Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

really with Mickelsson himself, he knew, that the class had lost patience. It was he that allowed the class to flounder, yet on quizzes gave low grades. In his mailbox this morning he’d found two more drop cards.)

Blassenheim said, “What I think is, all that’s important about the story is it’s a parable against human sacrifice, and what makes it right isn’t that Abraham listened to the whisper in his ear, which was really pretty crazy, but that all these generations of scribes and revisers kept agreeing with the parable, looking at, like, their personal experience, and listening to the whisper of God in their own ears—and they left it in, so the parable got, like, truer.”

Mickelsson felt gooseflesh rising. (He was admittedly an easy lay for notions of that kind. It was the point at which he and Nietzsche parted company. Say the words common sense or community and his eyes would grow moist, not that, in real life, he knew any community he did not hate.) “That’s not bad,” he said. He glanced around the room. Apparently nobody else had gotten gooseflesh. Blassenheim was looking at him intently, as if hoping for an A—not the common kind of A; an A straight from God. Michael Nugent, behind him, sat leaning on his fist, morosely waiting for graduation, success, old age. Susan Kunstler, behind Nugent, was asleep.

“Alan’s got the start of an interesting idea here,” Mickelsson told the class, feeling only a flicker of irritation at their sluggishness. (An idea that left much to be desired, of course; not exactly up on the metaethical, methodological, and epistemological issues central in philosophical ethics since 1903—but never mind.) He rose from the desk and moved toward the blackboard, looking around for chalk as he went. The light outside the window seemed to have brightened. “Let me try to rephrase it and develop it a little, in case any of you didn’t quite catch it.” He found a tiny pebble of chalk in the tray and wrote on the blackboard, Intersubjectivity, underlined it, then drew a line and, at the end of it, wrote and underlined Verification. “Now watch closely,” he said. “Nothing in my hat, nothing up my sleeve …” Dutifully, without pleasure, they laughed.

As he spoke it came to him that Brenda Winburn, who’d seemed to be staring at him with fierce hostility—eyelids half lowered, long dark lashes veiling the eyes—was not seeing him, in fact, but gazing inward. Relief leaped up in him, and he began to speak more quickly and heartily.

Considering the heat, Mickelsson spoke with remarkable animation and focus, making circles in the air with the end of his pipe, putting Blassenheim’s cloudy notion into language one could build on, make use of. Yet a part of his mind drifted free of all he said, half dreaming. Suppose it were true that God was really up there, a “lure for our feeling,” as Whitehead, not to mention Aristotle, had fondly maintained—bespectacled old Jahweh, scratching his chin through his mountains of beard, watching Blassenheim climb carefully, shakily toward him, feeling his way around boulders, scooting downward now and then on loose scree. Mickelsson’s voice resounded as in a cavern. He listened as if to a stranger, aware that he was in a sense talking in his sleep. At the edge of his consciousness, as on old, blurry film, he saw Brenda Winburn pulling herself deeper and deeper, with powerful strokes, like a pearl diver, down past the kingdoms of mammals and fish, down past the strangest of antique, blind serpents, toward God only knew what primordial, half-animate beast. He saw her reach out and seize something, and the next moment it seemed that what she held in her fist, swimming up, was the bright yellow courtyard, the tree.

He acknowledged Nugent’s hand. He felt, though he did not hear, the collective groan.

“It’s interesting, all that about shared community values tested over time,” Nugent said. He sat rigid, slightly tilted to one side, stiff with concentration, his arms—poking out of the short-sleeved blue shirt—very white, his face and elbows pink. “But what I wanted to say is … it doesn’t seem to me you can call either Plato or Aristotle a fascist.” He was indignant that anyone should think otherwise. His pale, lashless eyes grew round. “The point is … the point is, Plato and Aristotle have a test you can try out on your own, like a repeatable experiment in chemistry. They start with the same assumption everybody makes, even dogs and cats, that some things may be true and some things may not be; only Plato and Aristotle are better than dogs and cats at thinking logically.”

The pressure of his nervousness made Nugent’s face redder and redder, and he began, just perceptibly, to sway, eyes rapidly blinking. Mickelsson lowered his gaze, lest his looking at the boy increase his discomfort. “It’s bad to dismiss them out of hand,” Nugent said, “dismiss the whole idea of discernible truth just because one doesn’t want to go through the trouble of thinking.” Blassenheim turned, injured, to look at Nugent. Hadn’t Blassenheim stood up for Truth just last week, and Nugent, in his arrogance, made fun of the ‘eternal verities’? Nugent hurried on, “It’s the assumption that some things are true—discernibly true—that keeps us going, makes life even possible.” He flashed a panicky grin, catching Mickelsson’s brief glance. “I mean, that’s where we get our sense of dignity, from the feeling that we’re good, the feeling that our team’s better than the other team. Angels of Life versus Angels of Death, things like that. But the thing is—this is what I wanted to say—even though Plato and Aristotle mean to be logical and reasonable, so you can repeat their processes, when you really look at it nothing ever works. It’s as if between their time and ours all the names of the chemicals got shifted around, so that what we call oxygen is really lithium hydride, and … For instance, take the