Now his cell phone is tolling somewhere in the bedroom. With a sigh he gets up and traces the source to his jeans pocket. It’s Roz again. He’s up for the day now, but he doesn’t have the strength yet for Roz. He pulls on the jeans and a sweater and goes downstairs to put up the coffee. He’s feeling shaky from lack of sleep and has a moment of vertigo as he goes downstairs to pick up his Times. He tosses it on the kitchen counter as he pours himself a cup of the dark-roast brew, whose fragrance peps him up before he’s swallowed a mouthful.
His cell phone is vibrating again in his jeans pocket. Roz again, being relentless. He sips his coffee as he skims the headlines and then flips to the Op-Ed page.
His first thought is that he really has fallen back asleep, but now the cell phone is ringing again, and it’s Roz, of course, she must be going out of her mind with her need to reach him, and it only makes sense that she would be going out of her mind-at least, that is, if Cass is not at this moment fast asleep and dreaming bizarrely of the New York Times.
The New York Times
Friday, February 29, 2008
Cosmic Tremblings
By Jonas Elijah Klapper
Safed, Israel
I have watched for some years now, in silence but with mounting dismay, as a small sect has presumed to preach from on high. The sect speaks in the name of the false and hollow god, Scientism, claiming all the dominions under heaven for its faceless revelation. They accuse other faiths of intolerance, yet are contemptuous of all who dare believe that there is more than is dreamt of in parsimonious philosophies. They themselves have been indulgently tolerated, even celebrated, their books bought up at rates to enrich their coffers, their ubiquity a grotesque parody of the presence divine. A rough beast indeed is slouching toward Bethlehem.
For most of my sojourn on Earth my task has been to educate and elucidate. I have seen firsthand how our universities have been corrupted by the triumph of the number crunchers, permitted to crunch the very soul into ashes and dust. The sacred knowledge, preserved in imagery and metaphor, in incantatory language overheard from the higher spheres, has been forgotten, and forgotten, too, the few who remember.
My years as an educator yielded painful and intimate acquaintance with the band of the proud unknowers. Alas, it is to my own pedagogical failure that I painfully confess. Had I succeeded better, then at least one of the men of falsehood would not be laying evil hands on the evisceration of the world soul. Even here in my place of sacred exile I cannot escape his apostasy, the expression of defiance displayed behind plate glass. Betrayal is, of course, one of the stations on the road to redemption.
I have kept my silence, but I can no longer, for there are matters beyond me contending. The masters tell us that there are moments of cosmic trembling, when the future lies in the balance. It is always upon one man that the issue is poised.
The threats to such a one are commensurate with the enormity of what he is asked to do and to be. Every culture and every age has looked to its future and made out his dim form. “I behold him but not near,” says the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 24: 17). He has been called by many names: Ras Tafari, Mahdi, Shiloh, Yinnon, Menachem, Haninah, the Saoshyant, the Hermetic Corpus, the Christ, the Redeemer, the Saviour, the Moshiach, the Messiah, the Anointed, the Son. The names persist even into our day of failing memory.
There have been far more true Messiahs denied than false messiahs proclaimed. He has been born many times. If the moment is right, then he is of the line of David; otherwise he is but another of the line of Joseph, doomed himself to die, incapable of achieving the foretold redemption.
The belief that he tarries is erroneous and is partly to be blamed on the equally fallacious belief that he is required to perform miracles. I do but quote here from Maimonides: “Do not imagine that the anointed King must perform miracles and signs and create new things in the world or resurrect the dead. The matter is not so.”
How then shall he be known? For every age a different attribute is apt. In our day of prodigious forgetting what is more meet than prodigious memory? It is from the faithful rendering of all the world’s words that the Word shall go forth, for in the beginning was the Word.
And how shall the Word go forth? Jesus chose the Mount to deliver his sermon, but Jesus was born, depending on various reckonings, between 8 B.C. and 6 A.D. To Jesus there was but one medium and that was the human voice. Today would it not be felicitous for the Good News to go forth from the newspaper of record? Here then might it be said: I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
XXXII The Argument from the Precipice
Cass feels a forceful hand on his shoulder clamping him from behind. He turns back and discovers it’s Sy Auerbach, adorned in his fedora and impatience.
