To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

It was such an astounding rendition, the last stanza recited at an accelerated pace, quickened with a kind of arcing, aching desperation. Just as the eternal note of sonorous sadness had always been there in the waves' pounding, even before the poet had heard it, so, too, the rhetorical urgency of that last stanza had been in the poem, only Cass had been deaf until this moment.

Jonas Elijah Klapper himself seemed unspeakably moved, to the point of prostration, by his own performance. He placed his right elbow, swathed in the brown suede patch ornamenting the dusky tweed, onto the table and buried his furrowed brow into his fleshy open palm.

And from that forlorn posture, his face hidden from sight, he sent forth a query.

"'Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.' Why the 'melancholy'? Why the 'long'? Why the 'withdrawing roar'?"

His voice was so weakened that he could barely muster the rolling r's that he had elocuted to perfection moments before.

A sustained and uneasy silence followed the withdrawing roar. The lack of a response stretched itself out, until the silence itself seemed like a metaphysical presence that had quietly crept in and taken a seat at the seminar table. Even Gideon Raven stared down at the gnawed fingers of his left hand, which were playing keyboard on the left thigh of his crossed legs.

Cass was amazed by the vacancy that had suddenly invaded the room. Though Cass's understanding of the poem had been immeasurably deepened by the professor's recitation, no great insight was required to answer the question on the table. Obviously, Professor Klapper had thrown it out just to get the ball rolling.

And there sat Jonas Elijah Klapper, his outspread palm still cushioning his mighty brow. The very sunbeams splattering on the grainy wooden table seemed to tremble with the tension. They were all, even the sunbeams, letting Jonas Elijah Klapper down; and in letting Jonas Elijah Klapper down, they were doing nothing less than disappointing the whole of Western civilization, its faith, its literature, its values.

Could Cass, callow as he was, allow this to happen? He knew that, among all the people in that breathlessly strained room, he was, without a doubt, the least qualified to speak. He included here the toothsome undergraduates, who had probably been studying poetry longer than he, who was, after all, only an importunate petitioner from pre-med.

Cass felt physically incapable of maintaining his silence, not only because of Jonas Elijah Klapper, and all he stood for, but also because of how "Dover Beach" had laid its palpating finger on the something soft and inchoate inside him, the thing he hardly dared to call his soul. Just like the lyrical narrator, he, too, had been paddling around oblivious on the surface of a sea of faith that he had presumed was infinitely benign, only to submerge his ears below the waves and hear the eternal note of sadness, like the mermaids singing each to each that Alfred Prufrock says he had heard once-no, maybe not like Prufrock's mermaids-and to wonder, along with the poet, what's left to believe in? and to grasp at the same answer that the poet had seized on: love and love alone. Love is the only solace. Not just any love, of course, not an easy, superficial love, but the love of the like-minded, the like-souled, the one who hears the eternal note of sadness in the same key and register as you. Together with such a love, clasping each other tightly round for dear life, you can gaze out the window at the dream-stripped harshness and bear the awful sight of it.

Jonas Elijah Klapper, sunk in his blinded pose, didn't see the lone hand raised aloft. And so, in service to the poet, to the seminar, to Faith and Literature and Values, but, first and foremost, to Jonas Elijah Klapper himself, Cass tentatively began to speak into the void, of how the absolute faith of the childhood of man, in both the individual and the species, "which I guess would be the Middle Ages, when belief in an ultimate divine presence was full and calm and sweet, was wrenched away in a long, withdrawing roar, as we grow up and discover the way the world really is, through science and most especially the theory of evolution.

"Darwin's fingerprints are all over this poem. The Origin of Species had been published just a few years before 'Dover Beach' was published."

Cass had done his homework, not only perusing the poem at least thirty times-he himself had it memorized by the eighth or ninth read- but going to the Lipschitz Library and reading everything about the poem he could get his hands on.

