I wrote a post about our new president’s inauguration speech, where I analyzed it and made some facile comparisons to John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” but I decided not to publish it because it was turning into a mess. Let me say this, though: unlike a few of the early reviewers I have read, I felt this was an amazing speech, though perhaps in a darker tone and in a more minor key than some of the critics may have wanted. The speech seemed to be written for adults, grown-ups who could handle hearing real things without fainting away. The rhetoric was, for the most part, tight and controlled, with some sharp lines. It did not soar, but it was focused and direct, more like the flight of an arrow than that of an eagle.
But what I wanted to talk about today was Alan Lightman’s short novel Ghost, before I forget the points I want to make about it. It is a quick read, and not nearly as frightening as the title might lead you to believe, but it left me feeling deeply uneasy. The action has a distant feel to it, as if we were watching the events take place on a small television screen all the way on the other side of the room, and someone has draped a thin veil over the screen. There are some moments that call to mind Kazuo Ishiguro’s difficult novel The Unconsoled. Ghost does not have the same complicated plot or maddeningly opaque dreamlike sequences, but it did have a similar sense that things might not be happening as they appear to be.
The novel begins with a short introductory chapter where a demented-seeming narrator rambles almost incoherently about the thing he saw. He voice becomes frantic as the panic threatens to overcome him and he sees his reason wavering precariously. Like an obsessive lunatic, he keeps circling back to the thing he did or did not see. Was it real? Was it a trick of the light? Was it his imagination? Ultimately, he begins to ask a much more fundamental and even more terrifying question: What do any of these things mean? He convinces himself that the best solution is to do what “she” told him to do and write his story down.
The narration then shifts to a very tight third-person. The prose is stark and austere, but in that austerity it conceals as much as it reveals. We are introduced to Davide Kurzweil, a man who does not seem to have left a huge impression on the world so far. He had been a competent, but ultimately redundant figure at his bank, and he was fired. Desperate for a job, he becomes an apprentice at a mortuary. There, in the “slumber room,” he sees something. What he sees is never clearly revealed, and we do not even have David’s description of his vision until two-thirds of the way through the book. Our belief or disbelief in his vision thus hinges not on what he tells us but on what we already believe.
David tells a couple of acquaintances what he saw, and the story eventually finds its way out into the world, where it stirs up interest among the tabloids, those desperate to speak to their dead relatives, and a group of quasi-scientists calling themselves the Second World Society. He eventually agrees to submit to some tests to determine if he is directing energy, a so-called “intentionality force,” that can be measured by a computer. One of the tests suggests that he can creates a strong force, and his story becomes even larger and louder.
The controversy over his “powers” reaches a critical point when scientists at the local university feel that his notoriety is threatening rational scientific discourse. They argue for another series of tests, and David again agrees. The results are cloudy and show a distinct pattern when you tilt your head just so; in other words, both sides of the debate feel vindicated.
While all this is going on, David is haunted by memories of his ex-wife, Bethany, an ethereal presence who seems just as disconnected and vague as David himself. She longed for passion but settled into a boring, joyless second marriage for no discernable reason. David’s obsession with her parallels his obsession with his ghostly vision. Both the ghost and Bethany are pale apparitions who perhaps represent some unfulfilled desire but might also be nothing more than damaged old memories. David’s most vivid memory of Bethany is the time the two of them stumbled across an abandoned boxcar in the middle of a field. Inside the boxcar were huge bags of flour. Inspired by some inchoate desire, Bethany strips and rubs the flour all over her body until she is all a ghostly white except for the pink of her mouth and her nipples. The story is so remarkable, so unlikely, that, as David remembers it again and again, it begins to seem less and less like something that really happened and more and more like a dream.
As all of this is happening, we are encouraged to think about the nature of belief and our trust in our own perceptions. How do we know that what we see is real? How do we separate possible phenomena from impossible? When David talks to an old friend who is a chemistry professor at the local university, he tries to get the professor to admit that it is possible that David saw a ghost. The professor adamantly refuses to give any ground to such a belief, and we come away with the sense that the scientific rational mind may be just as trapped by its own belief systems as the superstitious, irrational mind. If it does not fit his understanding of the possible, the professor tells him, he will not believe it, even if he were to see it with his own eyes.
It is easy to categorize this novel as one that frames the debate between science and belief, but it is more complicated than that. It is also about the complexity of our perceptions and how they are both influenced by our surroundings and influence them in turn. Even more, it is about the singularity of our experience, the utter impossiblity of escaping our subjective positions and the miraculous nature of that web of imperfect perceptions. “The seconds and years stretch into infinity,” he writes in the last paragraph, “but a thing might be felt only at one moment. It might be there, the world underneath and the miracle, but felt only in brief, fleeting stabs.” The final lines take this further, and end with this haunting image: “This instant, this light falling, this table, this chair, it is all more than it seems. But how can he put the thing into words.”
This novel ultimately offers a fascinating secular and even scientific (Lightman teaches theoretical physics at MIT) interpretation of the line from Corinthians, “through a glass darkly.” Or, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, we cannot see to see.
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The Hobgoblin of Little Minds 