Where are you creeping with your lame paws?

Herman Wouk is the author of The Caine Mutiny, a magnificent tale of decision making and personal responsibility set in the South Pacific in World War II and in part inspired by the author's own service in destroyers in that war. It is a great book, particularly for young boys and young men, say 12 years old and older.

Wouk is still alive and well and writing great prose. He has a new book out The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion. I have not read it yet but it looks good based in this excerpt of his via New Scientist, Is God a Mathematician. It has been years since I have read anything by Wouk but he seems to have lost none of his style. Some lines from the essay:

. . . Like many novelists I have spun my books out of my experiences when I could, but in attempting work far outside my own relatively jog-trot existence I have had to pick other men's brains. My World War II service, three years on destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific, gave me the substance of The Caine Mutiny, but taught me nothing at all about the world storm that swept me from Manhattan to the south Pacific like a driven leaf. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima my ship was a bobbing speck on picket duty in the rough waters off Okinawa, and we had just survived a kamikaze attack unscathed; so I joined heartily in the merriment aboard ship, very glad that I had survived the war and would soon go back to my free civilian life and marry my sweetheart. As to the larger issues of dropping a whacking new bomb made of uranium on a Japanese city, I was innocent and indifferent. The radio said that our scientists had "harnessed the power of the sun", and that was quite enough for me and for all of us aboard that old four-piper, halfway around the world from home.

As a Columbia undergraduate, imbibing the Greek philosophy, comparative religion and general humanism of the noted core curriculum, I rode the subway to the Bronx once a week to study the Talmud with my grandfather. The Talmud is a hard grind in Aramaic, and to lighten up things I would now and then venture an agnostic prod at some tender point of our faith - say, Joshua's stopping the sun and moon. Grandpa would respond with good-natured scorn, stroking his full beard, "Where are you creeping with your lame paws?" It was more pungent in Yiddish, but you get the idea.