During the long course of writing LETTERS, I happened to move with my new bride back to those birthwaters after a 20-year absence, to teach at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, and to begin for the first time ardently exploring, in our cruising sailboat, the great estuarine system that I had grown up on, in, and around. It was sobering, in those high-tension times, to see the red hammer-and-sickle banner flying above the aforementioned Soviet embassy retreat across the river, and to note on our charts (abounding in Danger Zones and Prohibited Areas) the 80-plus Pentagon facilities scattered about this fragile tidewaterland — including the Pentagon itself, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Edgewood Arsenal’s chemical and biological weapons development facilities, not to mention several CIA “safe houses” and the headquarters of the Agency proper. Sobering too to sail past the odd nuclear missile submarine off Annapolis, packing firepower enough to wreck a continent, and to know that among one’s fellow pleasure-sailors and anchorage-mates would be a certain number of federal employees including the occasional admiral, active or retired, taking a busman’s holiday, and the occasional Agency spook, ditto, perhaps ditto. And sobering finally to be cruising the pleasant waters that a British task force had invaded during the War of 1812, burning Washington, bombarding Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and inspiring our national anthem — waters increasingly stressed by agricultural run-off ever since the first European settlers cleared the forests to farm “sot-weed” in the 17th century; by military dumping and residential development through the 20th; and by history, more or less, over that whole span.
Sabbatical glances at all that, perhaps even attempts here and there to stare it down, but it’s really only marginally about the Wonderlandish machinations of the CIA/KGB and the American heritages represented (in the novel) by Francis Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe. First and finally, the story is what its subtitle declares it to be: a romance, in the several senses of that term.
— Postscript, possibly evidencing that truth is more Postmodern than fiction:
After Sabbatical’s first publication in 1982, I learned from certain ex-colleagues of his and readers of mine that the unhappy Mr. Paisley had toward the end grown fond of declaring that “in life, as on the highway, fifty-five is enough” (his age at death). Moreover — and more poignantly, sober-ingly, vertiginously — I was informed by his son that the late Agency operative had been a fan of my novels, especially The Floating Opera and The Sot-Weed Factor—which it pleases me to imagine his having enjoyed in happier times as he and Brillig sailed the Chesapeake.
R.I.P., sir: Having surfaced in Sabbatical as in the Bay (and resurfaced in this novel’s successor, The Tidewater Tales), you shall not float through my fiction again.
“In the Beginning”: The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox
Turning now to a bit of proto-Postmodernism: Though far from being a Biblical scholar myself, I was successfully tempted by the bona fide Biblicist David Rosenberg to contribute the following essay on Genesis and Matthew to his anthology Communion1—having perused which, the distinguished journalist Bill Moyers persuaded me in 1996 to take part in one episode of his 10-part PBS series Genesis:2 a lively round-table conversation with Moyers; the novelists Rebecca Goldstein, Mary Gordon, Oscar Hijuelos, Charles Johnson, and Faye Kellerman; and the theologian Burton Visotzky, on the subject of “The First Murder,” Cain’s offing of his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Whereafter I happily retired from amateur scriptural exegesis.
1
Bereshith—in Hebrew, the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible — says it more aptly than does the usual English translation, “In the beginning.” Both expressions are adverbial, and their sense is inarguably the same: Bereshith means, indeed, “in the beginning,”3 its first syllable corresponding to the English preposition. But if, as John’s subsequent gospel affirms (1:1), “In the beginning was the word,” then any form-conscious writer of a creation-story will prefer that beginning word to be the word Beginning. The text of Genesis (called, in Hebrew, Bereshith), especially its opening chapters, is virtually proto-Postmodernist in its deployment of what art critics call “significant form”—the form a metaphor for the content, or form and content reciprocally emblematical — and the original Hebrew begins the story best: beginningly.4
In the “Near Eastern” stacks of my university’s library, once the distinguished haunt of William Foxwell Albright’s Oriental Seminary, there is half an alcove of scholarly commentary, in a babel of languages, on the text of Genesis; enough to frighten any self-respecting fictionist back to his/her trade. Of all this (except for Sacks’s excellent treatise aforenoted) I remain programmatically innocent. No professional storyteller, however, especially of the Postmodernist or Romantic-Formalist persuasion, can fail on rereading this seminal narrative to be struck by two circumstances, no doubt commonplaces among Bible scholars: 1) that the structure of Genesis, particularly of its opening chapter, is self-reflexive, self-similar, even self-demonstrative; and 2) that its narrative procedure echoes, prefigures, or metaphorizes some aspects of current cosmogonical theory.
• Taking, like an artless translator, second things first: As everybody knows, according to the generally accepted Big Bang hypothesis (as opposed to various currently-disfavored “steady state” hypotheses), our physical universe in one sense came into existence “all at once”—at the moment dubbed by astrophysicists “Planck Time” (10–43 seconds after T-Zero), prior to which the concept time is virtually as unintelligible as are physical processes at the infinitely high temperature of the original “naked singularity.” Exquisite scientific reasoning from known physical laws and processes has made possible a remarkably precise scenario/timetable for the universe’s subsequent expansion and differentiation, through its radical metamorphoses in later fractions of that first second,5 to the formation of galaxies and solar systems over subsequent billions of years and the evolution of life on Earth — including, if not culminating, in the day-before-yesterday development of human consciousness and intelligences capable of such rigorous formulations as the Big Bang hypothesis in all its scientific/mathematical splendor. In two other senses, however, the astrophysical creation-story ongoes stilclass="underline"
• The observable universe continues the “creative” expansion and exfoliation more or less implicit in its first instant (in the language of complexity physics, or chaos theory, its processes are “sensitively dependent on initial conditions,” more particularly on certain aboriginal inhomogeneities crucial to the uneven distribution of matter into galactic clusters, superclusters, and superclusteral “superstrings”) — a continuation whose own continuation apparently depends on the as-yet-imprecisely-known amount and distribution of “dark matter” out there. Moreover,