"The central metaphor in 'Dover Beach' is the ocean, and the poem itself is like a bridge passing from lush Romanticism to the brave new world of Modernism, where we aren't shaded from the hard truths of the natural world, and we have to create what meaning we can get from our relations with one another. That's all we have, in the end. The sublime has abandoned us, and what sublimity we have remaining we have to make for ourselves, subliminally, from the material of our own self."

Cass had been surprised by the surge of his own insights. That thing about the sublime, the subliminal, and the self-what this whole seminar was about!-had just hit him like a wallop between the eyes while he was talking.

Professor Klapper's eyes, which were shaped to the contours of sadness, slanting downward like two arrows taking aim at his lower face, had kept themselves unseen, obscured in the iconic thinker's pose.

There was silence in the classroom, the fraught silence of billions of agitated neurons soundlessly firing, until, at last, Jonas Elijah Klapper lifted his brow from off of his palm and revealed his face, which was contorted in silent-film fashion with the unmistakable mien of unmitigated aghastment and dismay. His lips were twisted, and his nose, a fleshy mound piled high on his face, was crinkled up as if some gaggingly offensive smell had entered the room.

"No, no, no! That's not what I was talking about at all!" He held up his two hands in an apotropaic gesture. "Not at all, not at all! Spare me, spare us all, such bromides. And above all keep the bad fictions of Charles Darwin out of my classroom. Darwin's fingerprints are all over this poem, indeed! I will not have such infantile slobberings upon the sacred body of literature"-he pronounced it, as always, "lit-er-a-toor"-"not even upon a poem of Matthew Arnold's. And since, Mr. Seltzer, you are a committed Darwinist"-the word came pushed out of his lips as if by peristalsis- "let me inform you that, though Arnold may have published 'Dover Beach' in 1867, he had actually written it sometime between 1849 and 1852. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. If you want to point to such precursors and influences, then do at least check the dates. You'd have been better off citing the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844, by Robert Chambers, a radical journalist. But do, please, have a care for my suffering sensibilities! Now it is Darwinism with which I must contend." He turned his head away so that his mournful countenance fell upon the non-Darwinians in the room. "As I have oft warned those of you who have any proclivity to receive my instruction, most of what passes for science is merest scientism."

The moments while Klapper spoke had at first borne the true marker of a nightmare: too perfect a realization of one's worst fears not to be a dream delivered sizzling from hell. Horrible disbelief was followed by far more horrible belief, and for the remaining hours of this first meeting of "The Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self," as Jonas Elijah Klapper's voice continued without interruption, not even Gideon Raven hazarding a comment, Cass sat unmoving, unhearing, almost unexisting, deliquescing into a numbness that approached the state of being nothing at all.

The two-and-a-half-hour seminar was drawing to a close. Professor Klapper was speaking of next week's assignment, Aristotle's Poetics.

"... answering the challenge that his discarded teacher, Plato, issued after he had symbolically, if not diabolically, banished the poet from his city of reason. As Plato wrote in his Republic"-Klapper was staring off into the inscribed distance-"'Let us, then, conclude our return to the topic of poetry and affirm that we really had good grounds then for dismissing her from our city, ... for reason constrained us. And let us further say to her, lest she condemn us for harshness and rusticity, that there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry.' I skip over a few lines here, not from lack of recall but lack of relevance, and proceed: 'But nevertheless let it be declared that, if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell.'

"Now, my creatures of sweetness and light"-this was one of his endearments for his students-"it is in the context of this gauntlet flung down by Plato that Aristotle's Poetics must be read. Aristotle is answering the older philosopher's challenge by pragmatically-I use the word in the sense of William James, which is my own as well-connecting it to psychopoiesis."

Cass recognized the word from his summer studies of the twenty-eight tomes. Psychopoiesis. Soul-making. The coinage was, so far as Cass knew, Klapper's own, struck out of the ancient Greek.

"Poetry is in the business of psychopoiesis at least as much as philosophy is. And if I might be permitted, humbly, to stand between Plato and Aristotle and offer my emendation, you will hear me fervently whispering 'oh more, far more!'

