Lost in the Cosmos

tourist from Moline, Illinois, a Catholic priest, a radio repairman, a Marxist technician.
    Some of the ten feel that they transcend the others. That is to say, he or she may feel that by virtue of a certain education, a certain wisdom, a certain talent, a certain gnosis, he stands in such a relation to the others that he can understand them and they can’t understand him.
    For example, the English novelist can perhaps be said to transcend the Illinois tourist, understand him and his camera—in fact, has written about him—in a sense in which the tourist does not understand the novelist.
    The physicist and his assistant, both of whom are amateur anthropologists, profess to have an understanding of both the Indian dancers and the Catholic priest which neither the priest nor the dancers profess to have of the physicist and his assistant.
    The young Indian dancer believes that he transcends the old Indian dancer because he, the young Indian, has put behind him myth and superstition for a world of science and progress.
    The old Indian dancer believes that he transcends the young dancer because he, the old Indian, has kept the cosmological myths by which the world, life, and time are integrated into a meaningful whole while the deranged Western society in Albuquerque goes to pieces.
    A similar symmetrical relation of transcendence exists between the physicist and the novelist. The physicist believes that science—i.e., psychology—can at least in principle explain what makes the novelist tick by taking account of his early repressions, his later sublimations, and so on. Whereas the novelist, famous for his sharp eye and his knack for sizing up people and rendering them with a few deft strokes, has already “placed” the American scientist just as he has placed the tourist and the Indians.
    There are three questions to keep in mind while reading the following summary of the various modes of transcendence and immanence of the ten characters.
    Question (I): Is there any sense in which it can be said truthfully that this or that member of the cast does in fact transcend some other member? Or are the ten no more or less than as described, a cast of characters, and therefore no judgment of transcending superiority or immanent inferiority can be objectively arrived at?
    Question (II): But in a play it is sometimes fair to say that one character is better or worse than another. There are, after all, good people and bad people. Can you say, then, that some of the ten are better or worse than the others? If so, are the best also the most transcendent?
    Question (III): Which character do you most nearly identify with? Which character would you rather be?
    (a) A nuclear physicist: a youngish scientist, hard at work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He is having, as Freeman Dyson put it, the best time of his life, embarked as he is on a top-secret project set down in a wilderness with an elite of an elite, the best scientific brains in the Western world, even though he knows he is making a weapon which will almost certainly kill thousands of human beings and may very well spell man’s ultimate self-destruction. Yet he is no narrowly educated scientist. His interests are far-ranging. He is by way of being an amateur ethnologist, a student of Oriental philosophy, and a member of a competent if unprofessional string quartet. He can speak as readily of Ramakrishna and Beethoven’s last quartets as he does of Planck and Fermi.
    As he watches the Corn Dance, he is engaged in an animated conversation with his assistant, a handsome blond girl. It is mostly a lecture, to which she gives her rapt attention. He compares the festivals and ceremonials of the different pueblos. Taos is rather ordinary. She ought to see the Corn Dance at Santo Domingo! On the feast day of the saint, the Catholic and tribal religions converge in a nice way characteristic of the tolerant pueblos. The statue of St. Dominic is taken from the church, paraded through the streets to the accompaniment of snare drums and gunshots, then stuck up on a cottonwood branch to enjoy the native ceremonial. In his low, earnest voice, he tells her of the pueblo equivalent of the Virgin Mary: “They call her the Spider Grandmother or Thought Woman, who created all things by thinking them into existence. Rather nice, don’t you think?”
    “Oh yes! Oh yes!” murmurs his assistant, leaning toward him.
    (b) His assistant, a tall striking blonde, a graduate student from