The phone rang at nine, and I crawled up out of a stupor miles deep to answer it. It was Shirin, explaining something far too intricate for me to comprehend on less than four hours of sleep. I asked her to go over it again, slowly, and finally got it straight. There was one speaking engagement B had been unable to talk his way out of, and it was today in Stuttgart. In order to reach it on time, we would have to board a train at eleven, and I was welcome to come with them to Stuttgart or to stay in Radenau, it was up to me. I told her I’d meet them at the Bahnhof at ten-fifty. I hung up and quickly decided that a shower and breakfast were more important than another hour of sleep.
There was something on my mind that I needed to explore on paper, so I took a notebook down to the dining room with me and wrote as follows:
There is only one degree of having faith, but there are fifty degrees of losing it. I feel I should carry this weighty observation on a separate piece of paper so I can whip it out for study whenever I feel the need: Only one degree of having faith, but fifty of losing it.
I think I know one priest who has faith in that one degree that deserves the name of faith. All the rest, including me, are at one of those fifty degrees of losing it. Most of my parishioners would probably consider this a shocking admission, but I don’t think it is. Of course there are priests who have gone beyond the fifty degrees and have walked away from the ministry. Everyone knows that, and I’ve known half a dozen of them myself. But the rest of us are still hanging on, by knees and elbows and fingertips and eyelashes and teeth and fingernails. This is actually reassuring, I think, because it shows that none of us wants to lose his faith or wants to think of himself as having lost it. Admittedly, this is partly just cowardice; we know that, once our faith is gone, the religious life will become utterly intolerable and we’ll have to move on, out into an unknown world. But it’s also partly because we have enough faith to want to go on having faith. When that amount of faith is gone, however, then it’s all gone, and you’re at the fifty-first degree. You’re out, you’re finished.
I figure I’m at something like the thirty-fourth degree. When I was fifteen, I was at the one degree that means faith. When I entered the seminary, I was at the third degree of losing faith. At my ordination, I was at the twelfth degree. When I walked into Fr. Lulfre’s office three weeks ago, I was at the twenty-fifth. The fact that I’m at the thirty-fourth now probably sounds pretty bad, but actually it isn’t. I was afraid (when I sat down here to do this soul-searching) that I was going to turn out to be at some really scary degree like forty-seven. I mean, when you’re at forty-seven, you’re really at the precipice. Three more degrees, and over you go!
To Stuttgart
The party of travelers consisted of B, Shirin, Michael, and me. As we shook hands, Michael for the first time gave me a surname by which to know him, though I can only guess at its spelling. It sounded like Dershinsky. Shirin was businesslike and neutral. B seemed gloomy and preoccupied.
No one was in a conversational mood, except possibly Michael, who kept giving me friendly nods and winks but otherwise seemed to be reining in his good mood out of deference to Shirin and B. After we were under way for ten minutes, I piped up to ask what the speaking engagement was. No one seemed keen to tell me. Finally B explained that it had been organized by a man and a woman at the university there who knew and wanted to promote B’s views on population.
“You don’t seem wildly enthusiastic about it,” I said.
“My views on this subject always generate a lot of rage.”
“Rage among whom? The Catholics?”
“No, not at all. The Marxists.”
“Why the Marxists?”
He shrugged and turned his gaze out the window. Michael and Shirin each gave me a little shake of the head to warn me off.
In Hamburg we changed trains to something faster and slightly less austere, but the atmosphere remained bleak and didn’t improve when we broke out the box lunches Michael had picked up for us at the Hamburg station.
Halfway to Stuttgart, B said to Sh
irin, “Why don’t you tell Jared the story of the Imperial Chill?”
If I read the progress of her thoughts right, she didn’t much care for the suggestion but was as bored as everyone else. To add a bit of encouragement, I unpacked my tape recorder and got it going.
Surprisingly, she betrayed no signs of self-consciousness or embarrassment (I certainly would have betrayed some). Instead, she spent a minute gathering herself, then launched into it like a professional actress.
The Imperial Chill
“The Imperial Chill had been an imperial preoccupation for so long that no one was counting centuries anymore. That it was genetic was obvious, of course, but this knowledge helped no one—certainly not the shivering Emperor. Every academic and scientific discipline in the realm had a chilly aspect. Every scholar and scientist was to some degree or in some sense working on the problem, which was generally agreed to be metabolic and probably dietary. There was of course nothing wrong with the emperor’s diet, but it was assumed that some adjustment (possibly quite infinitesimal) would turn the trick and give His Highness relief. There were acorn diets and apple diets—and watercress diets and zucchini diets at the other end of the alphabet. Every university depended on its subsidy for research on the tempering effects of diet and food—research that everyone knew could be effortlessly spun out till the end of time.
“One day, however, the Prime Minister called a press conference and announced that a breakthrough had been made. Of course, breakthroughs had been announced before and had always come to nothing, so no one was really worried—till they saw the look on the Prime Minister’s face. This time (that look told them) something uncomfortably new was in the offing.”
Shirin paused and asked B whether she should finish it then or wait till later.
“Oh, finish it now,” B said grumpily. “Then he can be thinking about it.”
Shirin continued.
“The Prime Minister’s announcement (that the cause of the Imperial Chill had been found) was shockingly brief—and was followed by a shocked silence, which soon became a murmur of horror, disbelief, and denial. The truth of the minister’s words was not what outraged his listeners. What outraged them was the idea that, after defeating the best minds of a dozen generations, the Emperor’s chilliness could be explained so simply. The feeling seemed to be that critical problems (like the Emperor’s chill) must absolutely have complex and impenetrable causes, and they must absolutely be difficult (and perhaps even impossible) to solve. As he wandered aimlessly through the crowd, one dazed scholar was heard to mutter over and over, ‘There are no easy answers, there are no easy answers, there are no easy answers’—not with any real conviction now but rather as if repetition might restore vitality to these familiar, comforting words.
“What was distressing them was not the fact that the cause of the chill was now known but rather the fact that it had always been known—but never as a cause. It had stared them in the face, and looking beyond it to remote and unintelligible causes, they had missed its significance. Throughout the empire, there was literally no one who was ignorant of the fact that their shivering monarch … had … no … clothes.”
• • •
To say that I didn’t know what to say to this would be an understatement. Luckily, it seemed that no response was expected. B continued to stare listlessly out the window. Without so much as a glance at her audience, Shirin picked up the book she’d been reading. Only Michael acknowledged that anything at all had occurred, winking me some of his abundant reassurance.
It hadn’t even been much of a break. I snuck my tape recorder away, feeling rather like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who had so many experiences of this sort, getting herself all set up for exciting entertainments that didn’t turn out to be entertainments at all.