Fun with Marxists and others
We were met at the station by our hosts, a middle-aged couple with a car into which five might conceivably squeeze, but not six by any means short of dismemberment. The problem was easily solved: Michael and I followed in a taxi. This ride gave me a new insight into him; he’d not been silent in the train out of deference to B and Shirin, he’d been silent out of sheer, desperate shyness—even more acutely projected now, when he might have talked as much as he liked. I made a couple efforts to draw him out but soon understood that he really preferred to remain in the background and never step forward into the light.
The taxi deposited us in front of a vast, neo-Gothic prison of a school, and we were led upstairs to a classroom that would have depressed a barrelful of monkeys. My heart sank as I saw it. Some twenty silent spectators were scattered through the room, half of them with the air of actors psyching themselves up to read for the role of Cassius in Julius Caesar. B, Shirin, and the host couple were at the front, chatting—or trying to give the impression of chatting.
Michael and I shuffled off to the back. A few minutes later Shirin took a seat in the front row, and B was introduced at length (and in German). I’d decided not to tape B’s speech, since I’d eventually have to transcribe it anyway, but I hadn’t counted on its being his longest presentation to date.*
I wasn’t prepared for what I heard—not that I ever was when it came to B. This material was extraordinary, unlike anything I’d ever heard or read on the subject, and as it unfolded I began to see the point of the story of the Imperial Chill. B was bringing to light crucial facts as far beyond argument as the Emperor’s nakedness (or so I naively imagined). When he was finished, about seven people applauded, two of them being our hosts and three of them being Shirin, Michael, and me.
Looking drained to the point of collapse, B began fielding questions—or rather disquisitions and rebuttals, all in German. Michael leaned in my direction to explain that by declining to use English (which they obviously understood), they were demonstrating their contempt for B’s views.
Before answering them, B summarized their questions in English (presumably for my benefit). As far as I could understand them, they simply denied everything B had said—an interesting approach, I thought. At the end of it (or when he got tired of it), he concluded with a little epilogue to the Imperial Chill, which he directed to me:
“When the scholars in the capital of the Chilly Emperor had had a few days to think things over, they began to recover their wits and to see that all was not lost to them after all. They called a press conference that was twice as solemn as the Prime Minister’s and three times as well attended. After the various media representatives had been wined and dined regally, the head of the Royal Commission for Chilly Research called the meeting to order and made the following announcement. ‘It’s perfectly true that the Emperor is naked,’ he said. ‘We have always known this and have always chosen to ignore it, because it’s a red herring. The causes of the Emperor’s condition are many, complex, and difficult for laymen to understand—and they cannot be reduced to this single, childish notion: that he is cold because he’s wearing nothing but his birthday suit. The suggestion that warm clothing might alleviate the Emperor’s discomfort is charming and well meant but will not be recommended for implementation or further study.’ Following this announcement, the Prime Minister was dismissed for incompetence, the scholars’ grants were all renewed, and the Emperor went on shivering into a snowy old age.”
B thanked his listeners and stepped away in the midst of a bemused silence. Evidently some sort of polite social follow-up had been planned for us, but we skipped it in order to catch a train back to Hamburg. As luck would have it, this late-night train was of the cozy, old-fashioned sort, with separate compartments.
Between Stuttgart and Frankfurt
“Remind me never to do this again,” B said once we were settled in.
“I reminded you before you agreed to go in the first place,” Shirin noted dryly.
“You didn’t do it forcefully enough.”
Michael cleared his throat and said, “You never know when you might have planted a seed,” and then turned an amazing shade of s
carlet.
“It’s kind of you to say that, Michael,” B said gently, “but that was mighty hard ground.”
“It was indeed.”
“Where did we leave off last night?” B asked me a few minutes later.
I thought for a bit and said, “You’d just made this point, that what the authors of the story of the Fall saw in our agricultural revolution was not a new technology but a new worldview that makes us out to be as wise as the gods—wise enough to wield the power of life and death over the world.”
B nodded. “I’m glad we got that far, but that’s the easy part of what we have to accomplish.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s easy enough to imagine what was going on when the universe was born, because we see the universe every time we lift our eyes to the sky. But it’s very, very difficult to imagine what was going on before the universe was born.”
“Nothing was going on before the universe was born. By definition.”
“Precisely.”
I shook my head. “You’ll have to relate this to our subject here.”
“It’s easy for us to understand what those first farmers had in mind when they settled down to live in villages. It’s easy for us to understand what bronze-age traders had in mind as they caravanned their wares over hundreds of miles between Thebes and Heracleopolis and Damascus and Assur and Ur. It’s easy for us to understand what the empire builders of Akkad and Sumer had in mind, what the builders of the Great Wall of China had in mind, what the builders of the colossal pyramids of Egypt had in mind. I trust you see what I mean—I could obviously go on piling up examples for hours.”
“I see what you mean.”
“We understand what they had in mind because they were doing what we would do in their place. They were our cultural kin. These were people who saw the world as we see it and who saw Man’s place in the world as we see it.”
“I understand.”
“But when we look back beyond our agricultural revolution into the human past, we no longer understand what people had in mind. We don’t understand what they had in mind as they lived through tens of thousands of years without trade and commerce, without empires or kingdoms or even villages, without accomplishments of any kind.”