People liked To look at Spinoza although he was not handsome or beautiful as some men can be. You might even hesitate to say that he was good looking. In fact, you might best describe him in the negative. He was not plain. He was the opposite of nondescript. Something about him invited your eye. Young women going the other way on the sidewalk, on an escalator, would shift their positions or look over their shoulders to see him a second time. That they did so is one important thing. That he didn’t “seem” to notice is another.
The truth is, nearly everyone was affected in those days. Students were changing uniforms and going by invented names. They were trading in the college wardrobes their mothers had carefully chosen for clothes from the Salvation Army. Young men were letting their hair grow long, and young women were deciding not to shave their armpits, not to save themselves for marriage.
Spinoza had affectations of his own: the long red scarf wrapped around his neck and thrown over his shoulder and the old camelhair overcoat with threadbare elbows he wore incongruously with battered Hush Puppies. Maybe the long, loping strides with which he came up the hill and crossed the campus. Maybe even his celebrated aloofness and his magical smile. Now, you may be saying, “Wait a minute. How could he be aloof and charismatic at the same time?” Exactly. Yet, somehow he was. Everyone knew him and no one knew him.
If Spinoza was a student, he was an irregular one, but he was also the most interesting one Walter Willie had yet encountered. From his sophomore year at Brown, all Walter had ever wanted to be was a “student.” He had wanted to spend his life studying. Now, as a young assistant professor, he realized one day that he thought many of his students were silly and some of his colleagues were frauds, and after years of loving literature, he was suddenly wondering if he had chosen the right path in life after all. Not coincidentally, this was about the time he stopped working on his book. He tossed his pen on the legal pad that lay on his desk and left it there for weeks. It became a symbol. “Why am I spending my life with these people?” he asked himself.
But also, “Could it possibly be me? Could I be intimidating them?” In truth, there was a certain formality about him that might have discouraged familiarity and almost certainly discouraged intimacy. Even when he was a child, for instance, no one ever thought to call him Walt or Wally. He was always Walter.
Maybe that’s what he and Spinoza had in common: a curious mix of remoteness and vulnerability. Maybe that’s why people found them both interesting in that way people can have of being attracted and repelled at the same time by those who remind them of themselves. At any rate, Walter looked up when Spinoza appeared in the doorway of his office one day and declared a little nonsolicitously as if he were not asking for a favor that he would like to audit Walter’s Old Testament as Literature class.
“Are you an English major?” asked Walter, certain that he wasn’t because he’d never seen the man before around the department.
“No,” said this Spinoza, “but I’d still like to get started.”
Odd phrasing. There was something in the way he said this that suggested that what he was starting was a little grander than a course of study or a degree program.
So Walter said, “Sit down” rather than “This is a 400 level course with prerequisites, and it’s only open to upperclassmen. Sorry.” He wondered if this student was a soldier back from Vietnam. He was clearly back from somewhere or something.
“Why do you want to study the Old Testament?” Walter asked.
“I’m interested in original sin and its relationship to guilt.”
“Guilt?” said Walter, surprised first that the younger man had a ready answer, and second that it was so glib. “Why guilt?”
“Because I have a lot of guilt.” Maybe that’s when Walter first made the association with Vietnam.
“Well then, I think what you need might be a psychology course. This sounds like a personal quest.”
“I’m not sure there’s any other kind,” said Spinoza. Walter was disarmed. He didn’t realize until afterwards that he had been trying in that carefully cultivated way of academics to patronize this student, and that the tables had been turned on him.
“Well, I just mean . . . ,” said Walter.
“I’m interested in exploring the ineffable, Professor Willie, and I’m thinking your class might help me to do that.”
“The ineffable?” thought Walter. What the hell did he mean by that? What a ridiculous thing to say. But he also thought about the fact that only six students had registered for the class, and one of them just to hear himself talk which he did endlessly, and the addition of someone who believed in ineffability might be welcome.
“Tell you what,” Walter said almost apologetically, “why don’t you sit in on a session or two, see if it’s what you’re looking for?” He was quite sure that this Spinoza would discover that he was in over his head or be bored silly and disappear.