Cass was suddenly called back into himself by the pain squeezing his heart as he contemplated that all but he and the girl who had voluntarily departed under the professor's gaze would be returning next week to hear the dialogue between Plato, Aristotle, and Jonas Elijah Klapper. Even those three undergraduate lovelies, who had managed, over the course of the seminar, to progress from chattering neophytes to wide-eyed acolytes, would be allowed to attend. He alone was to be cast out for the sin of his unclothed ignorance and arrogance.

And then, suddenly, Jonas Elijah Klapper was addressing him again, all vestiges of vexation vanished.

"Mr. Seltzer, I would like you most especially to pay keen attention to Aristotle's concept of peripeteia. Would you, by blind chance or happy happenstance, happen to know what peripeteia means?"

"Reversal of fortune." Cass's hoarse voice sounded unfamiliar to him. It sounded older, the voice of an ancient knowing that the best has been and will be no more.

"Excellent! Peripeteia! Reversal of fortune! Exceedingly excellent! It's a most un-Darwinian concept, wouldn't you say, my dear boy? Now you are thinking! Yes, until next week's peripeteia, my creatures, my delights!"

And Jonas Elijah Klapper, still beaming, gathered up his books and papers and shambled out the door.

Cass looked up from the table to see forty-two eyes fastened upon him. The three girls looked away so quickly they may have lost a few eyelashes. Only Gideon Raven continued to hold his stare, blankly and noncommittally He pushed back his chair and came over to Cass's side, tossing something onto the table right in front of him.

Cass's first thought was that Gideon Raven was so outraged with him, either for upsetting Jonas Elijah Klapper or, more probably, for the original sin itself, that he wanted to pelt him with a spitball and his aim wasn't good. Cass looked up questioningly, and Raven gave him a little twitch of a smile and then exited from the room, the rest of the seminar silently filing out after him.

Cass looked at the missile. It was a piece of paper that had been folded over many times, until it was the volume of a sugar cube. Cass unfolded it to find a flyer for something called "Sex Week at Frankfurter": Our goal is to promote an open discussion of love, sex, intimacy, and relationships. All sexualities, no matter how alternative, and all individuals, of whatever sexual experience, are welcome. If you would like to get involved contact Shoshy Wasserman at 555-4256 or Hillel Schlessinger at 555-7861.

What did this mean? Could Gideon Raven be so offended that he was insinuating that Cass was of an alternative sexuality? The fire in Cass's face and under his scalp, which had begun to subside, re-flared.

After a few minutes of sitting there alone, it occurred to him to turn the paper over. There, scribbled in chicken scratch, were the words: meet me midnight, view from nowhere Cass had not the hint of a clue as to what these words could mean. Was it a line from a poem? These people were all so formidably well read. Whatever it meant, it must have been given to him because of what had befallen him during the seminar. Did it contain a hint as to what was the nature of the peripeteia that he had just undergone? Was it what he needed to know in order to survive as a student of Jonas Elijah Klapper's?

He trotted over to the Lipschitz Library and up to the reference librarian on duty. She was a woman of about sixty, thin-lipped and spare. The nameplate identified her as Aviva Landesmann.

"Would you have any idea how I could go about finding out what this means?" Cass asked Aviva Landesmann.

She read it aloud, scowled at Cass, and then read it aloud again.

Aviva Landesmann looked familiar somehow. She reminded him of someone, someone who stirred up forgotten love and confusion.

Did psychologists have a word for this sort of thing, a reminding that consists in nothing but a mute emotion that can't name its own object? Was he having a Proustian moment? He wouldn't know. Wherever he turned, he was confronted by the vast ignorance that made him unentitled to be a student of Faith, Literature, and Values.

Aviva Landesmann was staring at the slip of paper. She turned it over and saw the announcement for Sex Week at Frankfurter, and her expression, which was none too encouraging to begin with, curdled with distaste.

"Feh!"

That's when it hit Cass. Aviva Landesmann reminded him of his beloved bubbe, his mother's mother.

