As a secular person, I feel comfortable personifying god in almost any endeavor.
Within literature particularly, where writers have to know everything about human character and behavior that psychologists and neuroscientists are now starting to uncover through quite another effort, the presence of that something that some of us have and that we as a culture long for is especially vivid.
Why should James Joyce be compelled to say that Gabriel had to fix “his cuffs and the bows of his tie” after his jovial comment is rebuffed by the young, poor housemade to whom it was offered ? (The Dead ) Why should Tolstoy know how to make an army commander press his two fingers "more and more rigidly to his cap," when confronted with having to justify himself to a superior? (War and Peace. Book 2 Chapter 1.) And why do we know just what they mean?
Today, science has a lot to tell us about why people fix cuffs and holds caps, and the simple answer to how writers who are not mind scientists know what is necessary for the building of frequently complete and believable characters, is that they are intuitive psychologists.
And we in their readership are to be intuitive readers. From general experience, we are to interpret the information we are given correctly. We are not to think, for instance, that the commander is holding his cap because it makes him think of this daughter. We, like the writers, are to know that this action means the commander is nervous or stressed.
We are all intuitive psychologists. But the most direct and interesting distillation between physical reality and its interpretation happens at the level of the writer. Between the writer and god. Between him and the biochemistry and neurocircuitry that runs us and that, at present at least, is likely to be so complex that it cannot be fully quantified in an equation.
Unless the equation is made of words that beget images that tell stories and result in experience.
Perhaps Einstein would say that the best science is the kind you experience. Or, if he wouldn't, perhaps our next inspired genius should.
