Room for Doubt Read online

  After Thom died, of causes that may well have stemmed from his own treasured recklessness, Mike asked me and August Kleinzahler, who was one of Thom's closest friends, to go into Thom's study with him and see what was there. We found drawers of file folders containing every draft of every poem he had ever published, all organized chronologically and each clipped to the finished, printed version of the poem; and we found schedules of every reading he had given for the past four decades, each with the list of poems to be read that night typed out neatly in Thom's recognizable typeface. “What a maniac he was,” I murmured to August as we looked at this record of obsessiveness, and August nodded, “Yes, he was.” It was part of what we both cherished about him, but it was rarely visible in such a naked form.

  Since Thom died, I have often thought about him in connection with David Hume. It is not that they were superficially alike. Despite Thom's Scottish name (it was really Thomson Gunn), he did not look anything like Hume, though perhaps he looked the way the very young Hume had, lean and tall and rawboned. Nor would anyone have classified Thom as a philosopher: he didn't like to think abstractly, but saw everything in its particulars, whether it had happened to him yesterday or to someone else four hundred years ago. Thom's was a world of sensory experience—experience that could be converted, in his wonderful poems, into language, but that had not been undergone for the sake of language. The felt experience was the primary thing, for Thom. So you can see that if he were to resemble any philosopher, it would have been David Hume.

  But what made me associate him with Hume was something else: his goodness. Like Hume, Thom was not boringly cloyingly good. He had a sharp tongue and a cold eye, and he could use them to scathing effect. He also adored misbehavior, and tried to practice it himself, though often his innate courtesy and his sense of decorum held him back. He would have liked to be worse than he was, and I'm not sure he would have liked being called good. But that's what he was.

  As with Hume, this goodness came out partly in the form of well-concealed generosity. For most of his life, Thom had very little money, but when he finally came into some (he won a five-year MacArthur Award in his sixties), he began to give it away like mad. He even gave some of it to me, or rather, to The Threepenny Review, which he supported at a far higher level than he could afford. And he began sending monthly checks to a brilliant, erratic poet of our acquaintance, a man who was often, or always, out of work, because he felt that the poet needed money and he, Thom, had it to give. He told me about the monthly checks in confidence, and said he didn't want anyone else to know about them, but now that he is dead I feel I can expose his generosity. When I first learned that he had died—quite suddenly, in the night—I wondered about all the other secrets he had taken with him.

  Because Thom was so good, people loved him wholeheartedly, even though we knew him only partially, at best. He put more of himself into his poems than he did into his daily conversation, or rather, he put into them a side of himself, the self-knowing, self-analytic, painfully aware side, that he did not care to show to the people around him. Did not care to, or couldn't: I'm not sure which. This habit of enclosure made him seem a bit removed from things, a bit inaccessible, even when he was at his warmest and jolliest. (He had a huge laugh; I can hear it still, if I try.) He was a very important friend to me, but I'm not sure I would have called the friendship intimate. I think he loved me, though, and I know I loved him.

  One of the things he always used to say, a sort of commentary on the nature of our friendship, was that we had both been brought up as agnostics. It was as if this made us special, and different: we had never had a shred of religious belief, but had come by our atheism naturally and originally, without having to react against piety and discover disbelief by default. Something about our shared irreligion, and something about the way he died (probably of a heart attack, probably after taking drugs— not suicide, but a choice of a different kind; endlessly searching for pleasure, disregarding the effects of speed on a seventy-four-year-old heart, not particularly wishing to grow old ungracefully; alive in his garden rereading A Sentimental Education one day, and gone, completely gone, the next), and something about the wholehearted quality of my feelings for him, which were not fraught and complicated like my feelings for most people, but gentle and consistent and undivided—all this has made his death, for me, somehow simpler to take in. I was shocked when I heard about it, and I was very sad for many months after, and I still feel sad whenever I hear or see or read something I would have liked to tell him about. But I very soon came to the realization that though his death was a bad thing for those of us he had left behind, it was not a bad thing for him. He was simply non-existent: not at peace, not with God, not enjoying eternal rest, not haunting his former life. Nothing. I began to understand, for the first time, what Hume had meant about Lucretius.

  I find it strange that people associate morality with religion. By “morality” I don't mean moralizing, or moral self-righteousness. I mean the desire to do good in the world, to be as fair and generous as possible, even to make a few self-sacrifices if they are not excruciatingly painful and can actually be of some use. Most of the people who have this kind of morality, in my experience, also have a pretty solid respect for the pleasures of existence, their own and others’. They are not ascetics or saints: their generosity and goodness stem from an overflow of sympathy and good spirits, a feeling that other people deserve to enjoy the things they themselves enjoy. And most of the people whom I would call moral in this way are not at all religious.