The first day Spinoza was seated in the middle of the last row when Walter came into the classroom. Walter smiled at him and raised a finger in recognition. Spinoza did neither and Walter was to see for the first time that he either missed or ignored a lot of social cues. Still, Walter introduced him to the others almost as if he were a visiting scholar. Spinoza said nothing, spent most of the hour gazing out the window and was the first one out the door. Afterwards Walter chastised himself silently for according Spinoza so much currency. “Well, so much for that,” he thought. It was with some surprise, then, that he found Spinoza sitting in the same place at the beginning of the next class.
It wasn’t until near the end of the third class that Spinoza said anything. Then what he said was only tangentially related to the discussion the others had been having, and as was often to be the case, it was in the form of a question: “So Noah got drunk and Ham told his brothers Shem and Já phĕth to cover up his nakedness. Why didn’t he do it himself?”
For a long moment, there was silence. Finally, a young woman who wore her collar buttoned to her throat and her hair in a tight bun said, “Well, maybe Ham was the eldest of the brothers.” She was speaking tentatively as you might to someone who doesn’t understand the obvious.
“Doesn’t seem to be,” said Spinoza. “He’s listed as Noah’s second son.” Now the other students were twisting in their seats or looking over their shoulders, not quite sure what Spinoza was up to. Some turned to the passage. One read it aloud perhaps to cover his embarrassment, perhaps because he was curious himself.
“Yeah,” said someone, “if Ham does this thing and Canaan is his son, why is Canaan punished?”
“Is he punished?”
“Of course he is,” said the girl who was less tentative now. “It says he is cursed and made a ‘slave of slaves’ . . . and to his brothers yet.”
Someone else read, “‘God enlarged Já phĕth and let him dwell in the tents of Sham; and let Canaan be his slave.’ I don’t get it. What did Canaan do wrong to deserve that?” Another student asked, “Is this one of those doctrinal contradictions you told us about, Dr. Willie?”
“Maybe,” said Walter who then stopped himself. “What do you think, Spinoza?”
“I don’t know,” said Spinoza.
But that was all he said. Spinoza didn’t speak again for two sessions. Mostly he stared out the window, his Bible and notebook unopened on his desk. In that time, the class divided itself rather neatly as classes often do into those who favored the conventional wisdom or interpretation and those who did not. There were two bearded students who sat on either side of the room facing each other like the Smith Brothers. One was, in fact, named Smith and was given to starting his sentences with phrases such as “One might surmise . . .” The other was named Stein and seemed quite intentionally informal just possibly in reaction to Smith. He sprawled across his desk and said things like “I don’t know, man, but it seems to me . . .” Then there was the prim young woman who, it turned out, had keen opinions and flashing black eyes so that Walter dubbed her Emily Dickinson although he didn’t know if Emily Dickinson had had either. Maybe he just hoped that she had.
There was also a provocateur as it seemed to Walter there was in every Bible class. His name was Harkness, and he was against any and every reading except his own which, in this case, was invariably the literal one as he was a Christian fundamentalist. Willie quickly concluded that the student had enrolled in the class just so he could take issue. And he was dogged. Other students tried hard to patronize him and Walter tried hard not to, and none succeeded very well.
One day the student steered the discussion of the word prosperity as it is used in Jeremiah toward economics and politics, and ranted against socialism and communism insisting that Jeremiah was God’s endorsement of capitalism. Other students shook their heads or stared off into space trying not too subtly to ignore him. “Can you deny that the definition of prosperity is literal?” he asked.
“No.” It was Spinoza. The others looked up because he had so rarely said anything.
“See,” said the student. “He agrees with me.”
“Everything has a literal meaning, doesn’t it?” asked Spinoza.
Harkness hesitated.
“And some things have metaphorical meanings.”
“Not in the Bible. Not when the word of God is involved.”
“I was troubled by the same thing,” said Spinoza, “so I did some reading on it and found that in the Greek translation of the Bible the word used for prosperity is evimeria and in the Latin, it is felicitation, and both mean ‘well-being.’”
“Material well-being,” insisted the other student.
“Well certainly, but not just that. The Hebrew word is shalom as in the Jewish greeting—‘peace’—so it is broader than material prosperity as we usually mean it. Do you think, for instance, it can mean spiritual well-being?” By this time Walter realized that for the moment his role had been reduced to that of observer. Harkness hesitated. “In the sense that the two can go hand in hand.”
