Swine Flu

The news about the so-called swine flu is not encouraging.

I am told the best place right now for sine flu news is Effect Measure, with regular updates from an informed perspective on the news and on emerging information from the CDC.

Why We Believe in Gods

I like this talk by Andy Thomson on the biological and psychological origins of religion.I also suspect that a connection can be made between the factors of belief and the process of textual interpretation generally.

Atheism and Morality (Again)

A silly post by Barry Arrington on the alleged ultimate immorality to which atheism "logically" leads:

In an earlier post I lamented the apparent extinction of what I called “Nietzsche atheists,” by which I meant atheists with the courage and honesty to accept the bleak conclusions logically compelled by their premises. Some of our atheist friends seemed to not know what bleak conclusions I was referring to. Here is a comment that sums it up nicely. This post is adapted from kairosfocus’ comment to that earlier post. He refers to Hawthorne on ethics and evolutionary materialist atheism and writes:

Make two assumptions:

(1) That atheistic naturalism is true.

(2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.

Given our second assumption, there is nothing in the natural world from which we can infer an “ought.” And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there’s nothing in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action.

Add a further uncontroversial assumption: an action is permissible if and only if it’s not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action. This is just the standard inferential scheme for formal deontic logic. We’ve conformed to standard principles and inference rules of logic and we’ve started out with assumptions that atheists have conceded. And yet we reach the absurd conclusion: therefore, for any action you care to pick, it’s permissible to perform that action. If you’d like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan “if atheism is true, all things are permitted.” For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don’t like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time.

I made two responses to this. First, I said

Responding to this: “for any action you care to pick, it’s permissible to perform that action. If you’d like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan ‘if atheism is true, all things are permitted.’ For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don’t like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time.”

As an atheist, I think all things are potentially permissible. We have seen plenty of societies that have permitted and even encouraged all sorts of atrocities against targeted groups and individuals. But this is why societies need to establish laws and determine for themselves what actions and behaviors will and will not be tolerated.

In America, we permitted slavery, then Jim Crow. We denied women the right to vote. We allowed polygamy in some parts. We interred our own citizens in camps. We know what Nazi Germany permitted, what Stalinist Russia permitted, what the Puritans permitted, and so on.

Everything is indeed permissible except for what a society prohibits. The role of public discourse is to help shape what we decide is permissible and prohibited. To me, this is the very opposite of bleak. Instead, it would be bleak if injustices and inequities could never be redressed because of an exaggerated assignment of authority to some ancient collection of tales and wisdom now taken to be sacred.

I wrote later

I believe in entry 17 of this thread I provided a direct response to the original post.

Everything Hitler did was permissible. Germany allowed it. Pope Pius allowed it. England allowed it. Russia allowed it. The US allowed it. It was able to be permitted and it was in fact permitted.

Make no mistake, Hitler’s was a religious crusade against a set of religious targets. We see similar such crusades emerging right now in parts of the US that are inventing so-called “liberal” bogeymen who want to come and take their freedom in the night.

In my experience and understanding of history, the commitment to reason and the free ability to question authority openly have been prized in atheistic viewpoints and admonished in religious.

Only calm, reasoned dialogue - not debate, pace JAD - by parties that want to live together can save us now. Increasingly, it seems to me that creationists, atheists, liberals, and conservatives are choosing instead to opt-out and not to seek mutual reconciliation.

I wonder if this site considers itself part of the solution or part of the problem?

Unfortunately, I received no direct response to these, but it's not surprising because most of the UD posters prefer hand-waving to real discourse. In any event, I think the whole thread was put to bed nicely by Allen MacNeill

This entire thread has focused on the question of whether a belief in God is necessary for being a moral person. Based on my own experience, I believe that this question is entirely logically separate from the question of whether some supernatural entity participated in the creation of life on Earth and its evolution to current forms. Indeed, there is no logical contradiction whatsoever between believing that a supernatural entity (or entities) provide(s) the foundation for moral prescriptions and the simultaneous belief that including the participation of a supernatural entity (or entities) in the evolution of life on Earth is unnecessary in a logically consistent explanation of how such evolution has occurred. This is especially the case if, as most people have already agreed, it is invalid to derive an “ought” statement (i.e. an ethical prescription) from an “is” statement (i.e. a description of nature).

Timeline of the Universe

I think this sums things up nicely.

The Irrefutable Ontological Argument for G-d

I like to read sophisticated arguments for G-d's existence. The Prosblogion is one of the better places to get these. It's a philosophy of religion site for real philosophers, the kind who do hard-nosed logical reasoning. These guys are good and I respect them a lot.

Here's "An Irrefutable Ontological Argument" from Mike Almeida, who is one of the ring-leaders over there.

I mean to beg no questions in claiming that (1) is an easily observed a priori truth.

1. <>(Ex)(x is maximally excellent & x is necessarily existing).

I do not take the proposition that x is maximally excellent to (obviously) entail that x is omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent or creator of everything that exists. I take (1) to entail that there is something that necessarily exists and is such that there is nothing that is more excellent (than it).

Still, observing that (1) is true is important. Now we avoid altogether the hackneyed objection that, “well, it is possible that a maximally excellent being does not exist, too”. The only question in dispute is what are the maximally excellent compossible properties.

But that too is an avoidable question. There are only certain sets of properties that we are actually concerned about and we can, without begging any questions, focus on them. Observe that it is equally undeniable that there is some degree K of knowledge that (more or less closely) approximates omniscience, some degree P of (essential) power that approximates omnipotence, some degree G of (essential) goodness that approximates (essential) omnibenevolence such that Px & Kx & Gx are compossible with necessary existence, Nx. So, the only question that is open is what is the greatest degree of each that is compossible with necessary existence. Let’s put it more exactly, quantifiying over degrees of such properties and beings that might possess them.

1. <>(EK)(EP)(EG)(Ex)([]Kx & []Px & []Gx & Nx)

(2) states that there is some maximally excellent set of compossible properties. Since those properties are compossible, they are obviously instantiated in some world. But then the being that instantiates those properties actually exists. Such a being actually exists, but what being is it? We can rule out human beings, each of whom has those properties to some degree, but none of whom necessarily exists. We can rule out any natural being, since every natural being contingently exists. We can rule out abstract beings such as numbers, properties, propositions and the like, each of which has necessary existence but none of which has the remaining properties. It’s beginning to look like any being satisfying all of those properties would have to be non-natural or supernatural, since there is no natural being that has the property of necessary existence and there is no abstract object that has the properties P, K, or G. Call that being God-.

