Lost in the Cosmos

masters of characteristic reentry modes, especially travel (geographical and sexual) and disguises. It is no coincidence that the English are not only the best actors in the world but the best spies. The modern Englishman can become anyone else. The prototypical Englishman of the twentieth century is not John Bull or Colonel Blimp but Lawrence in Arabia, Olivier in The Entertainer, Maugham in the Secret Service.
    Do you think it is an accident that all the best writers of spy novels are English?
    (8) Refusal of reentry and exitus forever into deep space, which is to say, suicide. Suicide, strangely enough, though the direst of options, is often the most honest, in the sense that the suicide may have run out of the other options and found them lacking. Suicide, that is to say, is arguably a more logical option than a constant recycling of past options—from booze to Spain to broads and back, from booze to Spain and so on; from cruising Buena Vista Park for the five hundredth fellatio.
    (9) Reentry deferred: Self on indefinite hold in orbit. That is to say, the withdrawal of the artist. E.g., Salinger in the woods, Proust in the cork-lined room. Thus, there is no a priori semiotic reason, after all, why the self must reenter the world. It can simply maintain the artistic posture throughout the day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, and have no more to do with the world than a Carthusian monk who receives his food through a turnstile.
    (10) Reentry under the direct sponsorship of God. It is theoretically possible, if practically extremely difficult, to reenter the world and become an intact self through the reentry mode Kierkegaard described when he noted that “the self can only become itself if it does so transparently before God.” This is in fact, according to both Kierkegaard and Pascal, the only viable mode of reentry, the others being snares and delusions.
    There are at least two reasons, having to do with the nature of the age, why this option is so difficult.
    One is that from the abstracted perspective of the sciences and arts—an attitude of self-effacing objectivity which through the spectacular triumph of science has become the natural stance of the educated man—God, if he is taken to exist at all, is perforce understood as simply another item in the world which one duly observes, takes note of, and stands over against.
    The other reason is that the God-party, at least those who say “Lord Lord” most often, are so ignorant and obnoxious that most educated people want no part of them. If they’re for it, then I can’t go far wrong in being against it.
    It is true that both St. Paul and God are on record as preferring simple folk to the overeducated, especially philosophers. But media preachers have little reason to take comfort. Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
    Question: Who is the most obnoxious, Protestants, Catholics, or Jews?
    Answer: It depends on where you are and who you are talking to—though it is hard to conceive any one of the three consistently outdoing the other two in obnoxiousness. Yet, as obnoxious as are all three, none is as murderous as the autonomous self who, believing in nothing, can fall prey to ideology and kill millions of people—unwanted people, old people, sick people, useless people, unborn people, enemies of the state—and do so reasonably, without passion, even decently, certainly without the least obnoxiousness.
    Religion, at any rate, has been having a bad time of it lately, perhaps for good and sufficient reason. By and large, scientists and artists and the autonomous self have gotten rid of God, whether or not for good reason, whether or not with catastrophic consequences, remains to be seen.
    In any case, reentry into ordinary life, into concrete place and time, from the strange abstractions of the twentieth century, the reentry undertaken under the direct sponsorship of God, is a difficult if not nigh-impossible task. Yet there have existed, so I have heard, a few writers even in this day and age who have become themselves transparently before God and managed to live intact through difficult lives, e.g., Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Some have even outdone Kierkegaard and seen both creation and art as the Chartres sculptor did, as both dense and mysterious, gratuitous, anagogic, and sacramental, e.g., Flannery O’Connor.
    (11) Reentry by assault. The writer-artist makes sure that he is in the world and that he