Julene handed me their phone number.
“It’ll have to wait till we return from Greece. It’ll be an opportune way to complete my sabbatical,” coughed Sullivan.
We talked some more. I reached for the tab before Sullivan could pay. “My gift!” I smiled. “It’s the least I can do.”
We shook hands at the door. “Next Thursday morning, at eleven!” He repeated.
“I’ll be there,” I gave Julene a huge hug. She kissed my neck. I could feel her warm body beneath her pink dress. Her earrings glittered in the soft red neon lights outside the entrance. I hated to let her go.
“Good night!” she whispered.
“And don’t forget the champagne,” Carl interjected. “No, no!” he suddenly blurted. “Tonight was enough. Just come as you are.”
They went up the street toward the metro. I watched them slip into the rouge shadows of the night. It enfolded them in its wispy, ethereal gloom. “Come, sweet night, ere soon the pain return.” I walked back in the settling mist, aglow in the soft lamp-lights that illuminated the Rue Guynemer, and headed toward the pension.
To my joyful surprise, Christine had returned. She was hauling a large piece of luggage down the hall.
“Well, bonsoir!” I greeted her. “I’ve been wondering where you were.”
She turned her head and smiled. “Oh, God! I’m exhausted.” Her hair was slightly plastered to her face and wet with mist. Her long, baggy black coat all but dragged on the carpet. “You look a little down yourself,” she observed. “If it weren’t so late, I’d share a drink with you at a café. I’m beat.”
I caught up with her and clasped the bag in my hand. “Here, it won’t hurt to walk with you.”
“God, but I’m dead. What a story I’ve got for you.”
“Tomorrow? How about telling me tomorrow? A date tomorrow night? Huh!”
“God, but you’re a lovely chap! How about the day after tomorrow? Right now, I’m just beat. You can take me to a bar, and then. . . .”
“My room?” I smiled.
“No, maybe mine.” She puckered her lips for me to kiss. Her eyelids drooped with sleep; her face was drained of emotion. It made me sleepy just to look at her.
I kissed her lips. She unlocked the door. I slid her luggage into the room. “Good night,” I said; then I returned down the hall.
6
Hemingway dubbed Paris “a moveable feast.” For me, it was a wanderlust’s dream. Sabbatical or no sabbatical, everyday the magical city—founded by no one less than Priam’s son, offered up something new, totally avant-garde, or ancient and crumbling, or wondrous and shocking. Even if I never left my room, simply gawking out the windows at the chimney pots and tin roofs across the street, or listening to the drone and hum of the incessant traffic, or watching from my balcony the prostitutes ply their trade in the rue below, or translating French, or sipping tea—all of it was a philosopher’s quest come true, a metaphysician’s alchemy bubbling up, intoxicatingly delicious. I had arrived in Paris at that time in my life that psychologists might call “late youth,” or “early middle years,” when the wine in ones veins is still gurgling with passion and the desire to learn. I knew what I wanted. What the next steps up the long, tedious ladder of academia should be, even if I should stumble and fall, or never make it. Or so I thought I knew. Ambitious, yet cautious, single yet ready for marriage, I wanted to write that next book, or at least get it underway, before having to return to the States and the obligations of the classroom.
At the same time, a nagging uncertainty sported with my brain. What was the ultimate intendment of my goal? My impulses felt so dull. Rereading Sullivan’s book, falling anew under its mythical sway, meeting the man in person himself, becoming bewitched by the charming spell of his incestuous bride-to-be, and forcing myself to read subjects that had lost their initial intrigue, created a burden that weighed heavier and heavier on my dubious pursuits. I knew I had to fight back, that I couldn’t surrender my dream, or find refuge in the beckoning despair of self-pity. Perhaps that was why Christine had come into my life, I rationalized: to enable me to remain human, until I could regain my élan for the academic call. Besides, I knew I was on to something, just as Sullivan was, and I wanted with all my soul to discover what that “something” was. Sullivan seemed inseparable from it. Perhaps we would find it together. That following morning I turned to Pascal to translate and draft my chapter, devoted singularly to him. He writes:
The principal illness of mankind is his restless curiosity of things he cannot know; and he is never in graver danger to his being than when he lapses into this useless and purposeless malady [Pensée 18].
In still another section, he adds:
We always find obscure the thing we want to prove, and clear the method we employ in proving it; for when we propose to prove a thing, we are so filled with the notion that it is precisely obscure, and that, on the contrary, our approach is perfect, that we grasp it too easily [40].
Pascal knew there are limits to reason. “The heart has its reasons which reason can never fathom” [277]. He knew that the processes of rationalization can only carry us so far. In his quaint pre-Kantian way, he identified two methods of knowing, or of arriving at knowledge. One he called “the mathematical,” the other “intuitive.” The first involved the ability to conceptualize and to employ logical reasoning. The second was more immediate and belongs to the realm of sensory perception. Says Pascal, somewhat condescendingly, it requires only “good eyesight.” Neither method by itself is sufficient. What Pascal really seems to have wanted was an immediate and unwavering knowledge of the truth that lies beyond the capacity of either method to establish. Without it, man tumbles headlong into an abyss of anxiety from which he is unable to extricate himself. It was his own analysis of a hellish No Exit, indigenous to the seventeenth century. In many of his pensées, Pascal examined that abyss, before attempting to resolve it. I found it exhilarating and challenging to wrestle with his dicta. But, then, that was what my quest was all about. For epistemology, or the science of questioning how we come to know, is the Holy Grail of philosophy, the quest of all quests. Oh, to know with certainty and to banish all doubt! But even philosophers recognize a pipe dream when they see it, though they smoke it every day. It is the aromatic breath of the gods: to know with certainty the truth or fate about anything!
What is man when he reflects on himself? Let him consider his place against the totality of being. He is but an aberration in a sequestered corner of nature, his lodgment but a dungeon in the universe, from which he apprehends the earth, its kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is man in the Infinite? [72]
One can take only so much dazzling, or disruptive self-examination, even from Pascal. After translating a number of other relevant thoughts, I laid my pen aside and left the room. The rains from the previous day had enveloped the city in a soft fog. Cool air settled about the streets. The cafés and boutiques huddled under wet awnings. I had chosen no particular destination for my promenade, or better, my mindless wandering. But my mind was numbed by the dozen or so homeless people I noted, asleep in doorways along the side streets. To my horror, one was the old woman I had attempted to assist on the steps of the Pantheon. She appeared comatose, her body curled in fetal position against a doorframe. I paused and stared down at this human “aberration in her sequestered corner of nature” and remembered Jesus’ famous maxim: “You will always have the poor with you and you can do for them what you will.” I squatted beside her and placed a five franc note in her wrinkled right fist. I tucked it inside her clenched fingers. Hopefully, no one else would find it, or steal it from her.
Whatever I had intended to do evaporated as a goal, as I “considered my place against the totality of being.” I wandered into a bon marché, stumbled upon a bargain department entirely by accident, and spotted rain gear on sale. I bought one and returned to the old woman. She was still asleep, the money still clenched in her fist. Perhaps it