I have had an interesting experience in thinking about my read of this book. I liked reading the book, but not as much as I wanted to like reading it, especially since I enjoyed Betraying Spinoza. I'm not sure whether the problem was with the writing or with my preferences for non-fiction these days. Some of the narrative and the dialog just seemed a bit wooden to me. I enjoyed the story and I identified with Cass, but the book didn't blow me away.
Until I began to look back over the passages that I highlighted. Then the book really took over a whole new meaning for me. First I copied my highlighted passages from my Kindle account to a web page, and then I winnowed those down further to what I thought were the most significant passages. Rereading these passages then really made me appreciate just what a fine book this is.
The major character of the book is Cass Seltzer, a professor of the psychology of religion at a small Jewish university who has just written a best seller, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, which has caused major publications to dub him "the atheist with soul." As part of his book, he has included an appendix with 36 arguments for the existence of God, with a refutation for each argument that points out its flaws. Goldstein has included the appendix as the second half of the novel. It's pretty heady stuff but it seems to me fairly comprehensive, moving from Aristotle's Unmoved Mover through Spinoza's Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe.
I found myself laughing out loud at the foibles of Cass and the people around him. At times, Cass seems a bit like Dobie Gillis as we see him fail at three different love affairs and move with perpetual adolescent wonder and angst through his life. But so much of the comedy also comes at the expense of the pompous academic, Klapper. a thinly veiled parody of Harold Bloom, who makes his graduate students jump through some pretty unrealistic hoops. Some reviewers have felt this character is just too unreal, but it worked for me as broad satire. And Klapper presents a pretty good foil against the Rebbe's son, Azarya, who struggles with the passion to follow his individual genius versus the need of his Hasidic community for him to fulfill a specific and circumscribed role that is central and sacred to them.
But still, it's those passages trying to capture what is really ineffable, moments when Cass is struck with the weirdness of existence, seeking for meaning and feeling special in the the face of being a cosmic fluke lost in an unfeeling and unmeaning universe. "All that one knows is that onen is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it." So there's part of me that says this is what Camus calls the absurd, man's searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. And yet, I get a sense almost of joy rather than despair. "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 our own self."
Is that the same as the look that Sisyphus has as he begins his walk down into valley to begin rolling his rock up the mountain yet once more time? And is that joy, that sublimity, coming from Goldstein's infatuation with Spinoza and his Intelligibility, that the universe, or at least our place in it, is ultimately knowable, even though our own understanding is, and will probably always be, incomplete, but it gives us meaning to strive for intelligibility, and that this striving gives us purpose, gives us dignity, gives us grace? In that regard, it seems in line with Kazantzakis in Saviours of God, maybe, or even--and this is a stretch--Teilhard's evolution toward the omega point. Are Teilhard and Spinoza on the same page, when you get down to it?
"Perhaps that is the proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility [what a phrase!] that assaults us on all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise, what are we?"
Author: Goldstein, Rebecca
Date Published: 2010
Length: 530 pp
electronic print
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