  Just think about it logically for a moment. Is it admirable to be benevolent toward others because you hope for a payback in the afterlife—or, conversely, to refrain from unpleasant behavior because you're afraid of eternal damnation? Greed and fear do not seem to me to be good supports on which to build a system of ethical behavior, yet the carrot and the stick are clearly at the core of most religious instruction. I am sure there are morally admirable people who believe in God, but I would argue that the two qualities are entirely separable, and probably separate, in most characters; the link is at best coincidental and at worst inverse. We can all think of badly behaved people who believed in God, starting with the Inquisition and ending with yesterday's news. Yet vast numbers of my fellow citizens continue to think that going to church will make them—or me—into a better person. I even have acquaintances who had pretty much given up on religion themselves but then went back to church after their children were born, ostensibly so that the children would have some kind of moral framework in their lives. Why didn't these people understand that a sense of moral responsibility could emerge from day-to-day relations between human beings, without any necessity for a supervising, admonitory, favorites-playing God?

  Monotheism has always struck me as a step in the wrong direction, in that, unlike polytheism, it posits an all-knowing God who can't be wrong. Such a person would have a lot to answer for in the evil-that-gets-done-in-the-world department, and simply inventing a devil to address that side of the problem only exacerbates it. Christianity, in this sense, is even more illogical than Judaism. But I don't want to get involved in denominational quibbling. Any church or synagogue or mosque, any fount of worship devoted to a singular all-powerful God, gives me the heebie-jeebies. Yet I don't feel at all this way about the old Greek temples I've visited, the ones at Paestum, Segesta, Agrigento, and Olympia (though I'm not sure that's because their gods are less objectionable to begin with: they might just be less objectionable because they're dead).

  The other night, as I sat watching a very good performance of Die Walküre, it dawned on me how brilliant of Wagner it was to set his grand myth among ancient, multiple gods. His Wotan is a willful, demanding, oppressively authoritarian figure—in this respect, not unlike Yahweh or Milton's God. But he is also torn by emotion, wrenched by conflicting obligations, doomed by his own passions, and betrayed by his own sworn oaths, and that makes him a far more interesting figure than either of those two solitary Gods. I
f Wotan were colder and more consistent, he might be a better god and a better ruler of the gods, but he would be much less appealing to us, the mortals out in the audience.

  The two tragedies at the heart of Die Walküre— first the death of Siegmund, Wotan's half-mortal son, and then Wotan's renunciation of his favorite child, Brünnhilde—are both set in motion by the intervention of another god: that is, Fricka, Wotan's legal wife. Like Juno in the classical myths (and, even more, like Junon in the French neoclassical versions), Fricka is the embodiment of jealousy; but unlike Juno's, her jealousy has a steely, lawyerlike logic to support it. With serpentile cleverness, she uses Wotan's own arguments and assertions against him, making him feel that if he helps Siegmund survive, he will undermine his own power by contradicting his stated principles. She also, cunningly, gets him to order Brünnhilde not to give Siegmund any aid either, because she knows that Wotan's Valkyrie daughter (who is, quite pointedly, not her daughter) reflects everything strong and good about him, including his love for Siegmund. Fricka plays on her husband's desire to believe that even Brünnhilde, his most wonderful creation, is merely an extension of his own will—and when Brünnhilde violates that belief by standing up for Siegmund, he strips her of her immortality and cuts her off for good.

  The bare-bones plot is implausible at best (I have left out the whole incestuous love affair between Siegmund and his sister Sieglinde, though that too is central to the plot, and to the implausibility), and without the music it would be merely ridiculous. But the music makes us able to feel Wotan's despair as if it were Lear's, even as we are also feeling Siegmund's and Brünnhilde's—for that is part of what it means for a tragedy to be Shakespearean. And it is because Wotan is one god among many, rather than a single all-powerful god, that he can become this kind of psychologically realized character. It would be too simplistic to say that his flaws make him human; rather, let us say that as he sacrifices his beloved child by making her mortal, he feels the pain of that sacrifice in a way that we can't quite imagine God-the-father feeling about Christ. The difference is that Wotan, despite his stature as an immortal, is not in control of events: he is caught in the toils of his own character, his own inconsistent desire for consistency, so that he is finally just as much a victim of fate and coincidence as his less powerful children are.

  We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent these ills, with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These unknown causes, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear; and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependence.

  This paragraph of acute Wagnerian criticism is in fact a passage from David Hume's essay “The Natural History of Religion”— specifically, a paragraph drawn from the section on the origins of polytheism. I came to this essay, as you might guess, expecting to get to the heart of my feeling for Hume. Here at last, I imagined, would be the firm arguments of the rational agnostic I saw as my ally; here is where I would find the reigning eighteenth-century Christianity shoved bravely aside.

  What I found was something much stranger and less reassuring. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the niggling suspicion that I was not going to write a book about David Hume first came upon me when I read (or re-read, because I had owned it for thirty years) this essay. “The Natural History of Religion” argues, first of all, that the progress of mankind “from rude beginnings to a state of greater perfection” involves a corresponding move from polytheistic to monotheistic religion. The essay even contains within its first few pages a sentence that goes: “It seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant multitude must first entertain some grovelling and familiar notion of superior powers, before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being, who bestowed order on the whole frame of nature.”

