420
PARTISAN REVIEW
he meets and about the essentials of all faiths. He hears it stated that, as the
Hasidim say, "Everything is Torah." Boning up in the library at Hebrew
University, he discovers that, by adding the Hebrew letter
shin
to the
Tetragrammaton, one can transform the name of God into the name of
Jesus. Raziel says, "The Sufi, the Kabbalist, the
saddhu,
Francis of Assisi–
it's all one." Lucas understands the yearning that drives belief in the
restoration of the
tikkun,
of cosmic harmony.
But the transcendental pantheism which sustains belief in the sacred–
ness of everything concedes to evil its own omnipresence. Lucas's reading
and conversations make him consider those heretical doctrines of the
Gnostics and others which explain the world we know as a residue of
God's withdrawal; he is drawn to the view that the universe is something
set up by a Creator who then "absconded." When he visits Yad Vashem,
the Holocaust memorial, on the day that he goes out to the hatred and vio–
lence of Gaza, the two are forever confounded in his memory
although he understood perfectly well that it was a cheap equivalence.
Blind champions would forever turn the wheels in endless cycles of
outrage and redress, an infinite round of guilt and grief. The two were
utterly unconnected, because history was moronically pure, consisting
entirely of singularities. Things had no moral.
John Casey's
TIle Half-Life qfHappiness
is a book as long as
Damascus Gate,
but it is thick with a different thickness-personal life multiplied and
expanded and keeping the drama of history at a distance though the con–
text of society at large is implied. Preoccupation with the personal is not
merely the author's, however. Mike Reardon and his friends are post–
Vietnam liberals. They have come together as a sort of loose, extended
family reminiscent of the communes of the sixties. But personal friendship
has replaced the social and political hopes of earlier years. Mike's father had
been an Irish Catholic New Deal politico, and after law school and the
Navy, with a brief tour of duty in Vietnam, Mike became a congressional
aide, only to be bored as much as fearful of "what he was becoming," a
drudge in the workshop of opportunist politics. He copes with his disap–
pointment by going into private practice, joining an old-fashioned law firm
in Charlottesville, and buying a rural property on the Rivanna River, where
his companions and tenants create a nest of friendship that includes Edmond
and Evelyn, a nature conservationist and an animal-rights veterinarian;
Bundy, a painter; Tyler and Bonnie, teachers at the university; and Ganny, a
black legal colleague. Joss, Mike's wife, an experimental filmmaker, had
