It's Been a Good Life Read online

  I am sometimes suspected of being nonreligious as an act of rebellion against Orthodox parents. That may have been true of my father, but I have rebelled against nothing. I have been left free and I have loved the freedom. The same is true of my brother and sister and our children.

  I have never, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.

  [Letter] Have I told you that I prefer "rationalism" to "atheism"? The word "atheist," meaning "no God," is negative and defeatist. It says what you don't believe and puts you in an eternal position of defense. "Rationalism" on the other hand states what you DO believe; that is, that which can be understood in the light of reason. The question of God and other mystical objects-of-faith are outside reason and therefore play no part in rationalism and you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending that which you rule out of your philosophy altogether.

  [Isaac had already written his Guide to the Bible when he appeared for a taping of the David Frost Show. Frost] said, with neither warning nor preamble, "Dr. Asimov, do you believe in God?"

  That rather took my breath away. It was a dreadful way of putting a person on the spot. To answer honestly, "No," with millions of people watching, could arouse a great deal of controversy I didn't feel much need of. Yet I couldn't lie, either. I played for time, in order to find a way out.

  He said, "Dr. Asimov, do you believe in God?"

  And I said, "Whose?"

  He said, a little impatiently, "Come, come, Dr. Asimov, you know very well whose. Do you believe in the Western God, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition?"

  Still playing for time, I said, "I haven't given it much thought."

  Frost said, "I can't believe that, Dr. Asimov." He then nailed me to the wall by saying, "Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?"

  (Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, "God is much more intelligent than I am-let him try to find me."

  The audience laughed its head off and, to my relief, Frost changed the subject. He essayed one more probe into mysticism by saying, "Do you consider it possible, Dr. Asimov, that there may be forces and energies in the universe we have not yet discovered?"

  "If so," I answered, "we have not yet discovered them." .. .

  I had an attack of superstition after the taping. I had often stated that I didn't think that God, even if he existed, would be angry with an honest atheist who voted his convictions. Would he, however, tolerate a wisegur atheist'? Of course, no lightning bolt had struck me on the spot when I virtually dared him to find me, but the show was only a taping. What would happen when it was actually aired on September 5?...

  September 5 ... at 5 A.M.... I woke with the familiar agony [of a kidney stone]. There followed a nine-hour period of unbearable pain, the worst and most prolonged I have ever experienced. At one point, I could only gasp, "All right, God, you found me! Now let go!"

  [He went to the hospital, and the doctor tried to give him an injection of morphine.] As he approached, the pain ebbed away. Whatever it was the kidney stone was doing, it stopped doing it.

  I said, vigorously, "No, don't. Don't use the hypodermic. The pain has stopped. It's really stopped." I must have seemed like a faker afraid of the needle, but no one with an acute kidney-stone attack can sit up in bed and smile. The pain had to have left. (Try it yourself and see.) The doctor had no choice but to let me go home, and I managed to catch the David Frost Show.

  [Isaac had to add! I was with a group of people about a week later, and one of them said, "I saw you on the David Frost Show."

  A young man of nineteen was part of the group and he said, with genial insolence, "And what did you do, Dr. Asimov? Read commercials?"

  With a haughty determination to squelch the young cockerel at once by a thrust too outrageous to parry, I said, "Not at all! I was demonstrating sexual techniques."

  "Oh," he said, smiling sweetly, "you remembered?"

  I was wiped out completely.

  [Letter about a letter from a minister! I have shaken his faith in God. This bothered me for while I am perfectly content with my own rationalist view of the universe, I would not wish to take Linus's blanket from him just because I can live without one (or perhaps because my blanket is of another sort). So I wrote back to the effect that people who limited God to a tiny universe six thousand years old and required him to be forever interfering with his creation in order to make it work and to concern himself with a single planet and a single life-form were perhaps sacrilegiously limiting his powers; and trying to cut him down to man-size.

  [Written in his last autobiography, when he was terminally ill] The afterlife is accepted by the vast majority, even in the absolute absence of any evidence for its existence. How did it all start? My ... speculation is this-As far as we know, the human species is the only one that understands that death is inevitable, not only in general but in every individual's case. No matter how we protect ourselves against predation, accident, and infection, each of us will eventually die through the sheer erosion of our body-and we know it.

  There must have come a time when this knowledge first began to permeate a human community, and it must have been a terrible shock. It amounted to the "discovery of death." All that could make the thought of death bearable was to suppose that it didn't really exist; that it was an illusion. After one apparently died, one continued to live in some other fashion and in some other place. This was undoubtedly encouraged by the fact that dead people often appeared in the dreams of their friends and relatives and the dream appearances could be interpreted as representing a shade or ghost of the still-living "dead" person.

