City of God (7 page)

Of course, the universe we have all known and seen since our childhoods is only apparently explained by the great, esteemed Sir Isaac Newton. That universe, with all the stars in the heavens and the planets turning in their orbits and night following day, and actions having reactions and objects in their gravity falling—all of it seems quite sound except to a mind like mine, nor is it the only one. Because my revered Sir Isaac's mechanical model of the universe makes one or two assumptions that cannot be proven. The idea of absolute motion and absolute rest, for example, the idea that something can move in an absolute sense without reference to anything else. This is clearly impossible, a concept that cannot be proven empirically, by reference to experience. The ship that moves on the sea does so with reference to the land. Or if you prefer with reference to another ship, moving at a greater speed or a slower speed. Or by reference to a dirigible overhead. Or to a whale beneath the sea. Or to the currents of the sea itself. Always to something. And this is true of a planet as well. There is nothing in the universe that can be proven to move absolutely without reference to something else in the universe, or for that matter without reference to the universe in its entirety.

Now, that is a very simple insistence upon which all my further thought is based. That absolute motion and absolute rest are false concepts that cannot be demonstrated. But you see the implications are enormous of this picky stubborn insistence of mine that we deal with these things only insofar as they can be proven. I'll show you, it's very simple. We will do a little thought experiment. . .

If I am in a rocket ship flying through space at millions of miles an hour. . . and you catch up to me in your rocket ship and decelerate your engines so that we are flying at the same speed side by side. . .
and a person asleep in each of our rocket ships wakes up and looks from his window into the other's window. . . without seeing the meteorites and bits of star material whizzing or drifting by. . . but seeing only into each other's cabin. . . they will not be able to say if the rocket ships are moving uniformly together or not moving at all. Because in either case the experience is the same.

You see how simple that is? I am really a simple man and I begin with the questions that a child would ask. For example, I was not much more than a child when I wondered what would happen if I traveled at the speed of light. Nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. You know what that means? That means there are no instantaneous processes in our universe, because nothing can occur faster than light can move and light takes time to get from one place to another. That means for example that a person cannot be in two places at the same time. Also for example that there cannot be the ghosts which are cherished by so many people, because ghosts no more than anyone else can appear and disappear as if having taken no time to travel from one place to another. So what I realized when I was a child was that if I were traveling as fast as light while holding a mirror before me, I would not see my image in the mirror, because as fast as the image of my face in light moved toward the mirror, why, just as fast would the mirror be moving away. And there would be nothing I could see in the mirror I was holding up to my face. Yet that does not seem right. It doesn't feel that this would be the case, does it? It is a rather frightening idea, in fact, that if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflected light such as a mirror. I would be like a ghost in the universe, materially unverifiable in the stream of time.

So from this simple thought experiment I deduced the following: No object, neither mirror nor person, even a thinner person than myself, one who did not indulge in the Sacher torte or tea with raspberry jam or a scone with butter, no, not even the thinnest person alive can move through the universe with the speed of light. Because we are always visible to ourselves in our mirrors and to each other, we must move more slowly than that, though light itself is moving from the surface of our dear faces and from our mirrors at the same constant ultimate speed. We ourselves are slower than that. Even in our fastest
rocket ships. Do you know what would happen if we moved toward or closer to the speed of light, going faster and faster, from zero miles an hour to one hundred and eighty-three million miles a second? Do you know what would happen to us? My goodness, we would get so leaden, heavier and heavier the faster we went, until our immense weight or density would be so great that the space around us would curve toward us and we would suck space into such density around us that. . . as fast as we might go, the less we would have the chance of attaining the speed of light. . . because the faster we moved, the more mass we would have and the more mass, the greater the resistance to our progress. . . until the celestial heaven around us would curl and bend and warp itself and us out of all recognition.

And from these few simple thoughts, perhaps simpleminded thoughts, I have discovered laws, physical laws, that alarm people to such a degree that they have decided the man in the street cannot be made to realize what I'm talking about, the revolution I have supposedly made. That I am some sort of genius to respect or even venerate while you scratch your head and say, God bless him. Look how funny, his hair is sticking up in every direction, perhaps from his having tried to fly into his mirror at the speed of light. Look at his sweatshirt, his unpressed trousers, not that this is practical for work but that forgetting to wear a coat and tie, he must be a genius. The chalk with which he writes his secret formulas on the blackboard, the chalk breaks in his hand! All this is the way the press and the radio people have relieved you of thinking about what I have to say. It is an insult not only to me but to you, because of course the human mind can always find out the truth, because however hidden it may be, eventually it will emerge. And nothing I have discovered is revolutionary, because I am seeing only what has always been as it is now and as far as I can tell always will be. It is only that our perception has become more. . . perceptive.

