On that first occasion, I lay starkly awake trying to reconcile the evidence of my senses with some rational explanation. One that soon occurred to me was that my wife was kicking the furniture in her sleep. In a place the size of ours, furniture is seldom out of leg's reach. However, I found that she wasn't moving. I would presently learn that she wasn't asleep, either, but was simply keeping her head when all about her were losing theirs.
No, this was something outside the house hitting the window beyond the foot of our bed. Something or someone. But surely no burglar would adopt such a modus operandi: coming at dawn and intermittently messing with the window till we woke up. How about a wayfarer lost in the snow who had spied a light in our window? But there was no snow and no light. For that matter, the curtains were drawn.
Now, birds occasionally dash themselves against windowpanes by mistake, but they either break their necks or repair to the woods thoroughly chastened. When a crow came a cropper against one of our windows last year, it dropped all of a heap and lay there awed by its encounter with the supernatural till it was strong enough to totter off. It didn't try, try again. Birds are no gluttons for punishment.
What, then, was it? Far from hopping up to investigate like some impetuous youth, I continued to take the thinking man's approach. I may have placed my fingertips together under the covers. Wisps of rational explanation swirled around and yet failed to coalesce. When that sort of thing goes on for a while, bafflement begets a sense of the uncanny. If the thinking man's approach yields no rational explanation, mightn't it be time to venture beyond reason? In short, might not this thing that comes bumping at our chamber window be — I know this will seem abrupt — the ghost of some miner doomed to wander the old trolley tunnels that are said to honeycomb this area? To put the case on a sounder footing scientifically, might not this phenomenon be due to the venting of subterranean ectoplasm? That would be fun. Our little cottage would go viral.
I didn't really entertain such a thought at the time. I made it up just now for the sake of argument, though some will say that the scope of admissible arguments ought to be narrower. Anyway, we know for a fact what it is that makes our bumping sound. When we finally peeked between the curtains on that first morning, we found that it was a bird after all. We haven't identified the species. This bird perches on the nearest branch of a peach tree and suddenly flutters up against the window just long enough to make a single light bump. Then it returns to the branch. It does this off and on every day, weather permitting, not only at daybreak but at various times during the daylight hours.
Its motive remains a mystery. In February there's no fermenting fruit (which can actually intoxicate birds) anywhere to be found. I've examined the outside of the window and the surrounding wall but can find no trace of anything edible or otherwise attractive. If this bird is excited by its own reflection, it's unique among all those that have ever stopped by our garden. That and its being a glutton for punishment suggest nothing so much as a reincarnated human being, but I'm setting any such thesis aside in obedience to the voice of reason. It's good to have an inner voice telling you that everything must be due to some natural cause, since -- this much is certain -- there's no such thing as the supernatural.
However, peremptory inner voices abound in today's world. Some people are immured against epistemic inconvenience by the precept that everything is due to God's will, since there's no such thing as a world beyond God's control. Does geological evidence confute a literal reading of Genesis? Well, God made it look that way to test our faith, or else Satan made it look that way to trick us; and Satan's ability to do so is willed by God. Some people who believe themselves free of religious faith argue in the same way, though perhaps not with quite the same absence of guile. Given the cookie cutter of Marxist critique, they spend their intellectual lives cutting Marxist cookies from every kind of material. Leninist critique takes care of international affairs (imperialism not being part of the Marxist lexicon). Does human history show us a world already beset with decadence and exploitation when Europeans were living in huts? Well, European colonialism severed the historical thread two or three hundred years ago, so never mind the ancient part. All the evils of our time are due to colonialism and capitalism: the very things that Marxists and Leninists want them to be due to. More recently, some people have adopted the precept that all violence and social injustice in America are due to white racism. Do the Atlanta spa shootings of 2021 defy analysis as a white-racist hate crime? Does the fatal beating of a black man by black police officers in Memphis last month tend to complicate the race-based view of police brutality? Not for a moment. All social evils in America rest ultimately on white racism, since — since white racism underlies everything in America.
That list of examples brings us a long way from the mentality that attributes a strange noise to a ghost. However, it doesn't leap any great divides. It just traces, in a hopscotch manner, the development of confirmation bias from a blunt instrument to a scalpel. In modern society, a priori precepts are constantly slicing up the collective brain, and the scope of admissible ones is no more governed by reason than by religion. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, in his "Up for Debate" newsletter of February 22, 2023, calls attention to a valuable commentary on this state of affairs. It comes from Brink Lindsey, author of The Permanent Problem on Substack, who perceives the negative consequences of abandoning organized religions although he has never subscribed to one himself. After noting how religious observance is declining across the Western world, Lindsey writes,
Most people who have fallen away from organized religious life remain exuberantly credulous: as G. K. Chesterton put it, "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." More than four in ten Americans believe that ghosts and demons exist and that psychics are real; a third believe in reincarnation; nearly 30 percent believe in astrology. In Europe, the churches may be empty, but comfortable majorities continue to profess faith in God or some higher power.
So the sunny view of organized religion's retreat as humanity's intellectual advance really can't be sustained. We are not seeing the decline of supernaturalism so much as its privatization or atomization. Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, and now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice to guide one's personal search for meaning. What the sociologist Peter Berger called the "sacred canopy" has shattered and fallen to earth; we pick up shards here or there, on our own or in small groups, and whatever we manage to build with them is necessarily more fleeting and less inclusive than what we experienced before.
Lindsey's focus is on patent superstition, but the procrustean beds of ideology serve the same purpose for intellectuals. Though dogmatically anti-religious people hate hearing their organized materialism referred to as a form of religion, let alone "the superstition of the 20th century," as Octavio Paz felt compelled to describe what Marxism had become, the characteristics are present there and in political orthodoxies more generally: revealed truth, unimpeachable authority, doctrine and heresy, insiders who have seen the light and outsiders who have not. Whether one tends to adhere to a traditional religion or to a modern substitute, there's a certain level at which one must either reserve the right to do some free thinking or settle down to a life of docile credulity.
Our bird continues to puzzle us. It sometimes moves around the corner of the house to a rose bush in front, from which it can watch us eat while it makes its ascents against the nearest window. Strange. When we're in the bedroom, it comes to the peach tree and jumps up and down. When we're in the living-dining-kitchen space, it comes to the rose bush and jumps up and down. You'd almost think it was trying to tell us something. Mind you, if I could find a rational alternative to the reincarnation thesis, I'd prefer it.
