The Argument from the Improbable Self

Me recomiendo altamente esta novela que me compré en Venecia (al ir recomendada por Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Safran Foer e Ian McEwan)— 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, de Rebecca Goldstein, filósofa de la religión, novelista y persona de aterradora y certera inteligencia. Versa sobre las experiencias externas e internas de Cass Seltzer, "el ateo con alma", autor de Varieties of Religious Illusion y refutador de los 36 argumentos. Así termina el primer capítulo, "The Argument from the Improbable Self":

Here it is, then: the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing, one comes into it, astonishingly, here one is formed by biology and history, genes and culture, in the midst of the contingency of the world, here one is, one doesn't know how, one doesn't know why, and suddenly one doesn't know where one is either or who or what one is either, and all that one knows is that one is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it, and one wants to live in a way that at least begins to do justice to it, one wants to expand one's reach of it as far as expansion is possible and even beyond that, to live one's life in a way commensurate with the privilege of being a part of and conscious of the whole reeling glorious infinite sweep, a sweep that includes, so improbably, a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer, who, moved by powers beyond himself, did something more improbable than all the improbabilites constituting his improbable existence could have entailed, did something that won him someone else's life, a better life, a more brilliant life, a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings, because all of this, this, this, THIS couldn't belong to him, to the man who stands on Weeks Bridge, wrapped round in a scarf his once-beloved ex-wife Pascale had knit for him for some necessary reason that he would never know, perhaps to offer him some protection against the desolation she knew would soon be his, and was, but is no longer, suspended here above sublimity, his cheeks aflame with either euphoria or frostbite, a letter in his zippered pocket with the imprimatur of Veritas and a Lucinda Mandelbaum with whom to share it all.

The Fleeting Systems Lapse Like Foam

 

 

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