Isaac Bashevis Singer
THE MISSING LINE
Toward evening, the large hall of the Yiddish Writers'
Club in Warsaw became almost empty. At a table in a corner two
unemployed proofreaders played chess. They seemed to play and
doze simultaneously. Mina, the cat, had forgotten she was a literary
cat written up in the newspapers and went out in the yard to hunt for
a mouse or perhaps a bird. I was sitting at a table with the most im–
portant member of the club-Joshua Gottlieb, the main feuilletonist
of
The Haint.
He was the president of the journalists' syndicate, a
doctor of philosophy, a former student of such famous scholars as
Hermann Cohen, Professor Bauch, Professor Messer Leon, Kuno
Fischer. Dr. Gottlieb was tall, broad-shouldered, with a straight red
neck and a potbelly. The setting sun threw a purple shine on his
huge bald head. He smoked a long cigar and blew the smoke out
through his nostrils. He would not have invited a beginner like
myself to his table, but there was no one else available at this hour,
and he liked to talk and tell stories.
Our conversation turned to the supernatural and Dr. Gottlieb
was saying, "You young men are in a rush to explain everything ac–
cording to your theories. For you it is theory first and facts last.
If
the
facts don't match the theories, it is the fault of the facts. But a man of
my age knows that events have a logic of their own. Above all, they
are the product of causality. Your mystics feel insulted if things hap–
pen in what we call a natural way. But to me the greatest and most
wonderful miracle is what Spinoza called the order of things. When I
lose my glasses and then find them in a drawer which I thought I
hadn't opened in two years, I know I must have put them there
myself and that they were not hidden by your demons or imps. I also
know that no matter how many incantations I might have recited to
retrieve them, the eyeglasses would have stayed in the drawer
forever. As you know, I am a great admirer of Kant, but to me
Editor's Note: "The Missing Line" and "The Last Gaze" are excerpted from
The
Dtath of Methuselah
by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright
C
1988 by Isaac Bashevis
Singer. To be published by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. Used by arrangement with
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux, Inc.
