Magic, religion, and dance are integral to several of the Gold family members’ lives: Klara is awed by magic and illusion; Saul finds comfort in religious ritual; and Simon is inspired by ballet. Although each of these activities seem totally dissimilar on the surface, the novel illustrates that the power of religion, magic, and dance lies in the fact that they each enable people to understand life’s greatest mysteries and imagine new possibilities in their lives and the world.
Klara loves magic because it often defies logic and physics, thus expanding people’s perceptions of reality. For Klara, magic is not about deception. Rather, her goal is to “impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility” on her audience. Magic thus represents the idea that there could be alternative explanations besides sheer logic and fact in the illusions that she performs. Klara also recognizes that magic can fill everyday life with wonder. Once, when the Golds are on vacation on a beach, they see that the water looks completely red. Simon posits that it looks like ketchup; Saul says it looks like the Nile. Years later, in school, Klara learns that it’s really because of algae blooms, but “This knowledge [makes] her feel curiously empty.” Preserving the mystery around the ocean’s red color is more appealing to her than understanding facts, because she likes the ambiguity and wonder in believing that something could have many different explanations. The fact that Klara believes in her own magic asks readers to consider alternate possibilities as well. When Klara produces a strawberry in her hand in a magic trick but has no idea where it came from, the novel invites readers to consider mysterious explanations for how Klara acquired the strawberry.
Religion—specifically Judaism—underpins the Gold family’s life, and the characters recognize that it is powerful because it, like magic, explores the world’s mysteries and allows for explanations beyond reason and fact. Saul is the most devout Jew in the family, and Klara describes him as having read the Talmud “every which way,” sometimes even staring at a single page for days. She understands that for Saul, Judaism is both “a way of living lawfully” but also “a placeholder for what we don’t know.” In other words, religion enables Saul—enables people—to engage in life’s mysteries because it allows them to have faith in a supernatural explanation for things that lie beyond humans’ capacity to understand. In Hebrew school, Klara loves the stories of Judaism, like that of Daniel, a prophet who disobeyed the king and was thrown into the lion’s den as punishment. Miraculously, the lions left him alone. As Klara notes, stories like this “suggest[] that she could do anything,” reinforcing the idea that religious stories expand life’s possibilities. Klara even relates her magic specifically to religion. She explains to an audience that for a long time, she thought magic and religion were opposites—that religion was formal while magic was interested in breaking rules. Yet gradually, she recognizes a deeper similarity between them: that they both believed in “a space where the impossible becomes possible.” Thus, Klara’s comparison of religion and magic reinforces that both require people to suspend their disbelief and consider more supernatural explanations for life’s mysteries.
Dance also expands possibilities for Simon, allowing him to imagine the way the world could be or what he might be able to achieve. When Simon moves to San Francisco as a teenager, he starts taking ballet lessons at a local academy, which houses a company called Corps. Simon notes that unlike other companies, where “male dancers act as bland fairy-tale princes,” the men at this company dance with each other and the movements are modern and acrobatic. For Simon, who is gay, this is appealing, as the company’s routines enable him to envision a world where he can partner with men romantically, not just in dance. Taking dance lessons also enables Simon to find new potential in himself. He expresses how it’s “mysterious” to him, but when he leaps, it’s “as if he’s sprouted wings.” Dance gives him a sense of achievement and freedom, elevating him to a state that he never thought possible. The combination of the words “mysterious” and “wings” also relates Simon’s movement to angels, which further connects dance and religion. Just like magic for Klara and religion for Saul, the power of dance expands his notions of what is possible.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Magic, Religion, Dance, and Possibility ThemeTracker
Magic, Religion, Dance, and Possibility Quotes in The Immortalists
What can Simon tell her? It’s mysterious to him, too, how something he thought nothing of before, something that makes him feel pain and exhaustion and quite frequently embarrassment, has turned out to be a gateway to another thing entirely. When he points his foot, his leg grows by inches. During leaps, he hovers midair for minutes, as if he’s sprouted wings.
In the final piece, The Myth of Icarus, Simon will perform his first starring role: he is Icarus, and Robert is the Sun.
On opening night, he soars around Robert. He orbits closer. He wears a pair of large wings, made of wax and feathers, like those Daedalus fashioned for Icarus. The physics of dancing with twenty pounds on his back compounds his dizziness, so he is grateful when Robert removes them, even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.
Years later, in school, Klara learned of a phenomenon called red tide: algae blooms multiply, making coastal waters toxic and discolored. This knowledge made her feel curiously empty. She no longer had reason to wonder about the red sea or marvel at its mystery. She recognized that something had been given to her, but something else—the magic of transformation—had been taken away.
When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility.
In Hebrew school, she loved the stories. Miriam, embittered prophet, whose rolling rock provided water during forty years of wandering! Daniel, unharmed in the lions’ den! They suggested that she could do anything…
Thirteen years later, the woman was right about Simon, just as Klara had feared. But this is the problem: was the woman as powerful as she seemed, or did Klara take steps that made the prophecy come true? Which would be worse? If Simon’s death was preventable, a fraud, then Klara is at fault—and perhaps she’s a fraud, too. After all, if magic exists alongside reality—two faces gazing in different directions, like the head of Janus—then Klara can’t be the only one able to access it. If she doubts the woman, then she has to doubt herself. And if she doubts herself, she must doubt everything she believes, including Simon’s knocks.
“It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand.” She lifts the ball and holds it tight in her fist. “It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel.” When she opens her fist, the ball has vanished. “It’s not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams—our faith.” She raises the steel cup to reveal the ball beneath it. “Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate”—she puts the cup down—“reality”—she makes a fist—“is.”
When she opens her fist, the red ball isn’t there. What’s there is a full, perfect strawberry.
Klara’s arms begin to shake. Sixty more seconds and she’ll give it up. Sixty more seconds and she’ll pack her rope, return to Raj and perform.
And then it comes.
Her breath is uneven, her chest shuddering; she cries thick, sloppy tears. The knocks are insistent now, they’re coming fast as hail. Yes, they tell her. Yes, yes, yes.
“Ma’am?”
Someone is at the door, but Klara doesn’t pause.
In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.