Notice the difficulty in attempting to refute that there is such a maximally excellent being. You would have to show that every interesting degree of K, P and G fails to be compossible with N. I submit that there is no reason to believe that there isn’t some interesting degree of those properties that is compossible with necessary existence. Now imagine believing that this supernatural being God- exists, but refusing to believe that God exists. That would be strange.

Addendum
I think several commentators have misread the initial premise and not quite followed the argument thereafter. The proposition in (1) states (just) that there is some necessarily existing thing, and this thing is, in some deliberately unspecified sense, a maximally excellent thing. I’m happy to say that it is at least as good as any other necessarily existing thing. Maybe none of them has any value at all. So, if there are abstract objects that are at least as good as any other necessarily existing thing (maybe at least as good as any other abstract object), then (1) is true.

That’s the first step in the argument. I explicitly skip all talk of the value or greatness of this being. I say “the only question in dispute is what are the maximally excellent compossible properties” and quickly add “but that too is an avoidable question”.

The argument is now captured in one question: what is the greatest degree of Px, Kx, and Gx that is compossible with necessary existence? That’s all I ask. I note that I’ve never seen an argument that shows (or even attempts to show) that every interesting degree of Px, Kx, and Gx is incompossible with Nx.

My conclusion is effectively that the psychological obstacles that (I think) inhibit nontheists from believing in God are removed once the nontheist believes that there is something God-ish in existence. And I do think that most of the reasons that keep nontheists from believing are psychological reasons (not epistemic ones).

I don't buy this argument, but I don't quite have the language to express why. I just don't see why Almeida's first proposition is acceptable on its face. Almeida concludes that "that the psychological obstacles that (I think) inhibit nontheists from believing in God are removed once the nontheist believes that there is something God-ish in existence."

But here's the problem: I don't believe there is something God-ish in existence. I think it's false to suggest so because calling something "God-ish" is nothing other than an imposition of human-derived values and qualities onto/into the universe.

If Almeida is trying to reach people who want to believe, then I guess I see where he's going. To believe in God you have to believe in the natural existence of qualities like benevolence, knowledge, justice, and so on. And you have to believe that these qualities are stable. These are nice fairy tales and quite sophisticated, but as always reality butts in and levels it all. I fail to see any reason behind the natural, as opposed to the social, existence of the so-called Godly qualities.

Almeida's final statement bothers me because it presumes that non-theists should believe - that belief is the natural, default or desired state, and it would happen only if some psychological obstacles were removed. I don't think this is true at all. I look at my 6-year-old daughter accumulating religious doctrine, including xian doctrines on Satan, and I see the whole religious worldview as potentially derailing her ability to address reality rationally. Religious belief, and its accompanying way of looking at the world, does not come about naturally, it gets introduced and drummed into people. There's only something God-ish in existence after a God concept gets fed into a person.

Poetry: At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop

This is one of my favorite poems, although I must admit not having read it repeatedly like I have other favorites. But I enjoy knowing a poem can haunt a person for years. The last line is breathtaking.

At the Fishhouses

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Religious Doctrines Fail

Once again, I have played the part of masochist and read a blog article by Denyse O’Leary. She talks about five reasons why people accept religious doctrines. I’ll present each reason – though I must say that in some cases I have not given O’Leary’s full entry – and then give a response.

1. Some doctrines are based strictly on evidence. The existence of G-d, for example, is attested by the nature of the universe.

Of course the problem here is that the nature of the universe does not attest to the existence of G-d. The G-d hypothesis is one way to explain the nature of the universe, and at a very basic level – I’m thinking something like deism – the explanation has plausibility. But O’Leary is quite disingenuous to suggest that modern self-proclaimed monotheistic doctrines have a strict basis in evidence. It just ain’t so. To them, everything attests to the existence of G-d; nothing does not. G-d is inescapable.

2. Some doctrines are based on logic. For example, why are there not Two G-ds? Well, what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? The point is, it can’t happen. So there are not Two G-ds. Or Many.

Some doctrines are indeed based on logic. Religious doctrines can be, but O’Leary is definitely not the best person to articulate that logic. Why aren’t there two G-d’s? Because there can’t be. Oh, that clears up everything. Perhaps she’s suggesting that by definition G-d is one and only one, and cannot be two. Let’s forget that this troubles the idea of a trinity and simply point out that defining G-d is terrific but doesn’t mean anything in the context of reality. I can make “long noodle-like appendages emerging from the forehead” as part of the definition of human. No effect, however.

3. Some doctrines are based on reason. One of the sillier new atheist arguments is “Who designed the designer?” Well, any series can have a beginning. If, as most now think, the Big Bang started the universe, there must have been a wider context. It is reasonable to think this context was the will of G-d, based on the fine-tuned universe we actually see.

The question of God’s origin, if even askable, lies outside this universe and outside anything the human mind can think. That is why God was traditionally called, in philosophical contexts, the First Cause. That’s like the number 1. Don’t ask which natural number comes before it. The answer is none.

O’Leary has hopelessly confused reason with rationalization and speculation. By the way, the number 1 is our human convention for expressing the concept of an initial natural number sequence. I suspect G-d is also a man-made convention.

4. Some doctrines are based on the testimony of reliable witnesses - sane, stable people with no record of deceit, who would rather lose their property, liberty, or life than deny what they saw or heard, and have nothing to gain from promoting a story that would cost them all that. The usual way they explain it is “We must fear God rather than men.”

From her Jesus, to Peter, to Paul, to Augustine, to Ratzi – all of questionable sanity and stability, and all with a record of deceit. Paul is one of the first exponents of “lying for Jesus” – it’s in 2 Corinthians.

