A Schroeder Etude

By Geoffrey Dean

Like so many other cellists, I grew up using a collection of studies that are often affectionately referred to as “the Schroeder Etudes.” In 2012 I started thinking about the man who compiled them just over a hundred years ago, and I realized how little I knew about his life. What more could I learn about him? The few brief biographical paragraphs about Alwin Schroeder that were readily accessible online didn’t seem to do justice to an artist who was once hailed as “America’s Greatest Cellist.” I set out to learn more about him and give him the more complete biography he deserves, using mainly online resources such as historical newspaper and magazine articles and especially performance reviews to create a picture of the kind of performer Schroeder was and trace his career path from Berlin to Leipzig, from Leipzig to Boston, from Boston to New York, and then (briefly) to Frankfurt, and finally back to Boston. Written over the course of 2012, the resulting sketch was, as far as it goes, adequate and in any case an improvement on the biographical information that had been available to that point.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

To my probably deserved embarrassment, I'd never heard of Rebecca Goldstein. But I've heard of her now, from my intellectual alter ego Sam Harris, in an email from samharris.org:

New Novel about the New Atheism: Rebecca Goldstein's, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
"So extravagantly witty and smart that it's making everything else I've read recently seem drab."
    —Ron Charles, Senior Editor at The Washington Post Book Review

"Comic and supremely witty, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is both a satire of the academic world and a feast of philosophical and religious ideas."
    —Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams [an excellent work, which I have read; by the way, Lightman is on the MIT faculty, along with Goldstein's husband, linguist Steven Pinker]

"You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something."
    —Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great [ditto]

"Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does it all. She has written a hilarious novel about people's existential agonies, a page-turner about the intellectual mysteries that obsess them. The characters in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God explore the great moral issues of our day in a novel that is deeply moving and a joy to read."
    —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated [not yet]

    I get from these recommendations the same thrill that I got from the ad I saw (in 2005?) in The New York Times Book Review for Harris's book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I knew it would speak to me on my own wavelength.

And the list of Goldstein's publications is intellectually provocative. From a research university's online library catalog:

Goldstein, Rebecca, 1950-
Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity
    New York : Nextbook : Schocken, c2006. [Spinoza!]
The dark sister
    New York, NY : Viking, 1991. [according to Wikipedia, "a postmodern fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James"]
Incompleteness : the proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel
    New York : W.W. Norton, c2005. [a filched book about Gödel's incompleteness theorem graced my summer of 1965]
The late-summer passion of a woman of mind
    New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c1989.
Mazel
    New York : Viking, 1995.
The mind-body problem : a novel
    New York : Random House, c1983. [don't you worry about this too?]
Properties of light : a novel of love, betrayal and quantum physics
    Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [let me know if you can explain quantum physics to me]
Strange attractors
    New York : Viking, 1993.

An Ian McEwan-class novelist? I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation, having this morning requested Properties of Light from my local library.
    36 Arguments for the Existence of God sounds like some excellent "talk about faith," possibly of the sort Russ Douthat had in mind in his op-ed piece, "Let's Talk about Faith", in Sunday's New York Times:

When liberal democracy was forged, in the wake of Western Europe’s religious wars, this sort of peaceful theological debate is exactly what it promised to deliver. And the differences between religions are worth debating. Theology has consequences: It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them.