A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [243]
After my military service, in 1961, the Committee of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to Jerusalem to study for two years at the Hebrew University. I studied literature because the kibbutz needed a literature teacher urgently, and I studied philosophy because I insisted on it. Every Sunday, from four to six p.m., a hundred students gathered in the large hall in the Meiser Building to hear Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman lecture on "dialectical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber." My mother Fania also studied philosophy with Professor Bergman, in the 1930s, when the university was still on Mount Scopus, before she married my father, and she had fond memories of him. By 1961 Bergman was already retired, he was an emeritus professor, but we were fascinated by his lucid, fierce wisdom. I was thrilled to think that the man standing in front of us had been at school with Kafka in Prague, and, as he once told us, had actually shared a bench with him for two years, until Max Brod turned up and took his place next to Kafka.
That winter Bergman invited five or six of his favorite or most interesting pupils to come to his house for a couple of hours after the lectures. Every Sunday, at eight o'clock, I took the No. 5 bus from the new campus on Givat Ram to Professor Bergman's modest apartment in Re-havia. A pleasant faint smell of old books, fresh bread, and geraniums always filled the room. We sat down on the sofa or on the floor at the feet of our great master, the childhood friend of Kafka and Martin Buber and the author of the books from which we learned the history of epistemology and the principles of logic. We waited in silence for him to pronounce. Samuel Hugo Bergman was a stout man even in old age. With his shock of white hair, the ironic, amused lines around his eyes, a piercing glance that looked skeptical yet as innocent as that of a curious child, Bergman bore a striking resemblance to pictures of Albert Einstein as an old man. With his Central European accent he walked in the Hebrew language not with a natural stride, as though he were at home in it, but with a sort of elation, like a suitor happy that his beloved has finally accepted him and determined to rise above himself and prove to her that she has not made a mistake.
Almost the only subject that concerned our teacher at these meetings was the survival of the soul, or the chances, if there were any, of existence after death. That is what he talked to us about on Sunday evenings through that winter, with the rain lashing at the windows and the wind howling in the garden. Sometimes he asked for our opinions, and he listened attentively, not at all like a patient teacher guiding his pupils' footsteps but more like a man listening for a particular note in a complicated piece of music, so as to decide if it was right or wrong.
"Nothing," he said to us on one of the Sunday evenings, and I have not forgotten, so much so that I believe I can repeat what he said almost word for word, "ever disappears. The very word 'disappears' implies that the universe is, so to speak, finite, and that it is possible to leave it. But no-o-othing" (he deliberately drew the word out) "can ever leave the universe. And nothing can enter it. Not a single speck of dust can appear or disappear. Matter is transformed into energy, and energy into matter, atoms assemble and