  So speculations about the afterworld grew more and more elaborate. The Greeks and the Hebrews thought that much of the afterworld (Hades or Sheol) was a mere place of dimness and all but nonexistence. However, there were special places of torment for evildoers (Tartarus) and places of delight for men who were approved of by the gods (Elysian Fields or Paradise). These extremes were seized on by people who wished to see themselves blessed and their enemies punished, if not in this world, then at least in the next.

  Imagination was stretched to conceive of the final resting place of evil people or of anyone, however good, who didn't subscribe to quite the same mumbo jumbo that the imaginer did. This gave us our modern notion of Hell as a place of eternal punishment of the most vicious kind. This is the drooling dream of a sadist grafted onto a God who is proclaimed to be all-merciful and all-good.

  Imagination has never managed to build up a serviceable Heaven, however. The Islamic Heaven has its houris, ever available and ever virginal, so that it becomes an eternal sex house. The Norse Heaven has its heroes feasting at Valhalla and fighting each other between feasts, so that it becomes an eternal restaurant and battlefield. And our own Heaven is usually pictured as a place where everyone has wings and plunks a harp in order to sing unending hymns of praise to God.

  What human being with a modicum of intelligence could stand any of such Heavens, or the others that people have invented, for very long`? Where is there a Heaven with the opportunity for reading, for writing, for exploring, for interesting conversation, for scientific investigation? I never heard of one.

  If you read John Milton's Paradise Lost you will find that his Heaven is described as an eternal sing-along of praise to God. It is no wonder that one-third of the angels rebelled. When they were cast down into Hell, they then engaged in intellectual exercises (read the poem if you don't believe me) and I believe that, Hell or not, they were better off. When I read it. I sympathized strongly with Milton's Satan and considered him the hero of the epic, whether Milton intended that or not.

  But what is n1Y belief'? Since I
am an atheist and do not believe that either God or Satan, Heaven or Hell, exists, I can only suppose that when I die, there will only be an eternity of nothingness to follow. After all, the Universe existed for 15 billion years before I was born and I (whatever "I" may be) survived it all in nothingness.

  People may well ask if this isn't a bleak and hopeless belief. How can I live with the specter of nothingness hanging over my head?

  I don't find it a specter. There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell or eternal boredom in Heaven. And what if I'm mistaken? The question was asked of Bertrand Russell, the famous mathematician, philosopher, and outspoken atheist. "What if you died," he was asked, "and found yourself face to face with God? What then?"

  And the doughty old champion said, "I would say, `Lord, you should have given us more evidence.'

  [Recently] I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and knew where I was-green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting.

  I said, in wonder, "Is this Heaven?"

  The recording angel said, "It is."

  I said (and on waking and remembering, I was proud of my integrity), "But there must be some mistake. I don't belong here. I'm an atheist."

  "No mistake," said the recording angel.

  "But as an atheist how can I qualify?"

  The recording angel said sternly, "We decide who qualifies. Not you.

  "I see," I said. I looked about, pondered for a moment, then turned to the recording angel and asked, "Is there a typewriter here that I can use?"

  The significance of the dream was clear to me. I felt Heaven to be the act of writing, and I have been in Heaven for over half a century and I have always known this.

  A second point of significance is the recording angel's remark that Heaven, not human beings, decides who qualifies. I take that to mean that if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

  I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don't believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God?

  I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.

  But all that is just playing. I am firm in my beliefs. I am an atheist and, in my opinion, death is followed by an eternal and dreamless sleep.

  Five.

  PRODIGY

  My father was a small storekeeper, with no knowledge of American culture, with no time to guide me, and no ability to do so even if he had the time. All he could do was to urge me to get good marks in school, and that was something I had every intention of doing anyhow.

  In other words, circumstances conspired to allow me to find my own happy level, which turned out to be sufficiently prodigious for all purposes and yet kept the pressure at a sufficiently reasonable value to allow me to chug along rapidly with no feeling of strain whatever. It meant that I kept my "prodigiousness" for all my life, in one way or another.

  In fact, when asked if I was an infant prodigy (and I am asked this with disconcerting frequency), I have taken to answering, "Yes, indeed, and I still am."