5. Some doctrines are based on experience - a form of evidence. I have observed that a great many people who come to an active faith later in life had an experience that they could only account for by returning to the practice of their faith (or finding a new one). An unexpected healing, perhaps?: The doctors have pronounced the patient’s case hopeless but the patient has decided to try prayer and repentance, and suddenly the burden of illness lifts. After that, the patient takes little interest in the views of new atheists, or the views of any atheists at all, on a permanent basis.

Some doctrines are indeed based on experience. But what O’Leary cites above is complete argument from ignorance stuff: I don’t know how I was saved (even though the other equally penitent patients died), so it must have been G-d.

So, can we dispense with the shenanigans? Religious doctrines do not really use as their basis evidence, logic, reason, testimony of witnesses, or experience. They use emotion and willful naïveté; they rely on a person’s wonder and that person’s unwillingness to investigate sources or wonder outside the context of religious thinking.

The Stones Pwn Rock and Roll (My Music Retrospective - The Rolling Stones, Part 2)

The first recording by the Rolling Stones I ever owned was an import cassette tape called Satisfaction. The tape contained their greatest dozen or so hits of the sixties, including the eponymous tune that gave modern rock and roll its stamp. It also had a few unusual tracks, one of these being the deliciously wicked “Memo from Turner”:

Didn't I see you down in San Antone on a hot and dusty night?
We were eating eggs in Sammy's when the black man there drew his knife.
Aw, you drowned that Jew in Rampton as he washed his sleeveless shirt,
You know, that Spanish-speaking gentlemen, the one we all called "Kurt."

Come now, gentleman, I know there's some mistake.
How forgetful I'm becoming, now you fixed your business straight.

I remember you in Hemlock Road in nineteen fifty-six.
You're a faggy little leather boy with a smaller piece of stick.
You're a lashing, smashing hunk of man;
Your sweat shines sweet and strong.
Your organs working perfectly, but there's a part that's not screwed on.

Weren't you at the Coke convention back in nineteen sixty-five
You're the misbred, grey executive I've seen heavily advertised.
You're the great, gray man whose daughter licks policemen's buttons clean.
You're the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine.

Come now, gentleman, your love is all I crave.
You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing, laughing on my grave.

When the old men do the fighting and the young men all look on.
And the young girls eat their mothers' meat from tubes of plasticon.
Be wary of these my gentle friends of all the skins you breed.
They have a tasty habit - they eat the hands that bleed.

So remember who you say you are and keep your noses clean.
Boys will be boys and play with toys so be strong with your beast.
Oh Rosie dear, don'tcha think it's queer, so stop me if you please.
The baby is dead, my lady said, "You gentlemen, why you all work for me?"

I heard this song the first time, it must have been 1983 or 1984, and got completely knocked over. It was so…decadent. As I mentioned in a previous post about the Stones: They really committed to their image, that is, to the act of being anti-bourgeoisie. They delighted in it and did it really well. In their best songs, they smile at us from out of the widening gyre, presiding over the loosing of mere anarchy upon the world:

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain,
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash,
It's a gas! Gas! Gas!

I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag,
I was schooled with a strap right across my back,
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash,
It's a gas! Gas! Gas!

I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead.
I fell down to my feet and I saw they bled.
I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread.
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I was crowned with a spike right thru my head
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash,
It's a gas! Gas! Gas!

Melodically, lyrically, and conceptually, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” takes “Satisfaction” to its logical end. The 1968 song revises the earlier riff, making it sleek and sinewy. Instead of wailing about being unable to get satisfaction, Jagger now yawls about embracing that condition. He draws strength and power from it. His Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a child of the storm but in no way dour or morose. He’s cool, happy, and he just don’t care.

Conceptually, then, the song tells of turning away from all bourgeoisie morality and hang-ups. Jumpin’ Jack Flash is too cool to reject these things and thereby give them some due. The song instead summarily closes the door on middle-class values and joyfully steps into the whirlwind of new standards: life, spirituality, obligation. All of these concepts become wiped clean, erased for new standards based on experiencing happiness. It's a terrific and infectious song, made all the better by being tied (at least in my mind) to “Satisfaction.” I still think “Satisfaction” defines the quintessential rock and roll posture, but “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” establishes the quintessential Rolling Stones posture - which is even better.

And 1972's Exile on Main Street remains the definitive extended statement of the Rolling Stones posture. It’s a beautiful work, a devastating journey in and through rock and roll’s heart of darkness. This is no album from a studio band, no record from a touring outfit. This is the Stones, a band in the truest sense, playing together in a bunker because there's nowhere else to go. After Exile, the Stones would never return to that place again. I don't see how they, or anyone, could have.

Why Creationists Think Stupid Things

Occasionally, I visit Uncommon Descent to see what the ID community is up to. Every now and again, an interesting article pops up with thinking that's worthwhile to study and consider.

This is not one of those times.

As I've learned, Denyse O'Leary is a rabid anti-evolutionist. I fancy that somewhere in her past she slept with an evolutionary biologist who never called back.

Her latest piece displays the sort of illogic I've come to expect from the religious and the anti-evolutionists. Watch her go:

Where I differ with the exponents of “Evolution” is:

1. I am not an atheist or a “liberal” Christian.
2. Therefore I do not need to prove that there is no design in the universe or life forms.
3. Therefore, I can acknowledge that design is evident in the universe and in life forms.
4. Therefore, I do not need to pretend that my method for weeding out loser plants in my garden actually creates any new information. All it does is distinguish between good and bad examples of the information that already existed.
5. I think that once we get things like that straight, we will be on the verge of another science revolution. But as long as we are stuck with no-design nonsense, we will be stuck with stupid projects about stuff we know that ain’t so.

So in her warped mind, atheists and liberal xians cannot - they just can't - acknowledge that design is evident in the universe and in life forms (1,2). Oh OK, never mind that it's not evident at all. We'll just say those bad people simply can't bring themselves to admit it. But I guess if you are a theist or the right kind of xian you can - oh joy - see, see, see that design is everywhere (3). It's everywhere, all right, except when someone tries to prove it with evidence (note that evident and evidence share root words).

O'Leary starts to get super-daffy by making a vague equivalence between evolution and what she does to "loser" [?] plants in her garden (4). Is there any chance that she is using "garden" as a sexual euphemism?

