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He crossed his arms and cocked his head to one side, a challenging pose he often struck. “Okay, my little geniuses,” the pose said, “what are you going to do with that one?”
One of the amphitheater’s downlighters happened to hit him dramatically, theatrically…just so…and he held the pose during the silence that ensued. In Charlotte’s estimation, the vision was…sublime. Victor Ransome Starling’s thick brown hair, which he combed straight back, was definitely still brown despite a rising tide of gray. The current fashion among male professors at Dupont was scrupulously improper: cheap-looking shirts, open at the throat, needless to say, and cotton pants with no creases—jeans, khakis, corduroys—to distinguish themselves from the mob, which is to say, the middle class; but Victor Ransome Starling always bucked the tide with the sort of outfit he was wearing right now, a brown-and-white houndstooth suit that looked great on his slender frame, a light blue shirt, a black knit tie, and a pair of ginger-brown suede shoes. To Charlotte he was elegance itself amid a motley crew.
Yes, Mr. Starling was sublime, to look at and to listen to, and he had posed a question. Swept away, Charlotte raised her hand and was immediately frightened by her own audacity—a freshman in an advanced class taught by a Nobel Prize wi
The vision below looked up at her, gestured, and said, “Yes?”
Charlotte’s heart began racing, and she became acutely conscious of the sound of her own voice. “Darwin said—he said he didn’t know where the original cells came from, and he wasn’t going to guess?” Even as the words left her lips, she was aware that she was reverting, in her nervousness, to the way she spoke before she arrived at Dupont. She had broken guess into two syllables and uttered it on a rising note, as if she were asking a question rather than making a statement. But she plowed on. “He said the origin of life itself was a hopeless in quiry?” Inquiry rose, too! And she had come down on the in like a farm boy driving in a stake with an ax head. “And it would be way, way in the future before somebody figured that out, if they ever did?”—which not only rose but also came out dee-ud. “And I think he said—in The Origin of Species?—I think he said that in the begi
“Right,” said Mr. Starling, looking up at her from the stage. Then he turned away to address the class as a whole. “Now you’ll notice—” He stopped abruptly and looked up again in Charlotte’s direction: “Very good. Thank you.” Then he turned away again and continued. “You’ll notice that Darwin, who probably did more than any other single person to extinguish religious faith among educated people, doesn’t present himself as an atheist. He bows to ‘the Creator.’ He always professed to be a religious person. There’s one school of thought that says he was only throwing a sop to the conventional beliefs of his day, since he knew The Origin of Species might be attacked as blasphemous. But I suspect it was something else. He probably couldn’t conceive of being an atheist. In his day, not even the most daring, most rationalistic and materialistic philosophers, not even David Hume, professed to be atheists. It’s not until the end of the nineteenth century that we come upon the first atheist of any prominence: Nietzsche. I suspect Darwin figured that since nobody had the foggiest idea as to what created life in the first place, and might never know, why not just say it was created by the Creator and let it go at that?”
He looked up in Charlotte’s direction again and gestured. “You’ve made a very fine and very important distinction.” Then his eyes pa
The student on Charlotte’s right, a cheery brunette with pale but striking features whom she knew only as a junior named Jill, whispered, “Hey! Charlotte!” and opened her eyes wide and pulled a face of mock astonishment. Then she mouthed the words “Not bad!” and smiled.
A flood of joy, so intense it seemed tangible in her nerve endings, ran through Charlotte’s entire body. She was giddy. She barely took in anything anybody said in the last few minutes of the class.
One thing she did remember was something Mr. Starling said about “the conscious little rock”:
“If anyone should ask me why we’re spending so much time on Darwin,” he was saying at one point, “I would consider that a perfectly logical question. Darwin was not a neuroscientist. His knowledge of the human brain, if any, was primitive. He knew nothing about genes, even though they were discovered by a contemporary of his, an Austrian monk named Gregor Joha
Once it ended, five or six students went up onstage and gathered about Mr. Starling. By the time Charlotte had made her way down from the upper rows of the amphitheater, he was just descending from the stage, and they came within two or three feet of each other. He excused himself from a tall young man who was hovering over him and turned toward her.
“Hello,” he said. “It was you—I’m afraid I have a hard time distinguishing faces in the upper rows—you’re the young…uh…the one who mentioned the Creator?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you made a very nice summary of a very subtle point. Can I assume you actually read The Origin of Species?”
“Yes, sir.”
Professor Starling smiled. “I assign it every year, but I’m not sure how many actually go to the trouble, although it’s well worth it. What’s your background in biology?”