Thomas the philosopher

Dearest grandchildren,

In this post, my father gets philosophical – and I get melancholy.

When I was looking for a meaningful reading for Dad’s funeral in 2017, I only had to go as far as his words in this little chapter of his book, The Rim of the Volcano. And reflecting on that reading made me reflect on his death… which made me reflect on his life… which made me realize that, in many ways, I am only really beginning to understand my father now, four years after his death, as I examine and ponder every word of his writings.

I chose to read the bolded words in this entry at Dad’s memorial because they so perfectly describe his philosophy about religion, science, compassion, knowledge, faith, order/chaos, nature, physics, and… well, the electromagnetic and space-time spectrum!

I share all of Dad’s philosophies that he describes here. Is that because he quietly and carefully imparted them upon me over the years? Or is it just happenstance, since we lived in the same family and community at the same time, even though we were separated by a generation? I don’t know, but I do know that I am grateful to Dad for urging us to always think, to question, to ponder, and to reflect. He reflected by writing, and I am grateful to have “inherited” that passion.

I decided to include photos from Dad’s memorial in this post because this important time in Ingolstadt is where Dad began to formulate his life philosophy that was brought full circle at his memorial.

I wish Dad could pull up a chair in my office and sit with me for a bit as I try to bring his words to life for his great-great grandchildren. Oh, how he would have loved you!

God, I miss him.

Here you go, dear grandchildren. Here are your great-grandfather’s words. Remember to always question, ponder, and reflect!

The summer of 1946 was terribly lonely for me. There was no picture of a woman in my room that summer. Nora’s picture had been dethroned. The picture I saw in my mind was that of Gisela, but it had become hazy. My first love. My pure love. My oh-so-innocent love. Would there ever be a chance that she would enter my life again? The eighth of August 1944 -- so very, very long ago, still smoldered in my soul, buried under two years of intensive living.

Professor Klatt from Vienna, a friend of my parents, had written in one of his books that "a young person who is still in the process of developing needs a great deal of solitude." I wrote that into my collection of poems and aphorisms at the time as a sort of consolation – the very wise Professor Klatt said it, so it must be true for me! But I didn't like this “important” solitude one bit. What did he think I should do with my riches of solitude? Brood? Think? Dream? Ruminate over all the newness one must digest when one is young? Why is it better to do that at home alone, in the quiet of one’s lonely little room? I didn't get it and I fought it. It wasn't until later that I realized that, while you learn about others in groups, you learn about yourself by meditating alone.

Two powerful influences on me during this time consisted of a Catholic student and a Priest teacher. Both were after me to save my half-Jewish, Protestant-raised soul. I had lengthy discourses with both, but the more they tried, the more they moved me away from the believes of my childhood. I still felt comfortable being called a Protestant (there wasn’t a drop of religion in the half-Jewish part of me), but I had practiced no religion for many years now, other than admiring Baroque churches, getting to know more of Bach's music, and looking at the religious pictures in my father's collection. My religious feelings were -- and still are! -- quite well summarized by Immanuel Kant: "There are two things which fill me with ever greater admiration, the more my mind contemplates them: the starry sky above me and the moral imperatives within me."

The more my two Catholic friends talked, the more I doubted. They only managed to instill three things in me: first, a thorough dislike for people with missionary zeal; second, a growing feeling that people had to invent religions to make themselves feel good; and most importantly, the realization that our own perceptions of heaven and earth are conditioned by a mind that could not possibly conceive of how huge the space-time spectrum is. I was just learning about the electromagnetic spectrum. It told me that our senses, being optimized for the great experiment called "evolution" (we didn't know about DNA in those days) can only perceive that minuscule part of the spectrum which we require for procreating and evolving. We happen to live in three dimensions, so the mind cannot visualize another dimension any more than a dog, say, can know what "reading" is.

The older I got, and the more I learned about the ingenious balance between order and chaos in the "big experiment" of nature and physics, and the more respect I gained for the grandeur behind the experiment. I developed an awe for realizing that vastly larger realities we cannot comprehend must exist, but I cannot get myself to worship them so they are benevolent to me, or ask their protection or forgiveness. But then — every time I watch the goldfish in the pond and observe their behavior, I think: ‘They have no idea I'm watching them. They hide when I approach, and they compete for the food I give them, but they don’t understand my presence. Is someone watching me in my fish bowl? And if someone is watching my behavior, is someone also watching that someone’s behavior?!’ It all felt so convoluted and yet, it made so much sense.

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I have never felt the need to develop a more profound theology than that in all of my adult life, but I'm not completely comfortable with it. What if there really is a God, and now he's mad at me? When I was eighteen years old, I longed for more, because my conscience and my surroundings told me I should. But even then, I found it hard to relate to any of the organized beliefs. I wanted knowledge, not faith. Today I find it interesting to study religions as a means of studying people. Isn't it presumptuous to say you "know" something that nobody can truly know? But I envy religious people for the peace their blind faith gives them, and I'm thankful for religions to have inspired the world's most magnificent art.

Handel wrote in the “Messiah,” that wonderful aria, “I know that my redeemer liveth.” What did he “know”? Did he really know? Did he think he knew? Did he believe he knew? Did he question whether he actually knew? Did he think questioning was a sin? What inspired that beautiful aria?

Don't I believe in anything then? Yes, I do, but you can’t really call it a religion. It seems that we establish the outlines of a belief system rather early in life and have it undergo its own evolution as we experience the world and people. I was well over 50 before I found the perfect credo for myself, and I have had it in front of me under the glass on my desk ever since.

Sir Kenneth Clark expressed it with a clarity that cannot be improved upon:

"I believe that order is better than chaos, and creation is better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. Overall, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human compassion is more valuable than ideology.

"I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last 2000 years, and so we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

"I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feeling by satisfying our own egos. And that we are part of a great whole which, for convenience, we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters.

Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible."

Thomas continues… from Ingolstadt in 1946.

I digress. Yes, life for me was very intense back in Ingolstadt 1946, and it was about to get more so.

The school year was over in mid-July. My report card was… well, charitable. It said that I was a “meticulous and well-behaved student who achieved, thanks to his great diligence, satisfactory results, except for the old languages which presented some difficulties.” That was an understatement. I got Ds in Latin and Greek, Cs in English and German, and just “satisfactory” in the rest of the subjects. The automatic “A” in Religion (despite my agnosticism!) didn’t make up for it.

Worse was the pre-printed reminder on the bottom of my report card: “To repeat Junior year, as required by law.”

The reason for that little legal wrinkle was this: Few of Germany’s universities had survived the war intact. During the four years of the war, millions of young men had to give up college for military service. Now, all at once, they came back to the ruins of their homes and their colleges. At the same time, a wave of new high school graduates was ready to graduate to compete with the returnees. Clearly, something had to be done. So West Germany — not the Russian Eastern zone — held the wave back by legislating an intensified extra year in high school which, for Seniors, could often count as a semester of college. At the same time, they arranged special crash programs for returning soldiers who had been drafted into the army out of high school. It was the way to get them a high school diploma fast before the younger students would graduate.

Here was my chance. We wanted to emigrate to America in 1947 and I couldn’t wait until summer 1948 to get my high school diploma. Using the interruption of my education under the Nazis as a justification, I used my summer vacation to apply for and pursue a very special permission from the Bavarian Ministry of Education to attend one of those Special Courses. It worked. Instead of spending two full years with high school kids to get the piece of paper entitling me to enter a university, I got permission to attend a six-month high-pressure crash course along with former soldiers.