date: Feb. 26 2008 5:38 a.m.
subject: re: possible argument #37
Awake.
to: GR613@gmail.com
from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
date: Feb. 26 2008 5:39 AM
subject: re: re: possible argument #37
I think I may have come up with another argument. A really good one. Tell me I’m crazy but I think this one might be it. Tell me I’m crazy but I think this one is different.
to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
from: GR613@gmail.com
date: Feb. 26 2008 5:40 a.m.
subject: re: re: re: possible argument #37
All right, you’re crazy.
to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
from: GR613@gmail.com
date: Feb. 26 2008 6:00 a.m.
subject: re: re: re: re: possible argument #37
But I still want to hear it.
to: GR613@gmail.com
from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
date: Feb. 26 2008 6:01 a.m.
subject: re: re: re: re: re: possible argument #37
It went away. I tried to formulate it and it completely went away. I think I miss Lucinda.
to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
from: GR613@gmail.com
date: Feb. 26 2008 6:08 a.m.
subject: the argument from Lucinda
Of course you do. But that’s no reason to believe in God.
to: GR613@gmail.com
from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
date: Feb. 26 2008 6:10 a.m.
subject: re: the argument from Lucinda
:-) Good night.
to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
from: GR613@gmail.com
date: Feb. 26 2008 6:13 a.m.
subject: re: re: the argument from Lucinda
Good morning.
III The Argument from Dappled Things
When Lucinda Mandelbaum entered the crowded auditorium of the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center at Frankfurter University for the inaugural Friday-afternoon Psychology Outside Speaker lecture of the new semester and rejected an aisle seat, instead clambering lithely over the legs, laps, and laptops of the assorted faculty members and graduate students, all of whom had been impatiently awaiting her maiden entrance, even though it was not she but, rather, Harold Lipkin of Rutgers University who was the invited speaker; and when she then slipped into the empty seat next to Cass Seltzer, bestowing on him a sweet little shrug of coy chagrin at coming in late and making a bit of a commotion in getting to him; and when she then proceeded, all through Lipkin’s lecture, entitled “The Myth of Moral Reason,” to address her running commentary on Lipkin’s efforts exclusively to Cass, so that Cass, who had in fact been looking forward to Lipkin’s lecture, seeing how the psychology of morality dovetailed with his own research on the psychology of religion, ended up missing a good part of it, instead chuckling appreciatively at Lucinda’s zingers and even managing to launch one himself that had made Lucinda snigger so enthusiastically that his good friend and colleague Mona Ganz, sitting several rows in front of them, her well-groomed girth just able to settle itself into the seat she always claimed for herself, front and center, swiveled her head around and then, determining the identity of the sniggerer, reversed the motion just as sharply-“like that kid in The Exorcist,” Lucinda observed, making Cass give vent to a chortle so disloyal that it certainly ought to have been swiftly followed by a stab of guilt, considering Mona’s devoted mindfulness toward him, especially during the ravaged weeks and months that had followed the post-aphasic Pascale’s first words to him from her hospital bed, which, in their percussive rhythm and impeccable precision, “I must of necessity break your heart,” were as reflective of the poet that Pascale was (La Sauvagerie et la certitude, Prix Femina, 1987) as they were effective in dampening the desire of her husband to live out any and all possible forms of his future-it had been entirely by mistake.
Lucinda had thought that Cass Seltzer was someone else entirely. To be precise, she had thought that Cass Seltzer was their mutual colleague Sebastian Held, to whom she had been introduced last week at the welcome party that she thought the university had thrown for her. (Actually, she had been wrong. The party had been in honor of all the newly arrived faculty.)
Lipkin, a small man with a booming, pedantic, overenunciating style, was an excitable lecturer, who rose onto his well-shod tiny tiptoes as he hammered home his points. He was already launched at full steam in his oratorical trajectory, irrigating the first row with his spittle, speed-clicking his way through the PowerPoint presentation that swerved abruptly from brain scans of sophomores, neuroimaged in the throes of moral deliberation over whether they should, in theory, toss a hapless fat man onto the tracks in order to use his bulk to save five other men from an oncoming trolley, to sweeping conclusions that claimed to deliver final justice to John Rawls, not to speak of categorically laying to rest the imperative-rattling ghost of Immanuel Kant.
“He Kant possibly mean that” had been the quip of Cass’s that had been anointed by Lucinda’s titter.
Cass had never been good at this sort of thing, making fun and making light, but Lucinda’s proximity, or, more to the point, her having so deliberately chosen proximity to him, had revved up his wit. The Katzenbaum auditorium was subterranean and windowless, but it seemed to have become ungloomed ever since Lucinda claimed her seat, as if some of the dazzle from outdoors had been tracked in on the bottom of her shoes.
It was one of those September days, the sky looking like an inverted swimming pool, and the white-gold liquor of afternoon light drizzling through the leaf-heavy trees and pooling on lawns and walkways and the gleaming crowns of Frankfurter’s youth. Cass had quoted the line “Glory be to God for dappled things” to himself, which was from a favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as he made his way across the stippled campus. “Glory be to God for dappled things- / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings.” And then that stunning second stanza, beginning, “All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)…”
How was Cass to know that Lucinda Mandelbaum was slightly prosopagnosic, “prosopagnosia” being the technical term for an inability to recognize faces? Arguably, Lucinda’s prosopagnosia had nothing to do with any malfunctioning in her fusiform gyrus. Arguably, prosopagnosia, in the case of Lucinda, was more a matter of mental efficiency than deficiency. Lucinda tended, largely unconsciously, to group faces into kinds, and then was likely to exchange one of a kind for another of the same kind. She could often, when her mistake was discovered, reconstruct the logic of her unconscious taxonomy. Her confusions sometimes led to awkwardnesses, but Lucinda generally knew how to cover herself, and her errors more often amused than alarmed her.
“Did he say brain scans or brain scams?” Lucinda whispered now into Cass’s tingling pinna.
“Do Lipkins recognize the difference?” Cass had returned with breathtaking celerity.
Cass had never been quick on the verbal draw, and the years he had lived with Pascale had buried him deeper beneath his reticence. Pascale went after statements with ferocity, ripping them into phonetic shreds. It was her poetic technique. At least several of her poems had been the result of her free-verse attack on some phrase he had uttered, including the prize-winning “Je ne peux pas te nier ça”: “I can’t deny you that.”