  I was appalled. Aside from its shameless pandering to the audience, its apparent support of the contemporary belief in a capitalized, singular Supreme Being, the sentence was irksomely snobbish in its attitude toward the grovelling multitude. I had actually seen this snobbery of Hume's before, in some of the personal letters—letters about his own family's standing in Scotland, say, or about someone else's good breeding or lack thereof—but I had mentally ditched the evidence as irrelevant to his philosophy. Now, however, I was confronted with that very tone in the philosophy, and in an argument that favored monotheism to boot.

  But did it really favor monotheism? As I read along, it became harder and harder to tell. A wickedly ironic sense of humor seemed to lap at the edges of every argument, like a fire that threatened to consume the whole enterprise. About midway through the essay, Hume tossed off the comment:

  It must be allowed, that the ROMAN CATHOLICS are a very learned sect; and that no one communion, but that of the Church of ENGLAND, can dispute their being the most learned of all the Christian churches: Yet AVERROëS, the famous ARABIAN, who, no doubt, had heard of the EGYPTIAN superstition, declares, that of all religions, the most absurd and nonsensical is that, whose votaries eat, after having created, their deity.

  The word “communion” is doing very heavy duty in this passage—and in the guise of questioning Catholic practice, Hume manages to get at all the Christian churches, in part by allowing a non-Christian to deliver the devastating critique. (Averroës, though not necessarily famous to us, is an altogether serious source: a twelfth-century Spanish Moor, he was a classical scholar as well as a respected judge.) But how does this interjection in any way support the idea that monotheism represents progress? It patently doesn't. The so-called argument of the essay has swallowed its own tail, leaving the author nowhere to go but into a kind of stand-up comedy routine in which he proceeds to tell catechism jokes with punchlines like: “How many Gods are there?” “None at all!… You have told me all along that there is but one God: And yesterday I eat him.”

  I did not know how to take any of this. Was this the way to make a philosophical argument against religion? Was this the kind of help I had been hoping to get from Hume My Contemporary? God forbid. And yet even as I collapsed in dismay, I also realized that Hume had once again evaded expectations. He was not to be pinned down to any system of thought, even mine; he was not going to allow himself to be merely useful. The Hume I had in mind when I started thinking about the book was a relatively straightforward fellow—I had vaguely imagined I would find a rational explicator who built up his arguments in logical steps—whereas, instead, I was faced with a stylish littérateur who allowed his essay to be pulled hither and yon as each new idea struck him. I had set out looking for Locke's smarter cousin, but I had ended up with the twin brother of Montaigne.

  My admiration for Montaigne is unmitigated, but it tends to be expressed in acts of omission rather than commission. I do not, that is, often find myself reading Montaigne, though whenever I do read him, I can see that he's beyond compare. Perhaps it's those scrupulous, fact-brandishing footnotes of his that scare me off; or perhaps it's my sense that by reading him in English— the only way I could possibly read him—I am missing everything that truly matters in his style. That can't be true, though, because he always seems to be recognizably Montaigne (just as Proust is always recognizably Proust) no matter whose translation I read. So something must be getting through.

  When I first discerned the secret connection between Hume and Montaigne, I thought it could be my way in. I picked up the huge Screech edition of Montaigne and settled in for a nice long read, starting with the famous “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Soon I put it down again. I just wasn't up to a hun
dred and ninety-five pages of this undulating thought process. On the shorter essays, maybe, I could manage to stick with Montaigne as he raced around three or four or even five violent switchbacks, but over the longer haul I began to feel carsick. I admit that this was my fault and not Montaigne's. My linear brain just wasn't up to his flexible sinuosity. But such admissions accomplish nothing: I still couldn't manage to read him straight through. My admiration for Montaigne, it seemed, would have to remain largely theoretical, and so would any insights I might have about the connection between his style and Hume's.

  Who, in any case, would have cared about my discovery? It wouldn't matter to the philosophers, since I am not one of them; and it certainly wouldn't matter to anyone else. Perhaps, if my old friend Lenny were still alive, it would have mattered to him, but I'm not even sure of that—he had his Montaigne, and I had my Hume, and we were both too old (or would have been, if he were still alive) to start mixing and matching. Realizing this made me feel briefly lonely, but the loneliness was not, in fact, another symptom of missing Lenny. It was a much more narcissistic feeling than that. I missed the possibility of a more flexible self.

  It's odd that Hume had brought me to this, because when I began thinking of him, it was precisely as a defender of one of my rigidly held beliefs (atheism being as much of a conviction as any other). I thought that by writing about him I would somehow prove the case for religious doubt, or at least be closer to arriving at a proof. But that kind of lockbox logic—the kind, in effect, in which most professional philosophy has now enclosed itself—is exactly what Hume turned out to be an escape from. If he had anything to teach me at all, it was about the value of not arriving at a firm conclusion.