36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein Page A
Authors: Rebecca Goldstein
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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.”
Cass had been surprised by the surge of his own insights. That thing about the sublime, the subliminal, and the self—what this whole seminar was about!—had just hit him like a wallop between the eyes while he was talking.
Professor Klapper’s eyes, which were shaped to the contours of sadness, slanting downward like two arrows taking aim at his lower face, had kept themselves unseen, obscured in the iconic thinker’s pose.
There was silence in the classroom, the fraught silence of billions of agitated neurons soundlessly firing, until, at last, Jonas Elijah Klapper lifted his brow from off of his palm and revealed his face, which was contorted in silent-film fashion with the unmistakable mien of unmitigated aghastment and dismay. His lips were twisted, and his nose, a fleshy mound piled high on his face, was crinkled up as if some gaggingly offensive smell had entered the room.
“No, no, no!
That’s not what I was talking about at all!” He held up his two hands in an apotropaic gesture. “Not at all, not at all! Spare me, spare us all, such bromides. And above all keep the bad fictions of Charles Darwin out of my classroom. Darwin’s fingerprints are all over this poem, indeed! I will not have such infantile slobberings upon the sacred body of literature”—he pronounced it, as always, “lit-er-a-toor”—“not even upon a poem of Matthew Arnold’s. And since, Mr. Seltzer, you are a committed Darwinist”—the word came pushed out of his lips as if by peristalsis— “let me inform you that, though Arnold may have published ‘Dover Beach’ in 1867, he had actually written it sometime between 1849 and1852.
The Origin of Species
was published in 1859. If you want to point to such precursors and influences, then do at least check the dates. You’d have been better off citing the
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, published anonymously in 1844, by Robert Chambers, a radical
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.”
Cass had been surprised by the surge of his own insights. That thing about the sublime, the subliminal, and the self—what this whole seminar was about!—had just hit him like a wallop between the eyes while he was talking.
Professor Klapper’s eyes, which were shaped to the contours of sadness, slanting downward like two arrows taking aim at his lower face, had kept themselves unseen, obscured in the iconic thinker’s pose.
There was silence in the classroom, the fraught silence of billions of agitated neurons soundlessly firing, until, at last, Jonas Elijah Klapper lifted his brow from off of his palm and revealed his face, which was contorted in silent-film fashion with the unmistakable mien of unmitigated aghastment and dismay. His lips were twisted, and his nose, a fleshy mound piled high on his face, was crinkled up as if some gaggingly offensive smell had entered the room.
“No, no, no!
That’s not what I was talking about at all!” He held up his two hands in an apotropaic gesture. “Not at all, not at all! Spare me, spare us all, such bromides. And above all keep the bad fictions of Charles Darwin out of my classroom. Darwin’s fingerprints are all over this poem, indeed! I will not have such infantile slobberings upon the sacred body of literature”—he pronounced it, as always, “lit-er-a-toor”—“not even upon a poem of Matthew Arnold’s. And since, Mr. Seltzer, you are a committed Darwinist”—the word came pushed out of his lips as if by peristalsis— “let me inform you that, though Arnold may have published ‘Dover Beach’ in 1867, he had actually written it sometime between 1849 and1852.
The Origin of Species
was published in 1859. If you want to point to such precursors and influences, then do at least check the dates. You’d have been better off citing the
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, published anonymously in 1844, by Robert Chambers, a radical
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