  I learned to read before I went to school. Spurred on by my realization that my parents could not yet read English, I took to asking the older children on the block to teach me the alphabet and how each letter sounded. I then began to sound out all the words I could find on signs and elsewhere and in that way I learned to read with a minimum of outside help.

  When he found out I could read, [my father bought] me a small dictionary, "so you can look up words and know how to spell them."

  My first thought was that it was surely impossible to find some one word among all the incredible number, but after I studied the book for a while, the workings of "alphabetical order" became plain and I asked my father if that was how the words were arranged. My father had clearly held back the information to see if I could work it out for myself, and was terribly pleased.

  [All this] gave my father the idea that there was something strange and remarkable about me. Many years later, he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?"

  "From you, Pappa," I said.

  "From me? I don't know any of this."

  "You didn't have to, Pappa," I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble."

  I did not realize that my memory was remarkable until I noticed that my classmates didn't have memories like it. After something had been explained to them, they would forget and would have to have it explained again and again. In my case it was only necessary that I be told once.

  Actually, my memory for things that are of no particular interest to me is not much better than normal, and I can be guilty of appalling lapses when my self-absorption gets the better of me.

  Early in my school career, I turned out to be an incorrigible disciplinary problem. No, I wasn't destructive, or disobedient, or difficult in any way. The point was that since I understood what the teacher was saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy on my hands, so I would occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime. I talked in school.

  I may have been gifted with a delightful memory and a quick understanding at a very early stage, but I was not gifted with great experience and a deep understanding of human nature. I did not realize that other children would not appreciate the fact that I knew more than they did and could learn more quickly than they did ... I cheerfully made it clear, at all times, that I was very bright.

  I was small for my age, weak for my age, and younger than anyone else in the class (eventually two and a half years younger due to my being shoved ahead periodically).... I was scapegoated, with diminishing intensity, right into my early twenties ... [but] in the end, I did learn. There is still no way of hiding the fact that I am unusual, considering the vast number of books I have written and published, and the vast number of subjects I have covered in those books, but I have learned, in ordinary life, to "turn it off" and meet people on their own terms.

  If only an infant prodigy could be prodigious in grasping human nature and not in memory and quickness of intellect alone. But then, not everything is inborn. The truly important parts of life develop slowly with experience, and that person is lucky who can learn them more quickly and with greater ease than I did.

  Once I could read, and as my ability to read improved rapidly, I had nothing to read. My schoolbooks lasted me just a few days. I finished every one of them in the course of the first week of the term and thereafter was educated for that half year. The teacher had very little to tell me ...

  The candy store was filled with reading material but [at first] my father wouldn't let me touch it. He felt it to be trash ... and I chafed. What to do? My father got me a library card.... Had my father had the time, and had he been of American culture ... he might have directed me to what he considered good literature and, without meaning it, have narrowed my intellectual horizons.

  However, he couldn't. I was on my own. My father assumed that any book that was in a public library was suitable reading and so he made no attempt to supervise the books I took out. And I, without guidance, sampled everything.

  By the purest of circumstances, I found books dealing with the Greek myths. I mispronounced all the Greek names and much of it was
a mystery to me, but I found myself fascinated. In fact, when I was a few years older, I read the Iliad over and over and over, taking it out of the library every chance I could, and starting all over again with the first verse as soon as I had completed the last.

  You could recite any verse at random and I could tell you where it would be found. I also read the Odyssey but with lesser pleasure, for it wasn't as bloody ...

  One thing leads to another, even accidents. Once, when I was ill and couldn't go to the library, I persuaded my poor mother to go for me, promising that I would read any book she brought me. What she brought back was a fictionalized life of Thomas Edison. That disappointed me, but I had promised, so I read it and that might have been my introduction to the world of science and technology.

  Then, too, as I grew older, fiction drew me to nonfiction. It was impossible to read Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers without becoming curious about French history ...

  I read The Jealous Gods by Gertrude Atherton (thinking it was mythology, I imagine). I found myself reading about Athens and Sparta, and about Alcibiades, in particular. The picture I have of Alcibiades, as drawn by Atherton, has never left me.

  Again. The Glory of the Purple by William Stearns Davis introduced me to the Byzantine Empire and to Leo III (the Isaurian), to say nothing of Greek fire. Another of his books introduced me to the Persian War and Aristides.

  All this led me to history itself ...

  When I grew a little older, I discovered Charles Dickens (I have read Pickwick Papers twenty-six times and Nicholas Nicklebr some ten times) ... Dickens's pictures of poverty and misery always had the leaven of humor, which made it more tolerable [than the books by Eugene Sue].