Read 36 Arguments for the Existence of God for Free Online

confused? And what is the confused but the cowardly? And what is the cowardly but the immoral? And what is the immoral but the probable? It is full circle! Therefore—she always said this word with a special emphasis, equal accent on both syllables, and blowing a bit of air into
the f
, so that the aspirated phoneme seemed to ascend on the smoky fragrance of her voice—there is only the absolutely impossible, what they rightly call the thing with 0 probability, and the absolutely necessary, which they say has probability 1, Papa had informed her, but she had vehemently countered that, no, it must be measured as 100, or, better yet, as infinite, since certitude is infinite. There
fore
—maybe she had inherited the love of the adverb of consequence from mathematical Papa, or maybe, as Cass enjoyed picturing, all the children ofBures-sur-Yvette, hanging upside down on the jungle gym, solemnly sprinkled their sentences with
donc
—there is only, in the calculus of probability, the numbers zero and infinity.
    “And do you know, Cass—Papa, he did not argue with me.”
    Cass could well believe that Papa, he did not argue with her. What Pascale believed, she knew, and what she knew, she knew with savage certitude.
La Sauvagerie et la certitude
.
    “Basically, she’s full of shit” was the way that Mona had put it, which Cass thought hardly did the situation justice. Mona, with her high-school-level French, couldn’t even read Pascale’s poetry in the original. Cass had translated as best he could, but clearly it wasn’t good enough.
    “Her poetry is a crock, too. That relentless keening. It hurts my ears just reading it. She’s the Yoko Fucking Ono of poetry. She’s
anti
-art.”
    “How is she anti-art, Mona?” Cass felt compelled to ask, even as he acknowledged to himself that Mona’s Yoko Ono comparison had something to it. “Say what you will about her, Pascale is a brilliant poet. How can her poetry be anti-art?”
    “I’ll tell you exactly how. Art is supposed to increase our
mindfulness
. Pascale wouldn’t know mindfulness if it bit her on her skinny French ass.”
    This last phrase, which might easily be perceived as not only anti-Gallic but, even more egregiously, intolerant of a woman’s right to choose the shape of her own body, was a testament to just how angry Mona felt, on Cass’s behalf, or how hard she was trying to get Cass to feel some anger on his own behalf. (She never succeeded.) But her assertion about the mindfulness function of art was straight out of her textbook. Mona had done her doctoral work with Arlene Unger, who makes the concept of mindfulness central to her existentialist psychology. The concept was central to Mona as well. She worked it in whenever she reasonably— or even unreasonably—could. Mona, who was quick to ask the first question at lectures, always began her query with the phrase “As an Ungerian, I’m wondering.” You could tease Mona about almost everything—her bisexually frustrating love life, her Omaha, Nebraska, upbringing, even her weight—but mindfulness was off limits. Mindfulness was Mona’s religion.
    And Mona had indeed been mindfully present to Cass during the longordeal with, and without, Pascale; mindfully eager for every blood-smeared detail, which she had picked clean with raptor-zeal; mindfully condemnatory of the mindlessness that had left Cass so battle-of-the-sexes-scarred—“I hate to say it, Cass, but you’ve been pussy-whipped. So have I, if it’s any consolation”—that she, Mona, repeatedly wondered whether he’d ever be able to love a woman again.
    Mona was facing stoically forward now, but Cass knew her well enough to read the silent reproach in her back. He knew what it must be costing Mona not to give way to temptation and swivel around backward to see what was going on
now
, and he felt remorse in a highly theoretical sort of way, which is to say that he supposed that somewhere, in whatever part of the brain was supposed