The Philosopher's Apprentice (46 page)

Handwritten but legible, the letter was in its promised place: an 8
¹
/2-by-11-inch sheet marking the Caputo chapter called “Several Lyrical-Philosophical Discourses on Various Jewgreek Parables and Paradigms with Constant Reference to Obligation.”

Imagine that a team of neuroscientists has just unveiled a technology that lets a person remove all trace of some terrible experience from his brain. Under what conditions, if any, would you use it? What might it be like to go through life knowing you'd once suffered an ordeal so dreadful that it demanded radical excision? How long could you endure this strange affirmative ignorance, this lost access to the unspeakable, without becoming neurotic, or even slightly mad? In the long run, might you not decide that such circumscribed amnesia was worse than whatever memory you'd felt compelled to erase?

The instant I finished Londa's letter, I decided that if an amnesia machine existed, I would avail myself of it immediately. Lacking such a device, I compensated as best I could, returning to the kitchen, lighting a gas burner, and with steely determination edging the message toward the flame. The paper caught fire, transmuting into an airborne carbon curlicue.

My flesh throbbed with the exertion of destroying the ontogenerator. My head reeled from the effort of forgetting Londa's confession. I trod the stairs to the primal Edwina's bedchamber, that bower in which her fourth iteration and I had never made love, then lowered the curtains and surrendered to my dreams.

 

FOR THE NEXT SIX WEEKS
I pursued an Uncle Rumpus sort of existence, combing the shores of my magic isle. I alternated my
residency between Faustino and the primal Edwina's cottage, all the while keeping an eye out for the Wild Woman—she with whom I had not slept, that person I did not impregnate—but I saw no trace of her, and eventually I decided she'd gone to the mainland. My scavenging skills were sufficient to keep me nourished, and the lack of distractions boded well for my new project, a sequel to
Ethics from the Earth
that I intended to call
The Serpent Was More Subtle.
The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he
replaced
theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.

Despite my tranquil surroundings and my enthusiasm for its theme,
The Serpent Was More Subtle
did not flow easily from my pen. Each sentence was a tribulation, every paragraph an ordeal. The problem, I decided, traced to a combination of writer's block and procrastinator's malaise. And the remedy? I couldn't be sure, but it seemed likely that a return to Boston would do my book more good than harm.

True to his prediction, my landlord had failed to find a one-semester tenant for my Sherborn Street apartment. Instead he'd granted a full-year lease to, of all people, a Hawthorne philosophy Ph.D. candidate who'd loved, absolutely loved,
Ethics from the Earth,
her zeal for the thing eclipsing even Natalie's enthusiasm of five years earlier. A spunky, thirtyish, divorced Spinoza enthusiast with an elfin face and a sensual overbite, Leslie Rosenzweig and I were not long into our first conversation before two note
worthy facts emerged: she found Boston as appealingly exotic as I'd found her native Los Angeles on those occasions when I'd visited my sister—Beantown's buskers and scrod versus La-La Land's surfers and palm trees—and she'd be delighted to let me crash on the living-room futon until I located more convivial digs. Leslie even offered me the master bedroom, citing the satisfaction she would feel in “doing a mitzvah for the inventor of Darwinian deontology.” Such a sacrifice, I insisted, was unnecessary: I had no wish to exercise some presumed elitist prerogative over her—as far as I was concerned, all middle-class urban intellectuals were created equal.

Not only did I now have a place to sleep, I soon acquired a social life as well. It turned out that my original vision for Pieces of Mind—here would flower the headiest philosophical discourse to be found west of ancient Athens—was not so silly after all. If an unrepentant neo-Darwinist and a vivacious Jewish Spinozist decided to institute such a dream, then by God it would happen.

Our core group met on Tuesday and Thursday nights, gathering in the science-fiction and fantasy section around a low, circular table barely large enough to accommodate our books, coffee mugs, tea presses, and occasional slammed fists. Leslie and I had peopled the seminar the way the young Orson Welles had mounted his idiosyncratic Shakespeare productions, with an affection for flamboyance. We drew our requisite eccentrics and scenery chewers from the Religious Studies Program, the William James Center, the Lewis Mumford Institute, and the congregation of bookstore barflies who passed their leisure hours at Pieces of Mind. I even allowed certain select members of the Hawthorne philosophy department to join our fellowship. We called ourselves the Whores of Reason, and our conversation was of sufficient general interest to eventually attract a regular audience, as if we were engaged in something rather more sensational than abstract discourse, like cockfighting or an American League pennant race. Week after week our fans would appear, cheering us on as we spelunked in Plato's cave, settled Heidegger's
hash, confessed to our guilty admiration for Nietzsche, forged a compromise with pragmatism, relativized relativism, categorically rejected absolutism, and presumed to know Spinoza's unknowable God.

Although I'd never regarded my recent sojourn on Blood Island as an attempt to elude the long arm of the law, the FBI didn't quite see it that way. Pleased to realize that I now had a known and fixed address, a place that a person might approach without fear of quicksand, alligators, venomous snakes, or poisonous jellyfish, two agents from the Boston office began paying me regular visits. I told them more than they wanted to know but nothing they didn't deserve to hear, with the upshot that I was not indicted. When one of my interrogators, a grim and intelligent Russian expatriate named Bolkonsky, said I should thank my “plucky stars” I hadn't ended up in prison along with Fox, Powers, Kristowski, and the rest, I assured him that at dawn I would sing a hymn to the Aton.

