Photo Sharing – Video Sharing – Photo Printing
Herman Wouk appeared Sunday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA, impressively interviewed for an hour by Tim Rutten.
Wouk’s new book, which he is publishing at the age of 94, is “The Language God Speaks,” a title he took from a statement made to him by the extraordinary Jewish scientist Richard Feynman (among whose many other activities was bongo drumming): that he should learn calculus, since it was “the language God spoke.”
The book is a response to Feynman’s view of religion, which is summarized in a Feynman statement that serves as the quotation on the book’s opening page:
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all those atoms with all their motion and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
Wouk ended his UCLA presentation by reading a few pages from his book, including a short section entitled “The Ghost Light,” which is worth many times the price of the book.
The video above is Wouk’s response to a question Rutten asked about whether the Jewish heritage of rigorous Talmud study might have affected secular scientists such as Feynman. The five minutes of Wouk’s answer is worth many times the time it will take you to watch it.
For a flavor of the book, here is just one paragraph, which follows this quotation from Ecclesiastes:
He has made everything beautiful in its time
And has put the universe in their hearts, except
That a man will not find the work that the Lord
Has wrought from beginning to end.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
The Hebrew root word for the universe, OLAM, takes in not only all Space but all Time, and it can mean this world as well, our beautiful little Australia in space, which has been circling the Sun, so we have learned, for some three or four billion years. Richard Feynman’s biographer chose one of his many quoted sayings as the epigraph for his whole life story: “I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there.” Call that a humble humanist scrawl in the margin of Ecclesiastes by a melancholy Jewish genius, whose humor it was to sport the persona of a raffish bongo drummer.