So: after all, we may with assurance say only the following about the Old One's universe: that nothing is constant other than the speed of light.

Of space all we may say with assurance is that it is something you measure with a ruler.

And of time all we may say is that it is something you measure with a clock.

But for the theological visions and screams and terrors this produces in our brains, I beg you do not hold me responsible.

—There are no science songs to speak of. No song tells you the force of gravity is a product of the masses of two objects divided by the ratio of the distance between them. Yet science teaches us something about song: Scientific formulas describe the laws by which the universe operates and suggest in equations that a balance is possible even when things are in apparent imbalance. So do songs. Songs are compensatory. When a singer asks, Why did you do this to me, why did you break my heart. . . the inhering formula is that the degree of betrayal is equivalent to the eloquence of the cry of pain. Feelings transmute as quickly and perversely as subatomic events, and when there is critical mass a song erupts, but the overall amount of pure energy is constant. And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.

—An odd sighting on the dock, a great blue heron looking out one way, almost back to back with a snowy-white egret peering in the opposite direction. This is why everyone should sometimes leave the city.

With the same food sources, I wonder that they get along, but there they stand with that mutual disregard.
I'm not looking, but I know you're there.
The egret breaks first, the neck outstretched, the yellow bayonet beak extended, a beautiful bird in flight, sleek, like a Pre-Raphaelite seaplane, but with merciless eyes. . . and the heron, looking rumpled with its round black shoulder patch, the feathered body more gray than blue, the long legs, feet, and beak black. It is a less comely bird, a less spiffy bird than the egret, although with its huge wingspan as it takes off low over the water it does achieve an airliner's stateliness. But there is a degree of sorrow in its gaze, and it is clearly a
loner, a bachelor sort of bird who could use some female attention, some sprucing up, like me.

—Heist

A phone call from Rabbi Joshua:

If we're going to be detectives about this. . . we start with what we know, isn't that what you did? What I know, what I start with, is that no Jewish person would have stolen your crucifix. It would not occur to him. Even in the depths of some drug-induced confusion.

I shouldn't think so, I say, thinking, Why does Joshua feel he has to rule this out?

The police told you your cross had no value on the street. But if someone wants it, then it has value.

To an already-in-place, raging anti-Semite, for example.

Yes, that's the likelihood. This is a mixed, multicultural neighborhood. There may be people who don't like a synagogue on their block. I've not been made aware of this, but it's always possible.

Right.

But it's also possible. . . placing that cross on my roof, well, that is something that could have been arranged by an ultra-Orthodox fanatic. That's possible too.

Good God!

I'm not saying this is so. I'm just trying to consider all the possibilities. There are some for whom what Sarah and I are doing, struggling to redesign, revalidate our tradition—well, in their eyes it is tantamount to apostasy.

I don't buy it, I said. I mean, I can't think it's likely. Why would it be?

The voice that told me my roof was burning? That was a Jewish thing to say. Of course I don't know for sure, I may be all wrong. But it's something to think about. Tell me, Father—

Tom—

Tom. You're a bit older, you've seen more, perhaps you've given more thought to these things. Wherever you look in the world now, God belongs to the atavists. And they're so fierce, these people, so
sure of themselves, as if all human knowledge since Scripture is not also God's revelation! I mean, is time a loop? Do you have the same feeling I have—that everything seems to be running backwards? That civilization is in reverse?

Oh my dear rabbi. Joshua. What can I tell you? If it's true and God truly does belong to the atavists, then that's what faith is and what faith does. And we are stranded, you and I.

-Monday

The front doors are padlocked. In the rectory kitchen, leaning back on the two hind legs of his chair and reading
People
magazine, is St. Timothy's newly hired, classically indolent private security guard.

I am comforted too by the woman at Ecstatic Reps. She is there, as usual, walking in place, earphones clamped on her head, her large hocks in their black tights shifting up and dropping back down like Sisyphean boulders. As the afternoon darkens she'll be broken up and splashed in the greens and pale lavenders of the light refractions on the window.