though it was not the last thing he told me. The fact is, I can’t remember on which side of his revelation in the garden it fell. (Doesn’t every philosopher these days have one?) The man I hope to encounter in London had his in a garden, too, where an apple fell at his feet—or hit him on the head. He’s been telling that story to one Royal Society member or another since ’66. Wish he’d pin it down on paper so we’d all know what he’s talking about or if it makes sense! But in this journal, putting it at the end of the account of what I remember Spinoza telling me is a way, specifically, of marking that it is not the end, it is not the conclusion, it was not the moment I have understood most exactly or the best summary of what’s gone before, either of context or content. Rather, it’s the one most open to revision, rethinking, correction.

  So at one point, he mentioned: “Because I started learning the languages in which basically I’ve lived—Latin and, soon, Greek—so late, I was particularly aware of the gifts they immediately began to give me, whereas someone who picks up an ancient language as a child of four or five is first aware of them the way one is aware of old, comfortable toys with their painted faces half worn away. Reassuring—but not exciting.” (Had he written this once in a journal to himself?) “Despite the fact that words, images, ideas, Vorstellen all share an ontology that is easiest to talk about metaphorically as images and art, one understand this most clearly when one explains language’s specific relation to a specific body, because a body is the material interface of matter and mind. I was led by those historical paths that Latin and Greek create for us among the living European languages my father and his business acquaintances had to speak for work to use philosophers from the past, not just Ignatius and Clement of Alexandria, not only the church fathers forbidden me by my own people, not just the endless conversation of Plato or the fragments of Heraclitus, the stories of Thales and Anaximenes, the fragment of Anaximander, Parmenides, the poets such as Xenophanes who could have been philosophers or theologians as well, or even Plato’s Diotima, who believed love could heal real wounds dealt by the sword of God himself, or Hypatia of Alexandria, who believed both in mathematics and magic. Whose brilliance was it, hers or Plato’s, to realize desire is the need to close a difference Deus sive Natura has struck into fundamental formations of the world as it has seemed to have so generously provided the many occasions for all these teachers’ different lessons?”

  It was the last line that brought me most sharply back (from my own thoughts, whatever they were) because that’s when I realized that, like Plato, whose Republic upheld the education of women and their entrance into politics, our radical philosopher despite all appearances had not abandoned everything female. And could admit to having learned something, as it occurs to me now, from wrestling bodily with a woman.

  But as well as admitting all this questioning and revision into the terminal place in my narrative, the place that in most discourses is reserved for terminal certainty, I have found that writing it down has made me remember something that I’d already written in an only partially remembered state. I’ve written it. If you’ve read this whole section, you’ve read it too.

  (Who am I talking to other than myself here? Someone I hope who at least knows my languages.) But what I’ve already written several hours ago now and you’ve read whenever was actually what I felt he’d probably said (as much of it as I could remember), enhanced by what I thought he must have meant, as best I could make it out. But only minutes back, in a pause between sentences, it returned to me, with clarity and certainty.

  This is what now came back to me verbatim:

  Trying to arrest me for atheism, given the specificity of my arguments, is like hunting for a man hiding in the attic of a building that has none, when in truth he is sitting in the back garden of another house, working diligently on his own co
ncerns, in another neighborhood entirely.

  Does this mean that his atheist in the attic was finally different from mine? Or perhaps that mine can talk to his from now on? And since we are letting this rethinking move us more firmly back to truth, the thought about the lacemakers was, actually, not one I’d had in The Hague but rather one I’d had here when I was misremembering what he’d said and what I’d thought it might have been. A real thought of my own, but—I confess—my placement of it was a lie—a lie with which it is easier to dispense, having now arrived at the same truth.

  7.

  How does it happen? Either the peasants or the powerful stamp their feet (or eat their enemies) on the continent which goes out not as a message written on a parchment and tied to a pigeon’s foot sent through the air and collected at the other end, but more like ripples sent across the surface of ink from a drop fallen into an inkwell, and it passes across the waters to England, which responds with troops and a tirade that strikes fear not only in the men and women of the Netherlands but in all the nations around.

  Is the ink itself, the sea itself, the Great Mind of God that carries the message? If not, then the message moves through the minds of men with all its terrors, with all its horrors, and I don’t know if we can bear that. Our radical Jew tells us it is carried not by the mind of anything but rather by the structure of nature to which all individual minds are merely a variety of over-interested responses, which is even more frightening, because we are the ink in which are written other messages that we cannot even understand.

  Is that my madness?

  Or his?

  Or is it a folie à deux, from two men neither of whom has been prepared by education or experience in the world, or in the world’s extant mechanics, to understand it or each other fully?

  Just after some church had rung its bells on the second hour after noon, I left by the front steps to see if my carriage was still parked outside. Twelve feet along the block, where we’d pulled up before sunrise, the heavy driver again lay on the bench under his lumpy blanket.

  I looked up to see that below a November gray like carded dust the house was red brick and three stories, with a stone cornice, no attic, and a level roof. Why did I bring my eyes down? On the second floor I caught a shutter closing.

  From street level, I heard the catch.

  Climbing into the carriage, I noticed the leather hinges were quite as loose as they’d been on the drive out before sunup. I was about to call to my driver to start, but the vehicle’s sag at my ascent must have wakened him. I heard him grunt, then felt the first shifting in the carriage as he rose upright. One of the horses stepped around—its shoes clinked the cobbles. We pulled a few inches forward, then drifted back; I settled onto the seat and shoved my own winter blanket to the padded wall.

  The driver shook the reins to still them. “Sir … ?” he asked from above.

  “Yes,” I said, “ready,” and hoped he’d found some side street in which to relieve himself during the hours I’d been inside.

