36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Author:Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religon
ISBN: 9780307378903
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2009-12-18T10:00:00+00:00

XVIII

The Argument from the Arrow of Time

Cass comes up the back stairs of his apartment, which lead directly into the kitchen. He pauses at the stove to put some water up for tea and then goes into the living room.

Last night had been his second night of sleeplessness this week, and the deprivation is taking its toll. He had stayed alert during his early-morning taping of an interview for National Public Radio’s The Cutting Edge. The interviewer had introduced him in his famous plummy tones as “Cass Seltzer, the eminent philosopher and one of our deepest divers into the choppy waters churning between religion and science.” Cass has learned to take it all in stride, even the mislabeling of him as a philosopher, which used to embarrass him, making him feel as if he had illegitimately been awarded a few extra IQ points. He had rushed from the radio studio to Frankfurter’s campus, to teach his afternoon advanced seminar, “Psychology of Religion.” The topic today had been the Concept of the Quest in religious contexts.

But at four in the afternoon, he had slumped. He had begged off keeping his date with Mona for a drink, pleading exhaustion, which was true but also convenient.

On and off, all day long, he’s been thinking of Lucinda, wondering how her talk would go, is going, had gone. She had set the bar high. Anything less than spectacular success will be counted as failure, and Lucinda isn’t made for failure, in much the same way as he hadn’t been made for success, despite the strange happenings of the last year, which he has spent walking around in someone else’s coat.

He hasn’t turned on any of the lights, but a soft glow from the street-lamp drapes itself across various sections of the furniture and rug, a black-and-gold-and-orange adaptation of a Klimt painting that had been left behind, along with everything else, by Pascale when she took off with her plundering neurologist.

When he found this place, he couldn’t wait to show it to Pascale. It occupies the two top floors of a spacious Victorian house on gracious Upland Road. It has three bedrooms, high ceilings, and ample light; the rent was surprisingly reasonable, too. But Pascale had at first balked.

“It is for us too much space.”

She had scowled, her thin, dark brows drawing themselves into one elegant line of rejection. Too much space seemed an odd drawback. Perhaps what was in her mind was that her emphatic “No!” had not entirely vanquished the delusions of breeding to which Cass had several times confessed. What did her husband have in mind with all those bedrooms? But the dormered room that would be her study, with windows looking out at the park across the way, had made her relent. Sheltered in the closest corner of the park were a few playthings for children—a seesaw, a jungle gym. Perhaps she pictured herself hanging upside down there, for the vertigo and the images. Or perhaps she detected the spirits of the muses thick in the air around her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.