True believers, do not lose ye hope, for Saint O'Leary prophesies the future: Someday, we will approach another scientific revolution, once we've rid ourselves of those pesky folk who refuse to admit design (5). Until that day, wolves will molest lambs and science will churn out projects that seem headed in the right direction, but really aren't - all because they don't say "Hey, this could be evidence of design."

Now we can easily laugh at the silliness of O'Leary's thinking, but unfortunately too many people actually take her seriously. Even worse, a few will respond to her as if she's scored some points. In fact, I see 44 comments and not one of these posts even slightly suggests that O'Leary's logic stinks. Instead, it's all a series of "I'm a scientist...really!" and "Thus saith the Lord" collective jerking off.

O'Leary needs to be permanently banned from posting on the Internet and having conversations with people, unless these conversations happen in a rest home. Surely, the day of her convalescence is coming soon?

Relegious Believers Sublimate Homosexual Desires

I've been causing trouble on the Internet. On an Amazon.com board I recently posted this:

No one - not one single person, ever - has provided the slightest evidence to support the creation hypothesis. I'll sit back now and listen to the crickets chirping while you try to look for something that might be considered evidence.

Believe me, if you have it, I'd love to see it. I'd enjoy seeing a viable creation model. I'm open to it, as all science-minded people are.

But you'll need to show something, not just spout the ol' "god is everywhere. He is perfect goodness and oneness. He can only be seen by the chosen few. Only the real believers can know him in his essence...." That all reads like psycho-sexual garbage to me.

Really, I think that all those religious types are actually just sublimating homosexual desires, which they then project onto a magical Pappy figure. Just go kiss some dude for $20 in a back alley somewhere and get over yourself.

I was quite proud of this and went over to the Jewish Philosopher blog to see if others agreed. Here's what I posted:

People don't need to believe in a supreme being. Often it's a psycho-sexual thing. Many believers simply project inner homosexual desires, which they abhor, onto an imaginary father figure. They love him and long for him without having to feel guilty about it. Yet they do feel slightly guilty, which often then manifests itself in a preoccupation with other people's sexual lives. This is one reason why theists often blurt out of nowhere that atheists are atheists only to be sexually "free." This of course is utter nonsense.

The response came quickly:

That's supposed to be a joke, right?

To which I responded thusly:

No, I think it's quite accurate. Certainly you don't disagree?

And now I get to read that response. How fun!

And women who believe also want to have sex with God?

Actually, I think evolutionists believe in Darwin because they all have a crush on him. It's the beard.

Poor man, his wires have been fried. Of course I didn't say believers wanted to have sex with their imaginary friend. OK, let's see what happens if I post this:

You're resisting. How else can you explain it?

I'll wait, but I don't think I'll get a good answer. Ah, well. I'll have to troll elsewhere.

Oh, wait. I had more to say to JP:

Theists want to have sex with other people of their gender, not with the deity. The deity merely allows them to construct scenarios of intimacy that, theoretically, they do not need to feel guilty about.

If you don't agree - and I'd be genuinely shocked if you didn't - then I'd like to hear your sense of the relationship between the theist and deity. Isn't it intimate? Aren't you a bride to him? Don't you yearn for his embrace?

The True Story of Jesus, a Jewish Radical from Galilee

[Note: This is my exposition of the life and death of Jesus, assuming he existed. It's based on actual historical data and current scholarly thinking. The main argument underwriting all below is that Jesus was neither more nor less than a Jewish dude whose story got picked up and sensationalized after he died.]

Even at the dawn of the Common Era, events and stories from the biblical past surround Nazareth, a peasant farming village in Galilee, Palestine. Lying in a basin and surrounded by limestone hills, Nazareth stands northward of the battlefields on the Great Plains of Esdraelon – where Barak, Gideon, Saul, Josiah, and the Maccabees all struggled against enemies. To the west lies Mount Carmel, where Elijah the prophet met the prophets of Baal. Nearby also is Naboth’s vineyard, the place of Jehu’s revenge upon Jezebel, Shunem, and the house of Elisha. Nazareth sits on “the Way of the Sea,” a Roman road connecting Damascus, far to the northeast in the province of Syria, with ports along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. To the south of the village, a road heads all the way to Egypt. Close by, a caravan route leads to Jerusalem. Across the hills and approximately five miles to the northwest, Sepphoris has been rebuilt into Galilee’s regional military and administrative center.

As a northern region in the province of Judea, Palestine, Galilee falls under the direct rule of the Roman Empire. However, local leaders and institutions have the charge to maintain law and order, collect taxes, and generally supervise the population. The Jewish tetrarch Herod Antipas, a son of King Herod the Great, rules Galilee and Jewish Trans-Jordan. He seeks the favor of Emperor Tiberius, and establishes a city by the sea that he calls “Tiberius.” He creates friction with Jewish population because of a royal palace containing decorative animal figures – a violation of the Jewish prohibition against graven images.

The Galilee is overwhelmingly Jewish and rife with social unrest and religious ferment. Most people in the Galilee toil in small villages as farmers, shepherds, or fishermen. They dream of worshiping God and surviving on the land He gave to their ancestors, to them, generation after generation. But the ambitions of the Roman Empire, the territorial princes, and the ruling classes entail building wealth and power. Ordinary families create the wealth of the empire because everyone taxes them – from the Romans to the local authorities. The poor have nothing but debt. The people also resent Roman rule because the governor appoints the High Priests in the Jerusalem Temple – the very house of God – retains custody of the High Priest’s vestments, and supervises Temple activities. Heavy taxes and the harsh, aggressive conduct of governors such as Pontius Pilate contribute to frequent unrest and riots. Jewish groups with revolutionary ideologies form and take hold – regarding any non-Jewish (that is, non-religious) government as unacceptable. These groups insist that they will serve God alone as their master, and they will not be as slaves to a king of flesh and blood.

A Teacher Emerges
During the governance of Pilate, from 26 to 37 CE, a certain rabbi and storyteller emerges from Galilee. Only about thirty years of age and blessed with extraordinary charisma, he has a reputation as a healer and dispenser of wisdom. His sayings echo and reference the biblical prophets and the sages of Jewish oral tradition. He speaks of honor for the lowly in spirit, healing for the mourners and brokenhearted, and a humble life undisturbed by the designs of proud and ambitious men. He also admonishes hypocrisy: speaking righteous words but not living in full accordance with them.

