He knows now, too, from the profiles, that though he’s a tall and lanky man-well, of course, that he knew-he carries himself as if he weren’t, as if, as one of the features had put it, “he’s almost apologetic to be taking up so much vertical space.” It’s actually less embarrassing to read these personal descriptions of himself than he would have imagined. It’s hard to take the person featured in these articles seriously as the Cass Seltzer that he’s known all his life.
Cass is still trying to assimilate the fact that his book has become an international sensation, translated into twenty-seven languages, including Latvian. He understands that it’s not just a matter of what he’s written-as much as he’d like to believe it is-but also a matter of the rare intersection of the preoccupations of his lifetime with the turmoil of the age. When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience-so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost-and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, he’d had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.
He would never have dubbed himself an atheist in the first place, not because he believes-he certainly doesn’t-but because he believes that belief is beside the point. It’s the Appendix that’s pushed him into the role of atheism’s spokesperson, a literary afterthought that has remade his life.
Tomorrow morning, he will meet with Shimmy Baumzer, the president of Frankfurter University, who will affect his I’m-just-a-hick-from-a-kibbutz demeanor, the better to cover up just how masterful an operator he is.
“What do I have to offer you to keep you from deserting us for those shmendriks up the river?” Cass knows that Baumzer will say to him, because that’s what he had said to Cass’s former colleague Marty Huffer, now at Harvard, three years ago, when Huffer’s research on the psychology of happiness had hit the big time in a book that a mainstream publisher had brought out to a sizable audience and which had been Huffer’s ticket out of Frankfurter.