His mother always kept the details of her stormy relations with her mother from Cass and Jesse when they were little, but he remembered the unsettling voice from behind the closed door of his mother's bedroom when she phoned his bubbe, terrifying bursts of fury that his mother emitted with no one else. When she emerged, her face white and strained, she could only say that his bubbe had "done it again." He later learned that what Bubbe had done again was what people with borderline personality disorder always do with their intimates: get their goats, push their buttons, pick at their vulnerable spots, draw them into destructive dramas that don't let up until the borderline tastes blood. Then, finally, Bubbe had stepped over some invisible line and had gone too far, even for her. All that Cass knew was that the support group that his mother belonged to, Borderline Offspring Injured Lifelong (BOIL), backed Deb up in her decision. One of the rules in the BOIL handbook was: set the limits of your own tolerance. Deb had reached her limits.

Cass had nevertheless loved his bubbe. He couldn't help himself. She used to sing a special song about a rooster, "Cookooreekoo," just for him. She had spoken in a special cooing voice, just for him, her oldest grandson, whom she called Chaim, his Hebrew name.

"Oy, such a boychik, so shoen"-which means "beautiful"-"so klig"- which means "smart," though it tore up her heart that he was being brought up like a vilda chaya, a wild animal.

Deb always blamed inbreeding for her mother's personality disorder. Deb blamed inbreeding for a great deal. Deb-who was originally Devo-rah Gittel Sheiner-came from a family that belonged to a sect of Ha-sidim, the Valdeners, who had originated in a town called Valden, in Hungary. Almost all the Hasidic sects are named after the towns where their first Grand Rabbi, the founder of his dynastic lineage, had originated, or where he had established his rabbinical court. So there are the Satmars, from Szatmarnemeti, Hungary (now Satu Mare, Romania), the Lubavitchers from Lubavitch, Lithuania, the Breslovers, from Breslov, Ukraine, and at least a dozen sects still surviving from the dozens more there had been before the Second World War. And all of them are crystallized around a charismatic Rebbe, the term that means "my rabbi," with the position of Rebbe passed down through family lines, from father to son or to another male relative, though occasionally there are controversies, splits, factions. Only the Breslovers never saw fit to have any Rebbe but their first, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: a mysterious figure with messianic aspirations, known for his collection of allegorical tales, and himself the great-grandson of the eighteenth century's founder of Hasidism itself, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.

The current Rebbe of the Valdeners, Rav Bezalel Sheiner, also claimed a lineage that could be traced back to the Ba'al Shem Tov. Deb was related, on both her maternal and paternal sides, to the Valdener rabbinic dynasty, though according to her that was nothing to brag about. Valdeners tend to marry each other, so just about everybody was related to everybody.

"And then they wonder about the genetic diseases."

Cass's father, Ben Seltzer, had also come from a fairly observant family, but it was standard modern Orthodox, so Deb's family was exotic to him, too. Both Deb and Ben had wandered far from the religiosity they had each been born into, but Deb had had to travel a lot farther to get to where they were, the non-kosher and non-Sabbath-observing house in which Cass and Jesse had been raised. After Jesse's Bar Mitzvah, his parents had let their membership in the synagogue lapse.

The Valdeners lived in a self-contained village, tucked into the folds near the rocky Palisades edging the Hudson River. It wasn't a gated community, but it might as well have been. Nobody but Valdeners lived in New Walden, except for a few sons-in-law and daughters-in-law who had come over from some other Hasidic sect.

The other sects lived in urban areas-in Jerusalem, or Montreal, or Brooklyn-always in some well-defined section. In Brooklyn it was in Williamsburg and Boro Park, where the Valdeners, too, had settled when they had first come to America. The previous Valdener Rebbe, Reb Yisroel Sheiner, who in the 1930s had shepherded some portion of his flock out of Europe and into safety in the nick of time, had decided in the 1950s, that Brooklyn, too, was getting tzu heiss-too hot-what with the increasing crime rate and the deteriorating relations between the Hasidim and the blacks and Puerto Ricans, not to speak of the high rents that made it difficult for the large Valdener families-average number of children, 6.9-to afford decent housing. The Rebbe had quietly, so as not, God forbid, to raise the fears of the Gentile farmers in the area, purchased a large chicken farm not far from where Rip Van Winkle had snored, and built a self-contained shtetl, the first village in New York State to be completely governed by a religious authority, with the town's mayor being none other than the Grand Rabbi himself, and the aldermen his closest disciples.