Who is this country rabbi championing the downtrodden and calling for individual purification? In his own hometown of Nazareth, his neighbors bear him little regard, perhaps for having been born without a proper father. He had grown up as the oldest child in a family of five brothers and two sisters. Like his adopted father, he was a woodworker. At Sabbath services and other occasions he had learned the Torah, prophetic teachings, and predictions. Unable to read or write, he had also heard the narratives of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, whose deeds served as inspiration for contemporary notions of personal piety.

He had been a disciple of one John the Baptist, a Jewish evangelizer calling for repentance before the imminent day of God’s judgment. John preached forgiveness to those who repented and accepted his baptism. In the Jordan wilderness with John’s group of ascetics, the young man from Nazareth learned of a life whose only obedience was to God. He internalized an unshakable commitment to following and explaining the will of God. He chose to remain unmarried, even though fathering descendants was generally considered a religious obligation of male Jews. Sometime after the young man from Nazareth left the Baptist sect, John was executed by Herod Antipas as a messianic pretender and political radical. Roman oppression produced plenty of similar prophets, but John had gained attention as a threat because he made charges of corruption in Jerusalem’s priestly aristocracy, which implied charges against Roman authority.

Breaking with John the Baptist, the young man strikes out on his own, developing his own sense of the Kingdom of God as something realized at meals in which all were welcome. He also gains skill in relating to people’s psychological and psychosomatic ailments. His ability to cure these afflictions usually attributed to demonic possession gives rise to the idea that the rabbi is successfully waging a war against evil spirits. He speaks in Aramaic, his native tongue, and weaves his message with parables and tales. In his talks and sermons, he draws images from the small agricultural village of his youth: sowers in the field, shepherds, birds, lilies, and mustard plants.

As he expounds a uniquely personal message – forged out of the time, place, and circumstances of his birth and youth, as well as out of his refocusing of John the Baptist’s spiritual-political preaching – the rabbi nevertheless remains committed to reverence of the Torah and agreement of the Jerusalem Temple as the true House of God on Earth. The rabbi wishes not to discredit or subvert Judaism, but he articulates a vision of returning to the Judaism that God Himself had delivered to the people at Mount Sinai and taught to Moses. He reminds all that authority comes from God; he calls upon this authority to praise the poor, laud humility, preach total pacifism, and urge reliance on God alone rather than even family or tradition. All of these teachings allude to antecedents in biblical texts and the sayings of the Jewish sages. Distinctively, however, the rabbi also promises that those who join him in his vision of God can know a life beyond death, like angels.

The Messiah
The rabbi gains followers and notoriety. A small community emerges around him. Some of these consist of the downtrodden and the rejected, including tax collectors and prostitutes, who give faith in the prospect of sharing in God’s kingdom. They give faith that perhaps this rabbi is the messiah who will restore Jewish self-rule and liberate all Israel to lives that unify Torah teaching and Torah observance. In the rabbi’s teachings, the Kingdom of God entails an ultimate liberation from the evils of sickness and an institution of a new Jewish political and social order – with the rabbi and his disciples having jurisdiction over all. This kingdom, with its New Jerusalem and its restored ten lost tribes, will soon be at hand. The rabbi himself exudes the idea that God will soon keep His promise to redeem the world to its rightful order. The rabbi speaks out of the conviction that his mission is to interpret God’s law in God’s name. He addresses God as Abba, Father, a term of intimacy and affection; indeed, the strange suggestion seems to be that God and His children are practically one and the same.

During the Passover holiday, always a tense time for the Roman authorities and their allies in the social hierarchy, the country rabbi arrives to a Jerusalem already swollen with celebrants. Deliberately staging his actions to reference messianic passages in biblical literature and other sources, he proclaims to the Jewish people and their leaders the need for repentance. In the Jerusalem Temple, he overturns some of the tables of the moneychangers and traders. This action dramatizes his criticism of the existing order and his conviction in the coming of a new Temple. It also marks him as a political and social radical at a time when the authorities can little afford or tolerate a troublemaker. Later, some will say he had declared himself to be the king of the Jews. Others will say he had been falsely labeled such. Despite the truth, the presumptuous rabbi has the attention of the Temple High Priest.

Joseph Caiaphas, the Temple High Priest, owes his position to Rome and his willingness to work within Roman rule. The activities of the Galilean rabbi in the Temple cause concern on several fronts. Left unchecked, the rabbi and his followers could lead to bringing down Rome’s wrath against both the Temple and Palestine’s Jewish population. A rabbi with a following and a message of social and political change are also unwelcome at a festival celebrating liberation from bondage. Most of all, Caiaphas fears that the rabbi might do something else to disrupt the feat or provoke Roman intervention – which might then spell disaster for all Israel. The rabbi is arrested some time before the feast and interrogated before Caiaphas and possibly two other high priestly advisors. The rabbi speaks boldly enough to convince the men he is a threat, and they deliver him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, on the charge of stirring up the people.

Pilate had been governor of Judea since his appointment in 26 CE. He had come from the Roman elite, and his family was well-connected. He had also shown himself to be dismissive of Jewish customs, as when he used monies from the Jerusalem Temple to fund the building of an aqueduct. For years, Pilate’s enthusiastic support of the cult of the Roman emperor has made for an uneasy relationship between the ruling class and their allies among the people. As governor and the empire’s representative in the province, Pilate exercises considerable power to enforce Roman interests and defend the hierarchical social order. He applies military, political, social, judicial, and economic control, often in exploitative and harsh ways, for the benefit of the elite. When a troublesome peasant rabbi from the country shows up before him, he and he alone has the authority to make a life and death decision. Pilate has no difficulty sentencing the rabbi to crucifixion, a typical imperial punishment designed to make an example of those in the lower classes who threaten the Roman social order: runaway slaves, those who attacked the property of the powerful rich, those who committed treason by claiming power and rule not authorized by Rome.