“Or the well-being of a family or a community?”
“Or a nation.”
“Of course,” said Spinoza, “but what is your definition of ‘nation’?”
So Spinoza had engaged the other man on his own ground, and the two seemed to reach something like a consensus. “How did he do that?” Walter asked himself as he watched them leaving the room together still talking.
The class took off, a bit like a runaway horse that Walter wasn’t always sure he could rein in nor that he wanted to. Sometimes the discussion was heated. One day talking about Leviticus, he cautiously admitted that some scholars were contending that the Exodus was a metaphor, that it had never actually taken place.
“Isn’t that a slippery slope, Dr. Willie?” asked Harkness.
“It is,” said Walter. “It opens doors we have to be careful about opening. On the other hand . . .
“How can you not open them, sir?” said Stein. “Isn’t that what honest inquiry is all about? You said on day one that there would be no holds barred in here.”
“But Exodus is history,” said Harkness. “It is a chronicle. It reads like a diary. I don’t think you can see it any other way.”
“I disagree,” said Smith. “Who are they when they leave Egypt? A tribe. Hardly more than a clan that can only be controlled by threat and magic, and just barely controlled at that. And who are they forty years later when they emerge from the wilderness? They are the Israelites! They are the chosen people! It isn’t Abraham who fathered them. It’s Moses!”
Walter smiled to himself at the hyperbole, but also at the passion. “Stein?” Walter said inviting him to rejoin.
“Yeah, they do have rules by then, and these do become laws . . .”
“They are more than laws, aren’t they?” asked Emily Dickinson. “I think they are what custom is before it’s custom, what tradition is before it’s tradition.”
“Dr. Willie, why all the dietary stuff?” asked Harkness. “Why all the hygiene? I mean, this stuff reads like the Boy Scout manual.”
“Maybe that’s metaphorical too,” said Stein. “Spiritual cleanliness. Purification. Maybe that’s why Leviticus is so full of fire.”
“Oh, come on,” said Harkness. “The Old Testament is nothing but fire. It’s everywhere you look. It’s for cooking. It’s for making sacrifices. It’s for making weapons . . .”
“And what do you make of the Molech thing?” asked Spinoza. “The Canaanites burning their children.”
“Living children?” asked Stein.
“Presumably,” said Spinoza.
Emily Dickinson asked, “Could this be metaphor again? I mean, the thing the Israelites are not? The thing they don’t do or even stand for? But also a god who is not Yahweh?”
“Oh, the Canaanites existed. They exist outside the Bible,” said Harkness.
“Is that right, Dr. Willie?”
“Well, they are there. The question that scholars debate is are they literally there or are they a foil. Same with their gods. Same with Yahweh and Jehovah, for that matter. God has many names. In the King James Bible, God is ‘the Lord’ as in ‘the Lord of the Manor’ because it is written in feudal times, the early 1600s. The Hebrew word is Elohim and, just to stir the pot, that is a plural: gods.”
“I think Leviticus is about identity,” said Emily Dickinson, “about the Israelites discovering who they are and distinguishing themselves from other tribes like the Canaanites who, after all, are just around the corner the whole time, just over the hill. Leviticus is about circumcision and menstrual practices and all that practical, day to day stuff. Yom Kippur. The tenth day of the seventh month. The whole question of literalism seems kind of incidental to me.”
Walter looked over the heads of the others at Spinoza sitting with his arms and ankles crossed hardly saying a word. What was he thinking? What was going on in that mind of his? And would any of this be happening if he weren’t sitting there? Maybe it would. Maybe Spinoza was simply a spectator. Or a witness. Maybe Walter himself was.
That day may have been when other students came to realize that Spinoza was bringing something a little special to the group and inviting them to do the same, to take second looks and further steps in a way that Walter did not or could not. In fact, after class it was Spinoza’s desk, not Walter’s, in front of which the Smith brothers had sat down. Walter drifted toward the back of the room and into the current of their discussion with the intention of commenting or guiding, but he couldn’t figure out how to do so without appearing to be territorial or a little jealous because, he realized, he was a little jealous, so he listened instead.