The village was to have been called New Valden, but through a county clerk's typing error it had been Americanized to New Walden. The Valdeners had no idea that the spelling mistake brought them into nominal intimacy with the ghost of Henry David Thoreau, sounding the chord of American transcendentalism-visionary, romantic, self-reliantly impractical. The Valdeners knew from Thoreau like they knew from clam chowder.

Cass had only visited New Walden a few times, since his mother hated the village and would go unusually quiet for days before a visit. It was a strange place, where he and Jesse were made to feel outlandish because they didn't dress in short black pants and large black felt hats, didn't have long side curls and speak the language of the place, which was Yiddish. Cass remembered some little boy, maybe a cousin-there were throngs of them, many of them with Cass's and Jesse's red hair-laughing with scorn when they were introduced, some kid named Shloimy or Moishy or Yankel finding the name "Cass" hilarious.

Even though his mother went strange around her, Cass had loved his widowed bubbe. Another thing that was hard to ignore was that his bubbe didn't treat Jesse as nicely as she treated him. It wasn't even clear that Bubbe knew Jesse's name. She called him "little boy." If Jesse came over and tried to climb onto her lap-a space freely offered to Cass-Bubbe would push him away.

"Feh, here he is again. The second tog"-day-"of yom tov"-a holiday- "always schlepping after the first. Why don't you go find your mommy, little boy, and let your older brother enjoy in peace a little?"

Jesse was so shocked by Bubbe's behavior that he would go off without a word of protest, an unusual response for Cass's brother, who could fly off the handle if Cass or his mother or father failed to read his mind concerning something he wanted. Cass always saved for Jesse at least half the babka that Bubbe gave him, even though she would impress upon him that she had made the delicious yeast cake for him "special," as if she had foreseen he might want to share it with the little boy, his brother.

He wasn't allowed to taste the babka, or anything else, until he had made the right blessing, the bracha. If he ever forgot, which he rarely did, his bubbe would purse her lips and say, "Feh! Like an animal, a vilda chaya, he's being brought up. A shanda fur da Yidden." A disgrace for the Jews.

His bubbe had taught him all the brachas that had to be made before eating. There was one for fruit, but another one specifically for grapes, and one for vegetables and one for bread and one that was for a grab bag of things. And, of course, there was a bracha for baked goods, mazoynos, including Bubbe's babka. Bubbe would quiz him closely every time he visited. It wasn't as straightforward as just knowing the general types, since foods could be mixtures, and some of the categories trumped the others. The bracha also depended on how much of something there was and also whether something had been done to the food to make it change its type: the apples in apple juice didn't count as fruit. It was complicated. What if there were raisins in the babka that Bubbe had baked for her little Hasid, her little pious one? Should Chaim make the bracha for the baked good or for the fruit? (The baked good!) And what about cereal? If it was corn flakes, then you have to make the one for vegetables, haadama, for things that grow in the ground. But it if was Cheerios, then you said mazoynos.

You also had to be careful about silverware and dishes, never mixing up the dairy with the meat. It had been poor Jesse's fate to have mixed some Bosco into his milk with a teaspoon from the wrong drawer, and Bubbe's wrath had been biblical. She had taken both boys out to the backyard and shown them how now she had to stick the spoon in the dirt to clean it. Dirt to clean? When they had asked their mother, she had answered in a way uncharacteristically terse: "If it seems crazy to you, you understand it perfectly."

Cass could have asked his mother to review the brachas with him. She still knew everything, including Yiddish. But he could tell that she would rather he didn't master his brachas too well.