“Seltzer! What are you doing at the end of a line for your own debate? Haven’t I taught you anything?”
“Sy! What are you doing here?”
“I’m here for your smackdown. I’m going to record it and put the transcript and video up on my blog.”
Cass doesn’t voice the first question that comes to mind: What if Fidley flattens him? Will his agent put that up on www.precipice.org?
“How did you even know about this?” is what he asks. He’s pretty sure there hasn’t been any publicity outside of Harvard.
“Roz Margolis told me. She got in touch with me about representing her and mentioned it. She said it was going to be big, but I had no idea.”
“Neither did I.”
“Obviously, or you would have gotten here sooner. Coming through,” he bellows to the people up front. “Cass Seltzer coming through.”
The crowd parts, and a student usher gushes, “Professor Seltzer, we’re so excited, please follow us,” and he enters the beautiful nave of the church, where the whitewashed pews are quickly filling and heads swivel in his direction as he walks down the long center aisle with Sy Auerbach at his side, a red runner under their feet and a simple Protestant cross before their eyes. The immense windows have the shape of the sublime domes that had been carved into the ice on Cass’s night on Weeks Bridge, and the walls are inscribed with the Harvard dead who had been lost in the wars of the twentieth century.
“You see that demented Op-Ed in today’s New York Times?” his agent is asking him. “Perfect timing. Coincidence?”
“You mean could he have known about this debate? Unlikely. It was my book that had gotten to him.”
“My congratulations.” Auerbach gives his mirthless laugh.
A thin young man with a ponytail and a ring piercing his eyebrow yells “Cass-man!” as they walk past, and Cass gives a lopsided smile and a halfhearted wave.
“I heard a rumor you were once his student,” Auerbach is saying.
“True.”
Auerbach chuckles softly.
“Remind me to tell you a story about Klapper someday.”
Cass will never remind him. He’ll remember not to remind him.
They pass the chancel and enter the chaplain’s office, tonight being used as the greenroom.
Five people are gathered there, and Cass’s eye is drawn first to a tall-ish man who has the kind of conical build that gives the impression of taking up more volume than it actually does, with broad shoulders and an expansive chest. His hair is silvered and elegantly sheared, falling silky to the finely stitched collar, but his eyes are hard, glinting pebbles and his mouth is a firm line, no give at all in the upper lip. There’s a suggestion of brute force as he stands there with a stillness that suggests reserves of strength that he is straining to hold in check. With an impassiveness that manages to be aggressive, he’s listening to a man who is addressing him with a desperate affability. The setup has the look of a psychological experiment, a verbal analogue to the dollar auction that Lucinda had used to fang Harold Lipkin. The speaker has already doled out so much in trying to win this man’s approval, and if he stops before getting anything at all, any flicker of humanity from those unblinking eyes, then he’ll have nothing to show for his efforts, and there’s no natural way to stop at this point, and Cass bets that the man behind the pebbles probably knows about the dollar auction, but then he commits an error, he glances over at Cass and Sy, which gives the desperate talker an excuse to stop talking as he rushes over to greet them. He’s Lenny Shore, the spiritual leader of the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, the sponsor of tonight’s event, and he’s a slight man who looks as if he would bend easily, surprisingly young, with long lank brown hair and a fidgety mouth that isn’t quite able to hold down an expression. He’s wearing a corduroy jacket and black jeans over cowboy boots, and he’s telling Cass-whose attire is the arithmetic mean between Fidley and Lenny, a dark wool jacket bought in France, a green silk tie-how much he admired The Varieties of Religious Illusion, and what a great day this is for the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, and how we are going to be at capacity crowd tonight, which means somewhere in the vicinity of eleven hundred, and how he feels that tonight the Agnostics of Harvard have really arrived, and is there anything that Cass needs or that Lenny or anybody else can do for him, and the crowd is just overwhelming, and Cass is smiling and nodding and trying to give the chaplain whatever he’s needing so that he’ll calm down and meanwhile also stealing sideway glances at the still and powerful man in the corner, who is standing next to an equally handsome and silver-haired woman-clearly his property and almost certainly responsible for the civilizing touches of his elegant haircut and clothes- and who has settled the tempered blade of his gaze onto Cass Seltzer.