The rabbi had been supremely confident in his mission, in himself, and especially in God his Abba. Yet he had never aspired to be king of the Jews. When he is arrested and later sentenced by Pilate, he still believes wholeheartedly that at the right moment God will turn the wheels of justice and institute His Kingdom. The rabbi’s disciples have all fled Jerusalem. Later, they exalt his memory and wonder about the meaning of his death. Although the rabbi’s crucifixion and death seem to falsify his claims of the coming Kingdom of God, his followers vividly remember and believe in their teacher’s promise to be with them. They feel his charismatic presence in their hearts and believe that his spirit has survived. The community that had formed around him when he was alive now discusses his teachings. They talk about his survival in their hearts. Some of his followers purportedly drive out demons in his name. Some reportedly perform miracles similar to his. Others even claim to speak on his behalf, and assert the authority to deal with problems in their communities. The mission itself, the charisma of the rabbi who had articulated and embodied it, and the growing body of stories about him sustain the community as they hold out faith that the truth of their teacher’s words will soon be divinely revealed to all in Judea.

A Journey of a Thousand (15-minute) Miles

I’ve drafted up a marathon training plan and have even been out for a few miles running in the past week. Well, I say running, but I am actually surprisingly slow. My time for a mile was 15 minutes last time out. Yes, that is correct: 15 minutes for one mile. For some reason, I think that even in my wounded and pained state in the Boston Marathon, I was doing 12-minute miles.

I am on the list for the upcoming Bay State Marathon. Come October, I plan to be ready to run a 4:15-4:30 race. I feel confident I can do it, but I worry about my legs. I’m carrying at over 200 pounds right now. I face a huge chance of injuring myself by trying to build up to long distances at my weight. My training plan calls for a 1.5 pound drop every week, but it may not be enough to save my legs.

We’ll see.

John Updike, 1932-2009

One of the best essays ever written:

John Updike's essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" -- inspired by Williams's home run in his last at-bat - was published in the New Yorker magazine Oct. 22, 1960

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidian determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, Sept. 28th, 1960, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as "Ted, Kid, Splinter, Thumper, TW, and most cloyingly, MisTer Wonderful," would play in Boston. "What Will We Do Without Ted? Hub Fans Ask?" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a - considering his advanced age - fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.
I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, "You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . ."

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams was no mere summer romance; it was a marriage composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It fell into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.
First, there was the now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West and announced, "All I want out of life is when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory - it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters - but he has held to it. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.
In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment - and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose - appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

"Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's], has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that."
There are answers to all of this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff game with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, when one victory would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.
Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams began when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell "blooper" pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose methodically along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance - since the reference point of most individual contests is remote and statistical -- always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by the players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to such manager's dreams as the manifestly classy Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams was an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, so assiduously refined his natural skills, so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I was in college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his rigorous pride of craftsmanship had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back - back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed sealed, shockproof, in some case deep within his frame. In addition to injuries, there was a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift - the manuever, custom-built by Lou Boudreau of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the league was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles - a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.
After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line falls between the 1956 and 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankees pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him. It was wise. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.
The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. "I feel terrible," he confessed, "but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park." He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the "leg hits" that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched ("rested," Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said). Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1954 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new super-stars - Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline - served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy - in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for chidlren with cancer - gave him a civic presence matched only by that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the abrasive-voiced Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome pair of seraphim.
Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like everybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmie Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.

In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as "the greatest hitter who ever lived." Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime average, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if - the least excusable if - we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson - another unlucky natural - rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.
Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose, that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Someday, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a sufficient quantity of insouciance is saturated with enough insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and steel in their stares; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men - taxi drivers, slaughterers, and bartenders - who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists - typical Boston College levity.

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.
A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words "pride" and "champion" as his text. It began. "Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California ... " and ended, "I don't think we'll ever see another like him." Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins, seated in a wheelchair, presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.
Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into "In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the knights of the keyboard up there . . ." He glanced up at the press rows suspended behind home plate. The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. "... And they were terrible things," Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. "I'd like to forget them, but I can't." He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, "I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life." The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, "Ted, you can play anywhere you like." Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves lustily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired - the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher born two months before Williams began playing in the major leagues, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. "Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful," the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine - flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles - all these cliches of sports cartoon iconography were rendered in the flesh.
With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout, "Steal home! Go, go!" Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.
"Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?" one of the collegiate voices behind me said.
"It's cold," the other voice explained. "He doesn't play well when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist."
The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood still, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line - along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game - and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning the tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate - pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity - it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized - and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts - really desired to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big "380" painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, "I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.")
The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on - always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us, and applauded. I had never before heard pure applause in a ballpark. No calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand, It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the Kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-two summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.
Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy, the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around the corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was low with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass, the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and vanished.
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs - hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters.
Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carroll Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.
One of the scholastics behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlan Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio, as I drove home I heard that Williams, his own man to the end, had decided not to accompany the team to New York. He had met the little death that awaits athletes. He had quit.

The Globe's Bob Ryan remembered Updike this way:

It is well-known that author, poet, and critic John Updike identified Fenway Park as "a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark" in his celebrated 1960 New Yorker essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," his first-person account of Ted Williams's final game. But the description goes deeper than that.

"Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg," he tells us. "It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities."
"I think I might have stolen the idea of the 'lyric little bandbox of a ballpark' from someone else," laughs Updike.
Fine. But the Euclid and Nature references are pure Updike.
Forty-eight years ago today, John Updike, 28 years old and, though raised in Pennsylvania, a Ted Williams fan since childhood, decided it was a good idea to attend the afternoon game between the Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles. He, like all members of the public, knew only that it would be the final home game of Ted's career. Not until the game was concluded did people learn that it would be Ted's last game, period, that he had announced before the game he would not be making a season-ending trip to Yankee Stadium.
The times were different. The word "hype" had barely entered the language. Today, there would be special editions, minted coins, and live shots galore.
"The world was a simpler place," Updike notes.
But Wednesday, Sept. 28, 1960, was a dank, dreary day. And the Red Sox, Ted Williams aside, were a dank, dreary team on their way to a 65-89 record and a seventh-place finish. Accordingly, a mere 10,454 fans showed up. And it could very easily have been 10,453. John Updike's first choice that day was to visit a lady on Beacon Hill. Fortunately, the lady was not home.
Updike explains in a 1977 epilogue:
"I took a taxi to Beacon Hill and knocked on a door and there was nothing, just a basket for mail temporarily hung on the door. A bright brown basket. So I went, as promised, to the game and my virtue was rewarded."
Whatever reward Updike derived from attendance at that game does not begin to compare to the amount of pleasure his patronage has provided for others. For "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," published in the Oct. 22, 1960, New Yorker, is the most spellbinding essay ever written about baseball. Some, like critic Roger Dean, go even farther. "It is simply the greatest essay I have ever read," he insists.
"It influenced me in a big way," says Roger Angell, who would become the foremost baseball writer of the late 20th century, but in 1960 was merely a devoted follower of the sport who had yet to publish a word about it in the magazine. "And it has influenced just about every sportswriter who followed. The great thing is that he went expecting something amazing and incredible - and it happened. Only baseball provides in any number those totally unexpected turns."

