These Dreams of You

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Has it really gone silent or is its power simply exhausted, the same song but sung to a different and more desperate wind that casts the words and music on ears that have grown deaf to it? For months the new president was the only thing that made Zan happy: He made me believe in the country of my dreams, but is everyone therefore complicit in the Great Wake-Up from that dream, as accountable for what they chose to hear as for what was sung? If in fact it isn’t really the song that’s changed but the listener, then is it not only no longer the same song after all but never was? Can it be one song one moment but then, listened to another way, another song, though the same melody and lyric and singer? Was there a secret country that all along hated the song, waiting for the other country that Zan loves to become deaf to it and lose its love for it and faith in it?

How can you believe in a god, J. Willkie Brown asks Zan at the pub outside the university following the lecture, and Zan answers, swallowing the last of his second vodka, “Because I don’t believe it’s all molecules. Because I don’t believe the conscience translates into a chemical equation. Because men and women run into a hundred-and-ten-story building to save perfect strangers, overcoming every instinct of self-preservation, when the hundred-and-ten-story building right next to it has just collapsed, which means people act not only in the face of nature and self-preservation but outright rationality. Because there are dimensions of nobility that can’t be diagrammed on a blackboard in a class. Because men wrack their brains trying to think of ways to turn their fellow human beings into lampshades, which means there are dimensions of barbarity that also can’t be diagrammed on the same blackboard. Because I believe such unquantifiables abound beyond dispute, along with evidence that human behavior is animated by spirit. Because I think the existence of the soul proves the existence of God, not the other way around.”