Amanda, curled up in bed with David Lodge's Thinks, makes a gaspy little laughing sound and, when I ask the cause, reads to me from the first conversation between the two main characters, Ralph Messenger, a cheerful, confident atheist and professor of cognitive science at an English university, and Helen Reed, a novelist and creative writing tutor who, after the sudden death of her young husband, has begun occasionally to attend church services again. Ralph naturally does not approve. The part of their conversation Amanda read concludes:
'So you think that when we die we just cease to exist?' she says, when the waitress has gone.
'Not in an absolute sense. The atoms of my body are indestructible.'
'But your self, your spirit, your soul . . . ?'
'As far as I'm concerned those are just ways of talking about certain kinds of brain activity. When the brain ceases to function, they necessarily cease too.'
'And that doesn't fill you with despair?'
'No,' he says cheerfully, twisting creamy ribbons of tagliatelle on his fork. 'Why should it?' He thrusts the steaming pasta into his mouth and munches vigorously.'
'Well, it seems pointless to spend years and years acquiring knowledge, accumulating experience, trying to be good, struggling to make something of yourself, as the saying goes, if nothing of that self survives death. It's like building a beautiful sandcastle below the tideline.'
'That's the only part of the beach you can build a sandcastle,' Ralph says.
Having spent some time recently reading up on John Updike, I connect this conversation with something he said on the occasion of winning the Campion Award, for "a distinguished Christian person of letters":
Is not Christian fiction, insofar as it exists, a description of the bewilderment and panic, the sense of hollowness and futility, which afflicts those whose search for God is not successful? And are we not all, within the churches and temples or not, more searcher than finder in this regard?
Which itself reminds me of something Flannery O'Connor wrote in a letter:
I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times. It's hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
To me it seems that these thinkers of big thoughts all agree that the claims of the Christian religion are implausible. Some, however, for reasons having to do probably with their own psychology, are quite discouraged to discover the implausibility and so determine to believe it anyway.
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