Smith was leaning forward, poking the top of his student desk with his index finger being fairly emphatic about something. Stein was listening intently. So was Spinoza. He sat back in his seat nodding very slightly. And while it would have been easy to dismiss what Smith was saying as sophomoric, Walter didn’t want to. Instead, he wanted to be intent. He wanted to be emphatic. He wanted to have the authority Spinoza seemed to have. The authority to entertain the improbable, to consider the unlikely, to take a flying leap.
That afternoon back in his office, Walter Willie put his lecture notes in a folder and put the folder in his file cabinet.
After that, the other students and then Walter found themselves sometimes to their annoyance waiting for Spinoza to speak, which he didn’t often, and he didn’t for long, but when he did, he sometimes said things they hadn’t thought of. He thought in a way that showed them how to think as natural dancers and singers show you how to dance and sing: “Oh my, so that’s how it’s done.”
On days when Spinoza didn’t speak, Walter began to call on him: “Spinoza, would you weigh in on this? I’d like your insight.” He said it as if he said the same thing and with equal interest to the other students, but he didn’t, and they also knew that. Insight. Spinoza had more of that commodity than anyone else in the class, sometimes including Walter, if only because he seemed to see the thing from a slightly different angle. Then one day when Harkness in exasperation had asked, “How can you be so sure?” Spinoza had answered, “Well, I’m not, but it is the word of God, after all,” and none of them knew if he was being naïve or visionary or maybe sarcastic (he could be all three). He could say things that seemed so dense that the others were quite sure they had to be at the same time that he could talk of transcendence and “ephemeralism” without batting an eye. He could also say “I don’t know” or “I don’t get it” in a way that allowed other people to say those things too. “I don’t understand this line. Why is it repeated?” In upper-level courses everyone had answers. Very few people had real questions.
Still, it wasn’t Spinoza’s insight or his brilliance which most interested Walter. It was his conviction. Walter came to realize with just a little shame that the literature they were reading and talking about was fundamental and essential, in fact the most important words ever written. There was simply no doubt that Spinoza believed this, that his peers wanted to and that Walter wanted to, again. His shame came because he had once felt this himself, but that feeling had seeped away over time without Walter even knowing it until Spinoza had given it back to him, had raised his hand one day and frowned and said, “Isn’t it possible that . . .” And Walter had known instantly, “Of course it’s possible.” The uneasy feeling Walter had that Spinoza might be a Svengali didn’t go away until he realized that it was exactly the cynical suspicion most of his colleagues would have had, and it was exactly the fact that he once hadn’t that had set him apart from them, and now didn’t.
“The words,” Walter said aloud running his dog in the woods that evening. A belief in the words. That day in class another student had argued that the Bible, the whole Bible, was a metaphor, and Spinoza had agreed. “Aren’t religion and literature the same thing?” he had asked.
“Are they?” wondered Walter, watching his dog digging at a rabbit hole. Is it that simple? Or is that too simple?
Spinoza did not take the midterm exam, did not take the final exam, did not submit a paper and did not appear again until three weeks into the new term, or until Walter had given up on ever seeing him again and was struggling to find ways he could sustain and even nurture the freshness that the other man had brought to his thinking. He found those ways, so that when he came down the hallway to his office one day, and Spinoza was waiting at the door, it was neither relief nor joy he felt but excitement; they had things to talk about.
“Come on in,” he said. Only that one time did he address Spinoza’s default. “You knew that stuff better than anyone else. You could have written a perfect exam. You would have written the best paper, one I would have liked reading. I don’t understand why you didn’t do the work.”
“Well,” said Spinoza slowly without apology, “I took the course to find out if the Pentateuch is important to me, and it isn’t.”
But what wasn’t important? The text? Knowing the text? Or proving to Walter that he knew the text? “Then what is important?” thought Walter. The question seemed at least pedantic, maybe rhetorical. He didn’t ask it.
Then Spinoza said, “Now I want to take a look at Ecclesiastes.” They both understood that it would be unofficially again, the same kind of arrangement with the same lack of commitment as before, and Walter knew that all he had to do was smile and shake his head just once, and say something about how much he enjoyed working with Spinoza and how he would really like to, but . . . maybe they could have a cup of coffee now and again . . . he didn’t.
