Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
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BORSCHT
by
Halfway through the Fitness Challenger's Heart Smart program, set at 15 out of 20, Stephen decided that feelings of existential gratitude and awe at creation like the ones he was suddenly and inexplicably experiencing were suggestive of the divine.
What, he asked himself as the program took him to a more intense level, could
possibly be a purely evolutionary explanation of such emotions? Preventing
self-destruction, he tried to answer himself. But he was unconvinced.
Stephen decided that he must a deist, if not yet a theist - because he could
certainly not admit of any direct divine intervention in the conventional sense.
Arriving at this very threshold to faith was the result of an overpowering need
to activate his mind against the excruciating boredom of staying fit. But he did
it religiously, because his doctor had told him six months ago that he had to,
and so he'd got himself a membership to the JCC.
Later on, after a shower and a relaxing steam, over a bowl of borsht in
Schmoozer's Cafe where the light streamed in through the glass wall, he moved
closer to theism by positing that the reason the theistic divinity that goes
under the name of God could not ultimately be understood by humans could be
suggested by imagining orders of magnitude, say in time.
God's calculations in time would naturally be vastly greater than those of
humans who count in lifetimes of about seventy-five years. If you could put it
like that, then whatever happened on the human scale might only make sense the
context of a scale inaccessible to human-sized
reasoning.
For some reason his mind felt pushed to make this surprising jump from deism to
theism while he was eating his piquant borsht - a Rumanian recipe?- and the
sensation, while not intellectually gratifying, was immensely calming, as if it
opened a vista that held the promise of
purpose.
That evening, sitting at his Ikea kitchen table that feeling of calm and
existential gratitude left him over a cup of green tea and an open faced
sandwich with mackerel in tomato sauce garnished with a dab of mayonnaise. His
sense of the divine, or whatever, evaporated. His
earlier thoughts now seemed stale as last week's bread. How could he have been
so naive? Worse, how could thoughts so deeply affect his sense of life? Could
thoughts work like a drug? Well, surely they could to a certain extent.
Delusions of all sorts abounded and seemed
to keep people going. Could natural selection have favoured a delusional
species?
Had the mackerel been off? Could his sense of the divine or his sense of the
lack of the divine - this current agnosticism, if not downright atheism - be
traced to the borsht - or the mackerel? Maybe. Stephen took a deep breath and
made a decision before turning on the radio to listen to the news: he was
definitely going to have borsht again tomorrow.