A week or so ago, I was googling a Spinoza citation (regular readers know I’m a big Spinoza fan), and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Spinoza of Market Street” popped up in my search results. Now, I vaguely remember reading that story sometime in my distant past, but had no real recollection of it. So, I pulled it up and was glad I did.
A digression here. I am constantly amazed at how little I remember of things I read decades ago. Unless I have reread or thoroughly studied the texts, I might be able to recall some themes, whether I liked the piece or not, a few memorable scenes or tidbits, who wrote it, but that’s about it. It is a mixed blessing, as I can enjoy some really fine works as if for the first time. I can even reread classic mystery writers like Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh. But really – where did it all go? What else has been lost over the years besides the knowledge of “who done it”?
Needless to say, the Singer story was “new” to me, and it made an overwhelming impression this time. Truthfully, besides the memory problem, when I read it for the first time, I was not old and surely did not appreciate old age (or Spinoza) as I do now. The story is about an elderly and impoverished man, Dr. Fischelson, who has spent his whole life studying Spinoza. He has written notes and stupendous amounts of commentary, but – at the end of his life – he cloisters himself in a small attic room in Warsaw trying to make ends meet. He has dedicated his life to trying to live the kind of life Spinoza recommended, to be the “free man” that Spinoza describes in his Ethics. He has forgone marriage, children, regular employment for this ideal.
Spinoza does not protect the aging scholar from the vagaries of life, however. Dr. Fischelson gets deathly ill in his attic room, and would have succumbed had not his neighbor, an old crone called “Black Dobe,” suddenly needed someone to translate a letter she got from a relative in America. Black Dobe is an aging spinster, described as “tall and lean, and black as a baker’s shovel. She had a broken nose and there was a mustache on her upper lip. She spoke with the hoarse voice of a man and she wore men’s shoes.” And yet, this old crone nurses the Spinoza scholar back to health. They talk to each other about their lives – for the first time in many years somebody is interested in what they have to say. Black Dobe knows nothing about Spinoza, but she cares about Fischelson’s childhood, about his thoughts. And he reciprocates. Eventually, they visit the Rabbi and say that they want to get married. The people on Market Street are amazed and pack into the Rabbi’s chamber for the wedding. The wedding night is better than expected. “What happened that night could be called a miracle. If Dr. Fischelson hadn’t been convinced that every occurrence is in accordance with the laws of nature, he would have thought that Black Dobe had bewitched him.” Good for them.
But here’s the thing. Dr. Fischelson thinks he has broken faith with Spinoza. He has failed to lead the kind of “life based on reason” that Spinoza has recommended. As the sun rises on the morning after his wedding night, the old, old man looks up at the sky and pleads, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.” Is rationality really the answer or do the fools really have the answer in the end? Does one preclude the other? One thinks of the Death of Ivan Ilych and the happiness of the servant Gerasim as opposed to the severe angst of his dying master. Is being in love with (or at least comforted by) an old ugly spinster a sin against Spinoza? Surely not.
While Spinoza himself led a solitary life, it does not seem to have been lonely. Spinoza boarded with a family, he had friends, he had a large correspondence with other philosophers. And one point that Dr. Fischelson seems to have missed in modeling his life after Spinoza’s precepts, is that – above all – Spinoza believed in cheerfulness. Other emotions could be tolerated as long as they were not in excess, but “of cheerfulness, there could be no excess.”
Fundamentalists, zealots of all kinds, tend to squeeze the joy out of life. There is no room for frivolous emotions in a single-issue mind. Dr. Fischelson was a zealot of Spinoza, but led a cheerless life. He thinks he has failed in the end, but perhaps – for the first time – he has gotten it right. Marrying Black Dobe was both a rational and joyful act. One does not preclude the other.
And here’s the thing that got me. When Black Dobe asks Fischelson why he doesn’t go to temple, he tells her that “God is everywhere. In the synagogue, in this very room. We ourselves are part of God.” This completely frightens the old lady. “Don’t say such things,” she tells him. The odd thing is that he says them but does not act as if they are true, and Black Dobe is frightened by the very thought and yet treats even a dirty old man as if he were sacred. Amen.
T. S. Eliot said it well in “East Coker”: “Do not let me hear /Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.” Ah, yes. And let us find reasons to be cheerful in our old age.
For a humorous look at love in old age, you might look at my stories, “Livability” or “The Case of the Missing Husband.” For more of Spinoza, you could try an earlier blog, “Smile for Spinoza.” Be of good cheer.
When I Come To Be Old 