He said, “Ecclesiastes. Okay.”
“I want to talk about vice,” said Spinoza. “I want to know if we are listening to the voice of Solomon throughout and to whom he is speaking, and where he ever got the wisdom and courage to speak as he does.” There he went again asking the questions that other students would hesitate to ask for fear the answers would be too simple or obvious, and didn’t this guy have just a bit of the wisdom and courage and perhaps presumption Solomon had had when he’d written, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”?
“Well . . . ,” said Walter, and they were off. That day, when Spinoza was finally leaving, Willie said to him, “One question. Do you have a last name?”
Spinoza tilted his head curiously. “Of course, I do. Jones. Spinoza Jones. I grew up with eccentric parents. My mother is an academic which is why I never want to be one.” Then he laughed a huge, toothy laugh and said by way of explanation, “You know, you can only get away with a first name like Spinoza if you have a last name like Jones.”
That day, as Walter watched this Spinoza Jones moving away from him down the corridor, he asked himself, “If he doesn’t want to be an academic, then why in the world is he here? Why in the world is he bothering me?” He did not then know that both questions were really about himself if obversely, that each demanded an answer and that those answers were going in some ways to change the way Walter looked at things. For the moment he was content to wonder with the kind of self-consciousness that Spinoza didn’t seem to have if he was being played, if maybe this guy was some kind of idiot savant, but that night walking his dog, Walter had laughed again, this time at the notion that the other man might not have a last name and then at the name itself. “Spinoza Jones!” he said. But it wasn’t all Spinoza Jones. Part of it was Walter Willie. Without knowing it, he’d been looking for Spinoza Jones. He’d been waiting for him.
Still, Walter’s curiosity about Spinoza was not altogether unwarranted; there were missing pieces that every now and then revealed themselves. Once when Walter had pointed out that Baruch Spinoza was the greatest of the Jewish Renaissance thinkers, Spinoza Jones had seemed surprised or caught off guard, somehow unaware. After a moment, Walter had said, “All of this seems second nature to you like some kind of birthright or something.” There had been an awkward pause. “Forgive me if I am being presumptuous, but you are Jewish, aren’t you?”
And Spinoza Jones had said, “I don’t think so.”
He didn’t think so? He didn’t know if he was Jewish or not?
So it was that every now and again when Walter Willie turned the corner, Spinoza was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of his office door with his battered King James Bible. Finally, Walter gave him a key of his own. Now when Walter came down the hall, and his door was ajar, he knew that Spinoza would be inside, and when it wasn’t ajar, he was a little disappointed. There was something self- contained about the younger man. He was serious about something that few people were serious about, and he somehow had the authority to give Walter permission to be serious about it too, again. He had been serious about it when he was younger and allowed to be serious, but was now serious about it when he was older and seriousness had been replaced for most of his peers by ambition, objectivity, and professional rigor. They looked upon seriousness as puerile and Walter realized that he had started to do the same.
That is why that night Walter made a cup of tea and climbed to his study on the third floor of the old frame house he lived in all alone, and for the first time in a long time opened the safe in which the ancient Bible was kept. He put on plastic gloves, lifted the book out very carefully, held it in his hands, felt it with his fingers, smelled it, turned its pages and read some of the words from its frontispiece aloud first in Hebrew and then in Latin and finally in Spanish. After that he turned to the back of the book and craned his neck to read the inscription again. Finally, he turned to the title page and read, “Mainz, A.D. 1455.”
It is also why he began to write again, why that autumn he published the paper called “Striving After Wind” that was to become the first chapter of Vanity of Vanities.
Peter Ferry’s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, OR, Fiction, Chicago Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Hypertext, and Catamaran. He is a winner of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Short Fiction and has written two novels, Travel Writing and Old Heart, which won the Chicago Writers Association Novel of the Year award in 2015. Old Heart has been turned into a stage play by the theatrical and movie producer Roger Rapoport and will open at the Redmond Theater in Detroit this year. His short story Ike, Sharon and Me appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. He lives in Indianapolis and Van Buren County, Michigan, with his wife Carolyn O’Connor Ferry.