First to speak was the school’s chaplain, who defined spirituality as the divinity within each and every living creature, no person’s (or animal’s!) greater than any other person’s (or animal’s!). “In my yoga class,” she said, “my favorite part is always the namaste, which comes at the end.” And there, she laughed at herself. “As those of us who do yoga know, we love namaste because it comes at the end!” (Much nodding and grinned approval in the congregation of affluent Brooklynites.) “But what does namaste actually mean? It means: I bow to the divine light within you and you bow to the divine light within me. Now I know yoga is not a religion, though we’ve all met practitioners we might describe as fanatics. But this little insight contains a great profundity: all of us, bringing our little lights together to form what the apostles of Jesus might have called ‘the light of the world.’ This is the spiritual, and it’s within and around us all, at all times. We may find our way to it through a text on a page. We may find it through love or our family and friends or in service to others. We may call this ‘God.’ It makes absolutely no difference what we call it: it is our divinity that makes each one of us deeply special.”
Then, after the expected applause, Dr. Vernon Loring walked to the podium, every inch the white cis-gendered male he was, and dressed in a gray tweed three-piece suit and a scowl for the occasion. Before he’d said a word, he was already an object of general disapprobation. Within minutes he’d sent the entire Walden community shuddering into hysteria.
According to Vernon Loring, PhD, the absurd and inadequate interpretation of “spirituality” they had all just been treated to ought to send each and every student home to Papa and Mama to demand they withhold tuition until the school ponied up some capable instructors. The divine light inside of me bowing to the divine light inside of you? Was he—were any of them—supposed to listen to this garbage with a straight face? Because he had been under the impression that an established school like Walden, with an impressive price tag and a frankly surprising (under the circumstances) 14 percent admit rate, ought to be capable of recognizing the anti-intellectual drivel they had all just been treated to, by a school official—its chaplain, no less!—and banish it to its natural habitat: a student club, for example, alongside the tai chi enthusiasts or the tiddlywinks-curious.
“Fucking hell,” someone said, behind Harrison. But he didn’t want to turn his head, not even long enough to see who it was. A few rows ahead of Harrison, a woman got to her feet and began moving to the back of the room, her face a rictus of horror.
“The narcissism I will not even engage with,” Vernon Loring scolded. “We all are narcissists, myself included, you will doubtless be stunned to learn, but this is an inextricable part of our success as a species. No, what I object to is the fact that you young students are in a position of privilege, with all human knowledge at your fingertips, and yet you are paralyzed by guilt over the moral failings of people who died centuries before you were born.” A popular teacher of pottery darted up the center aisle to crouch beside Aaron and whisper furiously into his ear. “Can even one of you explain to me why you are content to wade around in this kind of anti-intellectual muck, apparently without complaint?”
Harrison heard himself make a sound, something primal, deep in his own throat. At the same moment, an entire row of Walden seniors near the front of the community room stood in unison and turned their backs, showing their stricken expressions to the rest of the school. The speaker, blithely ignoring this and every other iteration of audience disapproval, had now begun his prepared remarks by batting aside the very notion of “spirituality” with a rather gleeful reference to Madame Blavatsky (a person Harrison felt certain few of his schoolmates could identify), then compressed into twenty minutes the most cogent yet comprehensive history of Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism Harrison had ever encountered, complete with political context and a spattering of references to William James. “Brother of Henry,” he informed his audience helpfully.
Harrison observed that this was not, in fact, helpful to his fellow students.
“I will now withstand your criticisms,” Dr. Loring announced, with clear delight, when he came to the end of his speech.
Harrison, glancing around the room, could plainly see his sister Sally, seated on one of the oak benches against the wall, looking stunned. Two teachers and a parent, magenta with rage, were surging in Aaron’s direction. Harrison himself was thrumming with excitement. For the very first time in Walden’s self-described Fulcrum of Enlightenment, he was being enlightened, and by a towering stranger who was also, by his clear reception here, a loathed iconoclast.
Loring stood calmly before the audience for another thirty minutes, parrying the sputtered outrage of adolescents and their “teachers.” He was a tree in a maelstrom, bending his strength with the winds, never losing his composure. He calmly suggested books a young man might read to elucidate the notion of individual responsibility, and made philosophical arguments a young lady (young lady!) might turn to for a very clear statement on the subject of personal freedom. Scholarship, books, the record of centuries—millennia!—of human (well, human male) thought; before Harrison’s eyes, this tall man in his three-piece suit was pulling back a screen to reveal a groaning board of new (old) knowledge. Incredibly, he laughed at his enraged audience. He did not even condescend. In fact, as far as Harrison could tell, he seemed to be looking for something: a capable debater he might set himself against, a young person to whom he might hand over a thing in his possession—a thing of value.
Whatever that thing was, Harrison Oppenheimer wanted it. He was seventeen years old, and he had groped his way alone in the darkness long enough.
Loring wasn’t difficult to find. He had an email address on the Columbia University Philosophy Department website, but Harrison opted to contact him in the traditional manner, on paper, explaining that he was a Walden student who’d admired the stand Dr. Loring had taken in his remarks, and would he possibly be willing to meet for coffee and further discussion? The response, also in writing, also mailed, was swift if succinct: Symposium on West 113th, the following Thursday at five. When the much-anticipated day arrived, he lied to his swim coach and headed to Manhattan on the subway, surfacing into a thunderstorm on Morningside Heights.
Symposium was below street level, and Harrison descended in a trill of nerves. Loring, the restaurant’s only customer, sat in a green faux-leather booth on the far wall, one of his bony hands wrapped around a china coffee cup, as if for the warmth. The other hand hovered over a short stack of blue exam booklets, the uppermost of which—Harrison saw as he drew near—Loring was liberally annotating with a classic red pen. Somebody was going to be very disappointed with their final, he thought.
“Dr. Loring?”
“Well,” said the man himself, giving Harrison a once-over. “I wondered if I’d recognize you when you got here. I don’t think I spotted you in that congestion of anti-intellectualism that passes for your high school.”
Harrison grinned. He couldn’t help it.
“I should have spoken up, but I guess I was too shocked. Please forgive me.”
“You’re forgiven. Sit down. Coffee?”
“Sure,” Harrison said, sliding into the booth. The green Naugahyde was troublingly sticky. “I’m afraid I cut swim practice.” He wasn’t sure why he’d led with this, and regretted it the minute it was out of his mouth.
“Why afraid? Do you think someone will punish you? Do you think I’m going to punish you?”
“No, no,” he shook his head. “I just … I’m feeling a little guilty.”
“Well, that’s a waste of your time,” Loring said. He was putting the blue books down on the seat beside him. Harrison couldn’t help seeing the bright red D on the cover of the booklet on top.
A waiter came with a coffee for him, and refilled Loring’s cup. Harrison wanted milk but was too shy to ask for it. Loring, he saw, was drinking his black.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m a triplet,” Harrison heard himself say. He was surprised he’d said it. He rarely thought it, or at least, he never tried to think about it.
“Interesting.” Loring nodded.
“In vitro. I mean, not natural.”
“More interesting still. And your siblings, do they share your intellectual interests?”
Harrison smiled. “They don’t have any intellectual interests.”
“Then you are as an only child.”
Yes, he wanted to shout. Yes, yes! Five minutes in, and this person understood him in a way his own family never had.
“It feels like that, sometimes. I mean, they’re not bad people. In a … moral sense, I mean.”
Loring, for the first time, seemed to smile. At least, it looked more like a smile than not.