From the family diary of 1997 —

Aaron loves big work trucks of all sorts, just as Evan did. His favorite is a backhoe. This fall he asked Victoria, “Where is God?” She answered, “In the sacrament, in our hearts, in good fun, in church, in heaven.” He countered, “He is on a backhoe, a cement truck, a bulldozer!”

At St. Bartholomew’s [in midtown Manhattan, my first cure], worried at the communion rail that the priest with the paten was passing him by, Aaron asserted in an uppercase voice, “I WANT THE CHRIST! I WANT THE CHRIST!”

At Christmastide he confided, “I want to go to church to see Joseph, Frankenstein, and Mary!” glossing thus the holy family, the gifts of the magi, and Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

Aaron and I are fans of the Red Wings and Tigers, so imagine our vexation last Saturday. Both teams were playing on television at the same time. My father is with us. He’s not into hockey. He wanted us to stick with the baseball game in Camden Yards. Aaron and I preferred the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals from Joe Louis Arena. We figured that behind their ace Justin Verlander, the Tigers would end the O’s five-game win streak. They did, 6 – 3.

I enjoy the story my father tells of the time a Latino player stepped into the batter’s box and crossed himself, as ball players are wont to do, and the Yankees’ catcher Yogi Berra tapped the guy’s knee with his mitt and said to him, “Whaddya say we just let God watch this game!”

That story has to do with why I don’t want my children to have values. That and some notes written by a soldier in a foxhole. Let me explain.

During World War I, a young Austrian soldier — an aristocratic Jew who was said to have fought with “reckless bravery” — used his time in a foxhole and in prison to jot down his thoughts on logic and ethics. After the defeat of Germany and Austria, these thoughts were published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an almost impenetrably complex landmark work on the relationship between language and thought. The soldier’s name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He published only this single book in his lifetime.

He was an intellectual high-watt bulb, Wittgenstein, especially on the subject of “language games.” We play games, he observed. So do languages. When we reach for words, especially technical words, to apprehend and articulate reality, we do well to note what language game they belong to.

The language of values, like the language of ‘fastballs’ ‘bunts’ and ‘sacrifice flies’, belongs to a game with its own grammar or rules. Whereas values assume a closed system — more about which in a moment — baseball assumes an open one. Baseball’s played in a paradise whose only canopy is the heavens. This is the world a baseball player inhabits and late-night talk show hosts do not. The baseball player thanks God, or the Big Guy Upstairs, for his success. The late show hosts, Leno O’Brien or Letterman, make him the butt of jokes for it. As if God cares, they say. As if God has any interest in a game.

Athletes make easy targets. They want to believe — they believe inveterately — that God cares about what they’re doing and wishes them well, a notion quaint these days. Such a thought is incongruous in a world where our lives entire, not merely our sporting lives, are no longer seriously imagined as beheld by divinity. The reason we doubt God watches baseball is not that we think sport trivial but that we think God is. We lack the moral imagination the ancients had, or John Donne or Jane Austen. Most of us who have fiber-optic TV and 457 channels no longer imagine God watches anything. We are Nietzsche’s “last man.”

It was Nietzsche who made this values language up. He argued that whatever the rules of the game concerning our behavior shall be, they can only be rules we make up or choose for ourselves. A nihilist, he defined reality in terms of negation, negating that particular and strange history of the Jews. No more “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” and the Ten Commandments and so on. The ancient Hebrew and Christian notion that the grammar of our lives is in league with a particular history involving Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Hannah, and David; the claim that our story is somehow part of the story of Israel and her children; the hope that we inhabit that story and are headed somewhere, all this belonged to another day. That day, Nietzsche said, and his values language assumes, is gone.

This is the language game of values, a language that presupposes God is not watching us any longer because there is no God to do the watching.

If values are what people are supposed to have instead of God — and I’ve just made the case that they are — why would I want my kids to have them? I’d rather they have virtues, especially those with narrative entailments. I’d rather they have the ancient sense that their lives are beheld by divinity, watched and worried after by the God of the Exodus and Mt. Sinai, the Lord who hung the stars in the heavens and raised Jesus from the dead. I want my children to live in a universe that is more like Camden Yards or Comerica Park than Mellon Arena or the venerable Joe. And I want the Wings to win the Cup.

The University of Michigan asked applicants for undergraduate admission to submit essay responses to the following prompt:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” (Robert Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 16)

Author Robert Pirsig (1928 — ) suggests that science has traditionally concerned itself with truth, while art has concerned itself with beauty. How might these two endeavors be the same? How might they be irreconcilably different?

Science doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about truth. Scientists do. Art doesn’t give a rat’s ass about beauty. Artists do. The scientist and the artist know what they are doing when they abstract — when they say “science concerns itself with truth” and “art concerns itself with beauty” — which they sometimes have to do. The artist is as smitten with truth as the scientist. The scientist is as smitten with beauty as the artist. Both knock on the same door, see the same splendors, drop the same handkerchiefs. And in their earnest flirtations with the world sometimes their very earnestness gets in the way.

The problem isn’t that science and art are irreconcilably different. The problem is that scientists and artists are irreducibly people, and people can be amnesiac. They forget that the world is as modest as she is alluring; that she can stand to be admired or studied only so much. Sketches and biology satisfy so long as we don’t reduce life to them.

Really talented people have had at least moments of trying. Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don and a Nobel Prize-winner in genetics, says that we human beings are “lumbering robots blindly programmed” by our genes which “control us body and mind.” Van Gogh had the gall to call this world “a study that didn’t come off.”

Disenchantment and lassitude are the subject of the celebrated early T. S. Eliot. “And I have known the eyes already, known them all — / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I presume?” As for the American novel, the fugitive nature of the true and the beautiful reaches its apotheosis in front of a couple of cabinets:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

I don’t suggest the one thing led to the other, but two years after Nick Carraway narrated The Great Gatsby, Eliot announced that he had converted to the orthodox Christian faith. The darling of the literati and the avant-garde had gone off the deep end as Auden would in 1940. Eliot published no major work for ten years. Some essays came forth, some plays, and then in 1943 Four Quartets appeared. It is the work of a man who has gotten beyond decadent aestheticism and the endlessly self-referential question “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Eliot became a critic of his earlier work, an artist with a new direction. Like Rat and Mole, he’d heard the music from another room.

By the end of the summer, when Gillian enters the ivy halls of Wheaton College — which to do is to get what Stanley Hauerwas calls “a damned good education” (he told me this as we stood next to each other making water at Boston College urinals) — only the caboose of our family will not have left home and taken his religion to school. Wherever Aaron matriculates, I hope he will be the kind of man moved by the scene of Daisy burying her face in Gatsby’s shirts. I hope he’ll be the kind of man who moves in the direction taken by Eliot and Auden and my Great Aunt Mena. If he does? He’ll know that education is something more than preparation for a game show. And when he watches the best game show ever and “Love Songs & Food for 800” is chosen, and Alex reads the answer, “‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ he asked, and measured out his life” Aaron will be able to pose without need of with coffee spoons the question, “Who is T. S. Eliot?” and wonder if America gets the irony.