"My one effort as a sportswriter," explains North Shore resident Updike. "It's had a longer life than I would have expected."
No one need be kept in suspense. We all know how the story ends. In the eighth inning, battling horribly adverse atmospheric conditions that have already cost him one shot at a homer, Ted Williams hits a 1-and-1 pitch from Jack Fisher onto the canopy covering a bench in the Red Sox bullpen. He runs the bases hurriedly amid relentless applause and does not tip his cap. He takes his place in left field at the start of the ninth and is replaced with Carroll Hardy by manager Pinky Higgins in the hopes he will acknowledge the crowd, and again he does not tip his cap. He has not tipped his cap since 1940 and he has no remote intention of deviating from his policy.
There are 10,454 eyewitnesses, and to our everlasting joy, one of them happens to be John Updike, who sets it all down on paper. I have read and reread what he has written about that dank, dreary afternoon and it is the visual equivalent of listening over and over again to a favorite song that never offends the ears.
"And it was all produced at lightning speed," marvels David Remnick, the current editor of the magazine and, in an earlier incarnation, a Washington Post sportswriter himself. Magazine articles are often handed in six weeks or more in advance of publication. This astonishing work had a publication 25 days after the game.
"By New Yorker standards, it was an amazing turnaround," Remnick points out. "It may not impress someone at the Associated Press - but it should."
Updike, it seems, was writing from the heart. Ted Williams had been a youthful obsession, with Angell claiming that Updike had once revealed that the Thumper was half the reason he had settled in Boston. In the essay, he recalls listening with fascination to the 1946 All-Star Game in which Ted had gone 4 for 4 with two home runs, and of seeing Williams play in Philadelphia.
"I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose methodically along a straight line and it was still rising when it cleared the fence," he writes. "The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might have hit."
"I was in love with him, you might say," Updike declares. "Although it was a chaste relationship. No other sports figure has moved me as much as Ted Williams."
Williams is his man, and for that he makes no apology.
"Williams," he writes, "is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill . . . No other player visible to my generation concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, so assiduously refined his natural skills, so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy."

Ted Williams liked the piece. At least, that's what was conveyed to Updike by a third party. And Ted even suggested Updike be a collaborator on a biography, an offer Updike politely declined.
"I'd said all I had to say on the subject," he explains in the epilogue.
Here is Updike on the always controversial topic of whether or not Ted Williams was a team player: "For Williams to have distributed all of his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness."
(By the way, that must have been some woman, if she was in legitimate competition with Ted for Updike's attention.)
But this is no hot August day. This is late September, early autumn in Boston. It is cold and damp. John Updike is there, and he is taking it all in.
"No one describes things like John Updike," Remnick notes. "I call him the 'Great Noticer.' "
Updike takes a seat on the third base side and looks around. "The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield."
And this: "Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a sufficient quantity of insouciance is saturated with enough insecurity." Thus speaks John Updike, Harvard '54.
Those aren't the only college students he happens to see and hear. "Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists - typical Boston College levity."
The pregame ceremony honoring Williams allows Updike to smile at the sight of "a tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians."
As for the ballplayers, the Red Sox, he decides, are "a jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence," while the Orioles are "a much nimbler blend of May and December."
Updike reviews Ted's career, dividing it into three stages, which, he says, "may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor." Explaining Ted's tortured relationship with the fans, Updike explains that Ted has "quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that surrounds it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap or to turn the other cheek to newsmen."
A Ted at-bat, according to John Updike: "Whenever Williams appeared at the plate - pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with a vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity - it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers."
We get to the eighth, when, Updike reminds us, "We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball." But Ted has sent right fielder Al Pilarcik to the 380 sign in the fifth, and thus "there will always lurk, around the corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a destiny of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future."
Of Ted's stubborn refusal to tip his cap, despite being given three separate occasions to do so (coming to the plate, rounding the bases, and trotting in after being removed from the field), Updike sagely notes, "Gods do not answer letters."
But they sometimes leave behind epic accounts of epic events.
Thank you, sir.

Coffee Makes Life Worth Living

I have imagined that one day I will write a memoir called Coffee: A Love Story. Until then, here's Wikipedia's entry on it. Citizendium says much of the same.

By the way, for those who think Wikipedia is always a reliable source of information, here is the very first sentence of their article:

Coffee is a stimulant beverage prepared from roasted seeds that may cause heart attacks in fat guys, commonly called coffee beans, of the coffee plant.

As a fat guy, this makes me nervous!!

Roman Ingarden and Textual Editing - A Fragment from My Aborted Dissertation

To understand how different edited texts of the same literary work construct that work differently, we need a tool for capturing the structure and functions of literary language – that is, of literary language as it becomes represented in and through text. In The Literary Work of Art, first published in German in 1931, Roman Ingarden provides such a tool by demonstrating that the literary work has a heteronomous existence, existing both on its own and dependent upon the conscious activity of a reader. Ingarden gives us a sophisticated picture of the internal ontological constitution and articulation of the literary work and its world. Because edited texts result in part from the conscious, critical acts of editors, Ingarden’s model can be used to compare different edited texts and gauge the effects of their differences on our apprehension of them and their presented worlds.

