course. I might wonder how my backlist would stack up by itself, and whether that next idea is really as good as I imagine. But I hope I’d decline—or at least negotiate, get them to put more in the pot. “How about eliminating not the fear of death but death itself? That would be seriously tempting. You get rid of death and I’ll give up writing. How about that for a deal?”
Chapter 20
My brother and I have inherited some things in common. Our four ears have sprouted three deaf aids between them. My deafness is on the left side. Jules Renard, Journal , 25 July 1892: “He is deaf in his left ear: he does not hear on the side of the heart.” (Bastard!) When the ear-nose-and-throat specialist diagnosed my condition, I asked if there was anything I might have done to cause it. “You can’t give yourself Ménière’s disease,” he replied. “It’s congenital.” “Oh good,” I said. “Something I can blame my parents for.” Not that I do. They were just doing their genetic duty, passing on what had been passed on to them, all the old stuff, from slime and swamp and cave, the evolution stuff—without which my complaining self would not have come into existence.
A few inches from these congenitally malfunctioning ears there lies, within my own skull, a fear of death, and within my brother’s, its absence. Where, nearby, might religion or its absence lie? In 1987 an American neuroscientist claimed to have located exactly where in the brain a certain electrical instability triggers religious feelings: the so-called “God spot”—a different, even more potent form of G spot. This researcher has also recently devised a “God helmet” which stimulates the temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field and supposedly induces religious states. Valiantly—or foolhardily—he tried it on perhaps the least suggestible person on the planet, Richard Dawkins, who duly reported not a flicker of the Immanent Presence.
Other investigators believe that there is no single God spot to be located. In one experiment, fifteen Carmelite nuns were asked to remember their most profound mystical experiences: scans showed electrical activity and blood oxygen levels surging in at least twelve separate regions of their brains. The neuromechanics of faith, though, will neither find, nor prove (or disprove) God, nor establish the underlying reason for our species’ belief in deities. That may come when evolutionary psychology lays out religion’s adaptive usefulness to the individual and group. Though will even this do for God, the great escapologist? Don’t count on it. He will make a tactical retreat, as He has been doing for the last 150 or so years, into the next unscannable part of the universe. “Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible is the strongest argument for His existence.”
Differences between brothers: when I was at the age of maximum teenage embarrassment, one of my parents’ friends asked Dad, in front of me, which of his sons was the cleverer. My father had his eye—his gentle, liberal eye—on me as he carefully replied: “Jonathan probably. Julian’s more of an all-rounder, wouldn’t you say so, Ju?” I was obliged to be complicit in the judgement (with which I probably agreed anyway). But I also recognized the euphemism. Rest of the World, Low Voice, All-Rounder: huh.
The differences my mother observed in her two sons pleased me more. “When they were boys, if I was ill, Julian climbed into bed and snuggled up to me, while his brother brought me a cup of tea.” Another distinction she reported: my brother once cacked his pants and responded with the words, “It will never happen again”—and it didn’t; whereas, when I failed to control my infant bowels, I was discovered merrily smearing my shit into the cracks between the floorboards. My favourite differentiation, however, was made much later in our mother’s life. By this time both her sons were established in their separate fields. This
Chapter 20
My brother and I have inherited some things in common. Our four ears have sprouted three deaf aids between them. My deafness is on the left side. Jules Renard, Journal , 25 July 1892: “He is deaf in his left ear: he does not hear on the side of the heart.” (Bastard!) When the ear-nose-and-throat specialist diagnosed my condition, I asked if there was anything I might have done to cause it. “You can’t give yourself Ménière’s disease,” he replied. “It’s congenital.” “Oh good,” I said. “Something I can blame my parents for.” Not that I do. They were just doing their genetic duty, passing on what had been passed on to them, all the old stuff, from slime and swamp and cave, the evolution stuff—without which my complaining self would not have come into existence.
A few inches from these congenitally malfunctioning ears there lies, within my own skull, a fear of death, and within my brother’s, its absence. Where, nearby, might religion or its absence lie? In 1987 an American neuroscientist claimed to have located exactly where in the brain a certain electrical instability triggers religious feelings: the so-called “God spot”—a different, even more potent form of G spot. This researcher has also recently devised a “God helmet” which stimulates the temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field and supposedly induces religious states. Valiantly—or foolhardily—he tried it on perhaps the least suggestible person on the planet, Richard Dawkins, who duly reported not a flicker of the Immanent Presence.
Other investigators believe that there is no single God spot to be located. In one experiment, fifteen Carmelite nuns were asked to remember their most profound mystical experiences: scans showed electrical activity and blood oxygen levels surging in at least twelve separate regions of their brains. The neuromechanics of faith, though, will neither find, nor prove (or disprove) God, nor establish the underlying reason for our species’ belief in deities. That may come when evolutionary psychology lays out religion’s adaptive usefulness to the individual and group. Though will even this do for God, the great escapologist? Don’t count on it. He will make a tactical retreat, as He has been doing for the last 150 or so years, into the next unscannable part of the universe. “Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible is the strongest argument for His existence.”
Differences between brothers: when I was at the age of maximum teenage embarrassment, one of my parents’ friends asked Dad, in front of me, which of his sons was the cleverer. My father had his eye—his gentle, liberal eye—on me as he carefully replied: “Jonathan probably. Julian’s more of an all-rounder, wouldn’t you say so, Ju?” I was obliged to be complicit in the judgement (with which I probably agreed anyway). But I also recognized the euphemism. Rest of the World, Low Voice, All-Rounder: huh.
The differences my mother observed in her two sons pleased me more. “When they were boys, if I was ill, Julian climbed into bed and snuggled up to me, while his brother brought me a cup of tea.” Another distinction she reported: my brother once cacked his pants and responded with the words, “It will never happen again”—and it didn’t; whereas, when I failed to control my infant bowels, I was discovered merrily smearing my shit into the cracks between the floorboards. My favourite differentiation, however, was made much later in our mother’s life. By this time both her sons were established in their separate fields. This
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