Our philosophy group's prestige quickly reached such proportions that the average Boston intellectual crackpot, of which there are many, took pride in being invited to favor us with an informal talk. Although it wasn't my idea to have Vincent Charnock contribute to the Londa Sabacthani Memorial Lecture Series—the suggestion came from Dr. Cochran, the medieval-studies professor whose high-definition television had saved my life by displaying
The Egyptian
at a crucial moment—I did not protest, for the man had clearly turned over a new leaf, several new leaves, in fact. Truth to tell, Charnock had rewritten the entire
Book of Vincent,
not only climbing free of his self-constructed abyss (with a boost from Alcoholics Anonymous) but also funding and administering the Charnock Consortium, a Cambridge-based enterprise that in its devotion to avant-garde cancer research was generally perceived as the stepchild of the incinerated Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations. Having supplied Anthem and Pielmeister with the means for spawning the immaculoids, Charnock would always seem to me
an accessory before the fact of Yolly's murder, and yet he'd also evidently become a crusader on behalf of Yolly's hope.

There was one way in which Charnock had not changed. This moralist who'd so adamantly opposed Edwina's removal of Proserpine's brain, and who would doubtless have resisted our uprooting of the sentient mangrove had he been around at the time, remained a steadfast foe of physician-assisted suicide. In his talk that evening, “From Mercy to Mengele,” he made a coherent philosophical case against euthanasia. He began by recapitulating Kant's claim that if the practice ever became commonplace, the effect would be to cheapen the intrinsic value of human life, then proceeded to demonstrate that John Stuart Mill's defense of euthanasia suffered from the same fallacy as other Utilitarian positions—namely, an assumption that to mathematize a dilemma was to resolve it. For his coup de grâce, Charnock explained why in his view the institutionalized destruction of individuals facing a life without quality lay on the same continuum as the Third Reich's eradication of those who supposedly had nothing to offer the Fatherland.

Although nobody agreed with Charnock's conclusions—as Leslie later put it, “you could float the
Titanic Redux
through the holes in his argument”—it was an astute and heartfelt performance, drawing applause from the audience, myself included, and our guest was in good spirits when we adjourned to the Shepherd's Pie. We were celebrating two events that evening: Charnock's successful appearance before our group and my recent contract with Prima Facie Press for
The Serpent Was More Subtle,
based on two sample chapters and an outline. Most of us ordered beer. Our speaker opted for a Cherry Coke and nachos. As the conversation heated up, Charnock confessed that he'd begun investigating the problem of physician-assisted suicide because the abortion controversy had proved too much for him, requiring that he search his soul more deeply than was compatible with his sanity.

“I came to feel that if I
really
cared about those seven embryos
I poured into the bay, I should adopt seven unwanted children in their place. Or six at least. Or five.”

“Or four unwanted children,” Leslie said.

“Or three or two,” I said.

“The truth is that I've never felt an urge to nurture,” Charnock said.

“Or one unwanted child,” Leslie said.

“Edwina certainly felt it,” Charnock continued. “She ached for motherhood. She needed it like oxygen.”

“So did Londa,” I said. “Not at first. But sometime during the hijacking, the impulse kicked in.”

“I didn't know that,” Charnock said. “I'm not surprised. Like mother, like daughter. This drive to rear the next generation, it's essentially a female instinct, wouldn't you say?”

“Nonsense,” Leslie said.

“Nonsense,” I agreed, though I had nothing on which to base this assertion, my parenting experiences being limited to John Snow 0001, who hadn't exactly brought out my inner Geppetto.

“To the next generation,” Leslie said, raising her pilsner high, and we all followed her lead, clinking our glasses together and giving posterity our permission to come forth.

 

ON A CHILL, RAINY EVENING
in October, three days before Halloween, the Whores of Reason sat down to epistemology as usual. Our reading that autumn had been Hegel's preternaturally dense
Phenomenology of Spirit,
with its audacious account of the individual soul's journey from consciousness to self-consciousness to reason to spirit to religion to perfect knowledge. Although I'd always found this byzantine ascent annoying in its obscurity, I figured that the fault lay with me, and as the evening progressed, Leslie and I began playing good cop–bad cop with Hegel's theology, your narrator defending the man's attempt to privilege pure thought, Leslie arguing that we shouldn't hesitate to label metaphysical drivel as such. To cinch her
case, she related how Hegel had in 1800 written a dissertation proving that, while the definition of a “planet” had varied over the centuries, there could still be, philosophically, only seven planets. “And then, in January of 1801, an eighth planet—the asteroid Ceres—was discovered by a non-Hegelian astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi,” Leslie said. “And so, once again, we see why the real world has always been such an embarrassment to German idealism.”

On that epigrammatic note, the clock struck nine, and the meeting broke up—or almost did. What kept everyone in place was the appearance of a stooped figure, wheezing and arthritic, her face obscured by the cowl of a rain-spattered poncho. She was toting, of all things, a wicker bassinet, and before she reached our inner circle, several bystanders remarked that the conveyance held a baby.