According to Ingarden, “every literary work is a two-dimensional linguistic formation.” One dimension consists of four distinct layers that are interconnected and interdependent; the other concerns the sequence of individual parts in the literary work. Each layer, or stratum, corresponds to a primary linguistic feature of the literary work. These strata are: linguistic sound formations, meaning units, represented objects, and schematized aspects. In addition to these strata, each of which will be discussed in more detail, the literary work possesses a systematic sequence of its individual parts – sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, for example – that produces through reading the work’s internal dynamics. For Ingarden, individual parts of the literary work attain constitution and qualification from preceding ones; therefore, to say that a work has a “beginning” and an “end” is not to use these terms in a temporal sense but rather to refer to the arrangement of these parts. It follows, then, that in regards to that which “happens” in the represented world of a literary work, one cannot speak of time in the true sense because that which happens now in the world of the work is an illusion from the point of view of the world of physical space and time.

The stratum of linguistic sound formations is the level constructed out of the sounds of words. For Ingarden, the single word is made up of the word sound and its meaning: given sounds become word sounds only if they can determine a meaning, which establishes the primary function of the word sound as determining the meaning of a word through context and manner of articulation. However, word sounds, or phonetic formations, are not simply a means for revealing the literary work but form “the external, fixed shell of the literary work, in which all of the remaining strata find their external point of support or – if one will – their external expression.” The phonetic stratum is thus the means and the form through which the reader apprehends the literary work, with word sounds uttered by a reader – aloud or silently – influencing the ways that corresponding meanings get inflected. Word sounds, moreover, usually become operative in the context of the sentence, the phonetic formation that binds the meanings of given words to each other. In sentences, properties such as rhythm and tempo also become established.

With the stratum of linguistic sound formations, Ingarden uses a conception in which linguistic signs consist of sounds and meanings. He categorizes the sounds as a separate level of the literary work, a level that is nevertheless conditioned by its connections with the other strata and by the determinations of human actors. The stratum of word sounds and the operations of human consciousness assist in the construction of the stratum of meaning units, the level of sentences. According to Ingarden, the meaning content of sentences is partially a function of the exigencies of reading, the reader, and the temporal circumstances within which reading is performed. On the other hand, meaning content is not a simple sum or aggregate of word meanings but rather an entirely new construction with respect to them. Ingarden distinguishes between affirmative propositions and judgments. Affirmative propositions are statements that claim to be true; judgments are affirmative propositions that also are true or false. For example, the affirmative proposition “I live in town” claims to be factual, and, as a judgment, might actually be true at the moment for that speaker. However, if that speaker is a fictional character, it can never be a pure judgment because the fictionality of the affirmative proposition overrides the distinction between true and false: it cannot be actually true or false because the statement acquires the fictionality of its speaker and the represented world of the speaker.

According to Ingarden’s model, then, declarative sentences in the literary work are neither purely affirmative propositions nor pure judgments. The affirmative propositions of literary works are, ostensibly, hybrids: they are “quasi-judgments” that “have the external habitus of judicative propositions, though they neither are nor are meant to be genuine judicative propositions.” Unlike pure affirmative propositions, quasi-judgments “are capable of evoking, to a greater or lesser degree, the illusion of reality…. They carry with them, in other words, a suggestive power which, as we read, allows us to plunge into the simulated world and live in it as in a world peculiarly unreal and yet having the appearance of reality.” Because of this suggestive power, the stratum of sentences performs the central function in the literary work. At this level of the work, the conscious activity of the reader constitutes the represented world as objects become revealed. In other words, as objects get revealed in their various states, they are brought to representation. The meaning stratum thus has a representation function in addition to a constitution function.

Through the strata of linguistic sound formations and meaning units, Ingarden places sign-recognition and sign-interpretation at the center of apprehension of the literary work. The next level, represented objects, emerges out of the reader’s recognition of word sounds and their meanings in phrases and sentences. Every represented object and state of affairs that is constituted and represented in this stratum has its source in either the phonetic or meaning stratum, the two strata which together constitute the language element of the literary work. The stratum of represented objectivities thus encompasses presented things and the world created vis-à-vis literary language. Through these presented things, a reader engages a simulated reality constructed out of “a unique space which essentially belongs to the represented ‘real’ world.” However, the unique space of the represented world is always incompletely determined and marked by its partiality. Not everything in the space of the represented world gets determined explicitly, nor could it. The text used to imagine a represented space does not and cannot provide all of the information about every quality it holds. In a literary work, then, the form of a represented object is a schema which, unlike objects in real time and space, can never be entirely filled by material determinations. Because a represented object “is simultaneously formally intended as a concrete unit containing an infinite number of fused determinations and, consequently, intentionally created as such, ‘spots of indeterminacy’ arise within it, indeed an infinitely great number of them. These spots of indeterminacy in principle cannot be entirely removed by any finite enrichment of the content of a material expression.” For instance, to enrich a nominal expression like “the person” with more adjectives, as in “the strong, generous person,” does not render the represented person any less schematized. But the production of a partially determinate, simulated reality is not, Ingarden says, the most important function of the stratum of represented objectivities. Rather, the central function that represented objective situations perform is to exhibit and manifest metaphysical qualities, such as the elegiac, the heroic, the homiletic, and so on. The manifestation of metaphysical qualities depends not only on the attributes of represented objects and situations but also on the manner in which they are constituted and represented.

Recognizing that objects in the represented world of the literary work are not fully constituted or rendered present, Ingarden proposes that a fourth level of the work, the stratum of schematized aspects, prepares readers to apprehend represented objects. Since objects represented in the literary work cannot be represented completely or apprehended fully by a reader but instead contain spots of indeterminacy, the schematized, or inevitably unfulfilled aspects of objects “have the basis of their determination and, in a certain sense, their potential existence in the states of affairs projected by the sentences or in the objects represented by means of the states of affairs.” In other words, objects and the conditions in which they are presented help readers to intuit the unstated qualities that give the represented world an apparent vividness. The stratum of schematized aspects thus enables readers to apprehend represented objects intuitively: language, characterizing objects in various states of affairs, directs readers to apply their sensory faculties – vision, hearing, or touch, for example – in the conceptual domain of the represented world. Because readers take a conceptual and perceptual leap to get from schematized aspects to a sense of immersion in a “real” world, schematized aspects play a crucial role in the aesthetic experience of reading.