  Wisely, I’d asked to use the water closet in the back of the house, with its ceramic amphora and the little long-handled pan for splashing down the planks if anything got stuck: good working-class manners said you cleaned it yourself, while good manners at Gunter’s said you left it for the gardeners to do each dawn and evening. Only the poorest folk—often lame or one-eyed or deaf, or with a withered arm (broken and not properly set)—were such assistants at Gunter’s; they never came inside the house. I still recall Gunter explaining proudly, two years ago, that he was going to have a slanted wall built down the inside of his latrine, so his doctor (or he himself … ?) could examine his stool if necessary.

  Examinations of fecal leavings tell much about a man’s or a woman’s health.

  The first time this morning I’d used the place, I’d noticed the building he’d planned hadn’t been done yet—or had been done and undone. (I wondered if some story lay behind it, or was it only a good—or not so good—idea no one had ever got round to.) Sitting in the carriage as we rumbled and joggled behind the horses, I wondered why I’d let my fancies roam so far afield.

  Me, I’d left nothing to be splashed on the inside walls of Spinoza’s four-square Dutch water closet. (I looked.) And I couldn’t even remember—or was it just that I didn’t want to—whether I had on Gunter’s, since my arrival in Amsterdam the day before. Would such universal necessities ever be brought indoors, I wondered? And to whose maintenance would they then be assigned, and would it be different from now … ?

  8.

  As I rode back home, that red-brick Hague house drifted behind and a foggy November city afternoon became a country November night with a moon and discarded clouds aslant the horizon as we returned to the Venice of the North, the city of water and donkeys and cheese. For a while I thought: Sometime we fear the Jews’ control of our lives, the way we fear so often that servants can run—and run away with—a great house wherever the least laxness is allowed. Diogenes, who was a homeless slave two and a half millennia ago, used to declare that it was not such a bad thing, but one that wise men should wish for, if their slaves—he was a slave and said slaves—were smart enough to make the system work to everyone’s profit.

  There’s a form that waits for a fiction, a story old as any everyday tale: one, two, three … Choose an event. (That’s one.) Begin with what happened before it and tell it, concentrating on what caused it. (That’s two.) Once you’ve moved on to tell the tale itself, tell what its outcome was—and it’s over. (That’s three and done.) You’d think you could squeeze such accounts comfortably into three days. But the fact is, real events seldom leave such simple narrative forms intact, any more than the shit on the boards of the water shaft tells all … True stories want to go on for years. They want to wriggle back to beginnings before the flood. Or they want to stop as abruptly as—

  Well, as that dash there.

  We Europeans have a set of systems in which for centuries, outside Russia, Jews were not allowed to own land and so were forced to work in cities. They suffered severe restrictions on the ways in which they were allowed to survive. Having confined them to trade, we seemed surprised when we blinked and found them dominating it! In fifteenth-century Italy, we made them wear black and yellow handkerchiefs and their citizenry put on races along the Corso for the pleasure of the aristocracy.

  And every forty or fifty years, soldiers were dispersed to slaughter the inhabitants of one or another of their villages. After centuries of such oppressions, it’s rather arrogant to claim surprise at any possible retaliation, whether aimed at the perpetrators or passed on to a whole new set of victims, reread conveniently as more oppressors. Even so, around and between our atrocities, they develop a life, a culture, a way to negotiate the world we shaped for them, so that soon they seem to be as invaluable … well, as servants in a capably run home.

  But when the most frightening Jew of all appears—or has already appeared and been writing, thinking, forming his … but what is he forming? We know only it has been going on a decade or more. Or, who knows, going on even longer and blossoming when it does because of the extraordinary pressures upon it. What is the first we hear of him?

  His own community cannot tolerate his deviations from the strict reactionary structures they’ve evolved to make themselves invaluable to their own oppressors any more than the oppressors themselves can, nor does he have any serious desire to side with we who oppress. He simply wants to sit and think, to walk about and think, to look at things already arrayed about him and observe what there is about them that has not necessarily been thought before.

  If such a man, with such a history, found such a world intolerably evil and worthy of immediate devastation by an angry, resentful God, how could anyone be surprised?

  The amount of agony and suffering that must have been deployed to bring it to its present form!

  How could any of us, gentile or Jew, be surprised—wouldn’t we rather breathe a sigh of logical relief?

>   But that he should look at it with a calm eye, should find things in it that are beautiful, that he should hesitate to look beneath the surface at the evil that supports all things and instead see the beauty of surfaces and think how they may be logically linked without causing any more pain, rather than trying to pay back every little bit of pain caused in the past, as if forgetting and dying were even more humane for the group than forgiving and praying were for the individual …

  How terrible that, with a serious knowledge of what had been done, he could find the world beautiful because beauty was a potential to be gambled on as much as an accomplishment to be coveted, that at best the world was intriguingly devious and only the people in it a little silly.

  That the world I live in could produce such a man is—frankly—as humbling as the fact that it could produce more than one of him, that it could produce so many so like each other, among all our differences.

  Which includes me, arriving with a pile of spoiled small-clothes and a smile for a grubby young Dutchman who, at least for now, finds it both fascinating as well as a fine diversion in his day’s drudgeries to wash them, for which I will give him an extra coin.

  That this Jew and I would come so close to the same conclusions, as different as we are, I find even more humbling. For I’ve always felt that this is a very good world, the best world that, given what we have to work with, it could be—and that’s even with the silliness.

  9.

  That night, instead of going right to bed after my grim, chill supper of fish and bread, I was joined by Gunter for a glass in the dining room. We lit no candelabra. He struck up a single lamp, placed it on a copper charger, and transferred it from the linen mantel cloth to the lace tablecloth.

  On some napkins whipped out from a drawer in the sideboard, he set two glasses and poured from a ceramic bottle.