Funny that he could still miss his bubbe, even though by now he understood a lot more about the personality disorder that had made her decide that Chaim was git-good-and the "little boy" who was his brother was nish git. She had died when Cass was a junior in college, but she had been banished from their lives long before then, with the full approval of BOIL.

When he came back after the interval that Aviva Landesmann had specified to him, she had something better to offer him than babka. It was The View from Nowhere, by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Cass thanked Aviva much more than she was probably used to being thanked and went off to his carrel, three flights below ground level in the Lipschitz Library.

The basic idea in The View from Nowhere is that we humans have the unique capacity to detach ourselves from our own particular point of view, achieving degrees of objectivity, all the way up to and including the view of how things are in themselves, from no particular viewpoint at all. This is what Nagel calls the View from Nowhere, and he analyzes all sorts of philosophical problems by showing how they arise out of the clash of the subjective point of view with the View from Nowhere.

The View from Nowhere was hard going, but Cass kept plugging along, at first motivated simply by his burning desire to get to the bottom of Gideon Raven's gnomic message. But then Cass got to a section that made him forget all about gleaning any clues to his afternoon's ordeal.

BEING SOMEONE.

One acute problem of subjectivity remains even after points of view and subjective experience are admitted to the real world-after the world is conceded to be full of people with minds, having thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that cannot be completely subdued by the physical conception of objectivity. The general admission still leaves us with an unsolved problem of particular subjectivity. The world so conceived, though extremely various in the types of things and perspectives it contains, is still centerless. It contains us all, and none of us occupies a metaphysically privileged position. Yet each of us, reflecting on this centerless world, must admit that one large fact seems to have been omitted from its description: the fact that a particular person in it is himself.

What kind of fact is that? What kind of fact is it-if it is a fact-that I am Thomas Nagel? How can I be a particular person?

Cass only realized he had been holding his breath when he let it out. Here was the bedtime metaphysics that used to exercise him to the point of hyperventilation being described with precision by a prominent philosopher. (Thomas Nagel sounded prominent from the book jacket.) Cass here, Jesse there. The ritual used to send him hurtling so far outside himself that, night after night, he had become frightened that he might never find his way back in again, might never be able to take for granted that he was who he was. Cass had never hoped to find another person who could understand the strange state he used to induce in himself, and he had certainly never guessed that it might be shared by a philosopher.

It can seem that as far as what I really am is concerned, any relation I may have to TN or any other objectively specified person must be accidental and arbitrary. I may occupy TN or see the world through the eyes of TN, but I can't be TN. I can't be a mere person. From this point of view it can appear that "I am TN," insofar as it is true, is not an identity but a subject-predicate proposition. Unless you have had this thought yourself, it will probably seem obscure, but I hope to make it clearer.

He became so caught up in The View from Nowhere, the dense mass of its distinctions parting for him like the sea, that he forgot the whole point of why he was reading it.

He wasn't sure whether Professor Klapper would approve of Thomas Nagel. The style of The View from Nowhere was of the sort to send Jonas Elijah Klapper fleeing for protection from "the talismanic attachment of certain philosophers to logic. No thinker worth our contemplation is going to be held back by the Law of Non-Contradiction, which I do not recall being ratified with my approval."

Cass heard the gong of the ten-minute warning and crash-landed back into Cass here. He thought he understood the reason why Gideon Raven had tossed him a spitball commending The View from Nowhere. It was precisely so that what had happened to him over the course of the last few hours would happen. Somehow or other, maybe even because Gideon Raven had gone through a similar baptism by fire, he'd known the right salve. Nothing but extra-strength objectivity could help.

Cass emerged from his narrow cell a minute or two before the library was going to close at midnight. The rows of carrels lining the walls down here in the bowels of the library were disgorging a thin stream of pale and brooding graduate students. Just a few carrels down from Cass was Gideon Raven, sliding his door shut behind him, giving the combination lock an extra, paranoid twist.

Raven spotted him and came over, taking the book out of Cass's hand and reading the title with raised eyebrows.