FRIETSCH: I remember her coming from the telephone another day and when she saw me, looking as if I had seen her unexpectedly with her clothes off.
SCHMIDT: I had reason to believe that she was fond of me. I was in love with her. She was very beautiful.
RAKOVSKY: She was excited and high-strung and this gave her a theatrical quality which was very attractive.
HERRIOT: We dined together once at the Commodore when I returned from a trip to Chicago. I was amazed at the variety of her emotions during the course of one evening. She retired several times in order to make phone calls. Her life and death seem to me to be models for imitation.
DR. BERGEN: I agree with you, Herriot.
[A pause. Several DISCIPLES are weeping. DR. NEWMAN gets up and goes toward the terrace.]
DR. NEWMAN: [To MRS. BERGEN] An opportunity has come much sooner than I expected. [To DR. BERGEN] Dr. Bergen, in all sincerity and sympathy, I would like to suggest to you certain difficulties in your scheme of things. I would not intrude except for the fact that your wife has asked me to speak to you, and in addition, the fact that your doctrines have an aspect which would be impossibly dangerous and foolish, unless they are, in fact, true doctrines. I mean that your final test, that of dying to find one’s true self is indefensible unless you are sure that you are right. But perhaps you prefer to discuss these matters with me in private.
DR. BERGEN [impatiently]: Go right ahead, sir. I hide nothing from my students and we believe, as you heard, that to hide anything is to multiply ignorance and blindness.
DR. NEWMAN: How, then, do you know that your belief in the sky as God’s great eye is true? What possible proof have you?
DR. BERGEN: I know by intuition — by gazing upon the inevitable blue until it becomes self-evident that it is so.
DR. NEWMAN: Intuition is not proof. Proof is afforded when an hypothesis is framed — forgive me for using the jargon of science — making certain predictions about future events. If these events occur, the statement or hypothesis is true. If not, they are false. But intuition is something else again. The drunkard and the lunatic also have their indubitable intuitions — although I am not, I humbly assure you, suggesting that you are like one or the other. Many people have different and contradicting intuitions. Suppose another person had an intuition of the sky as God’s round wall to hide the realm of heaven. How would you show him that he was wrong and you, on the contrary, correct?
DR. BERGEN [becoming heated, but still full of assurance]: How do you know that the grass is green? By looking at the grass. But some are color-blind. How can you prove the greenness of the grass to them? You cannot because of their incapacity to see color. Thus to some the sky is merely blueness and nothingness. Only by looking at the sky, grasping its nature by means of pure attention, can you be convinced that the sky is God’s sensorium, God’s blue eye. [There is a murmur of pleasure among the DISCIPLES.]
DR. NEWMAN: What you are saying amounts to this, that your belief can neither be proven nor disproven, for you provide no specific test of your assertion. The sky remains what it is for perception, no matter what is said about it, and almost anything can be said. If one does not see the sky in your fashion, one is blind.
DR. BERGEN [sharply]: Yes, one is blind. You are blinded by scientific method which looks past and beneath the facts of direct experience and forgets them. Consider, for example, the difference between the physicist’s time — readings on a clock, a machine’s abstract numbers — and felt time, time as we experience it from moment to moment. Surely you cannot deny that the latter is prior and ultimate, for without that actual experience how could the physicist get his kind of time? How could he have any experience whatever?
DR. NEWMAN [as if concerned with other thoughts]: There are a hundred other religions, a thousand more systems of belief, all of them asserting that they have the true path to the divine.
DR. BERGEN [smiling with assurance]: All of them fail in one thing, they have not attained knowledge of what mediates between the divine and the human, the infinite and the finite, which is the chief religious problem. Some have had direct experience of that mediator, which accounts for their frequent truths. But none have recognized fully nor correctly named the actual fact which mediates between God and man. I know I am right because I have direct experiences of what I assert, the only means of arriving at certainty.
DR. NEWMAN: Dr. Bergen, I am full of misgivings about what I now must do. I have delayed this interview with you for weeks, fearing the consequences of what I am about to tell you. But worse may come if I do not speak.
You believe that your daughter Eleanor killed herself because of one of your doctrines. You think that she believed as you do, and you say that intuition has made you certain that she killed herself, accepting your doctrine. You are wrong. She killed herself for a wholly different reason. She was in love with a man who would not marry her, partly because he was already married. Though he loved your daughter, he would not divorce his wife for her. He brought her to me, hoping that an analysis might free her from her obsessive passion for him. It did not, unfortunately, although we tried for more than a year. She became desperate because he had refused to see her for almost three months, and she killed herself when she was convinced that he would never marry her. Her predicament was almost commonplace in modern life. Only her means of adjusting herself was extraordinary, and that is accounted for by her inability to control her emotions, such an emotion of despondency as is clear in the victrola record you played. She killed herself because she was in love with a married man.
DR. BERGEN [shocked and at a loss]: You are lying! How can you prove what you say? It is what you wish to believe, not the truth. Whether consciously or not, you lie.
DR. NEWMAN: I have conclusive proof, the kind which you do not possess for your fantastic belief. It is a letter from your daughter written and posted an hour before she killed herself. You will see why I hesitated so long before coming to you, though I knew that her death was a mystery. By the time this letter was written, I was the only one in whom she would or could confide. The point is that despite your intimacy with God’s blue eye, you wholly misconstrued her act. [He reads the letter.]
“Dear Dr. Newman:
You have been so kind to me that I don’t like to use you for an unpleasant task, but M. (her lover’s name) destroys all letters from me. I am killing myself because I cannot live without him. I want him to know that in his heart, but without any scandal which will hurt his wife and children, and he will not know this unless you tell him because I am trying to be good and useful for something for once by letting my poor father suppose that I am killing myself in obedience to his religious belief, of which you will hear more from others. Please forgive me and do this for me — tell M. that he was wrong to let anything stand in the way of love.
Your poor friend,
Eleanor.”
DR. BERGEN [desperately]: Is that your sister’s handwriting, Martha? [DR. NEWMAN gives MARTHA the letter. She looks at it and reads it.]
MARTHA [after a moment, in a strange tone]: O Father! Yes — it is her handwriting. He read the letter correctly.
DR. BERGEN [as if completely humbled]: Agh! I have shown myself a deluded fool, I suppose. I have been taken in by my own fraud, it seems. It seems that I deceived myself and I deceived all of you. No! It is inconceivable to me.