Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (30 page)

13

THE WORLD AS A BIT OF
LIGHT VERSE

L
ate winter in Manhattan. Afternoon. A siren in the distance. (There is always a siren in the distance.) The phone rings. It’s John Updike.

I had been expecting the call. Earlier that month, I had sent a letter to Updike describing my interest in the mystery of existence. I had guessed, I said, that he shared this interest, and I wondered whether he would be willing to talk about the matter. I included my phone number in case he did.

A week later, I received a plain postcard with Updike’s return address on the front and a long type-written paragraph crowded onto the back. The occasional typo had been corrected in pen with a proofreader’s “delete” or “transpose” sign. At the bottom, in blue ink, it was signed “J.U.”

“I’d be happy to talk to you about something rather than nothing,” Updike had typed, “with the warning that I have no thoughts.” He then, in a trio of brisk sentences, mentioned the dimensionality of reality, the possibility of positive and negative being, and the anthropic principle—the last of which, he cryptically added, “to some extent works for somethingness.” Then, as a comment on the mysteriousness of it all, came the kicker:

“Beats me, actually; but who doesn’t love the universe?”

THAT UPDIKE LOVED
the universe had long been obvious to me. His novels and stories are suffused with the sheer sweetness of being. We “
skate upon an intense radiance
we do not see because we see nothing else,” he wrote in a memoir of his youth. “And in fact there is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm.”

In this respect, Updike was the anti–Woody Allen.

But, in another respect, he was at one with Woody Allen. He shared the same horror of eternal nothingness—and the conviction that sex offered a psychological hedge against it. Indeed, he found that his phobia of nonbeing was inversely proportional to his carnal flourishing—a point he put in succinct mathematical form in his 1969 credo poem, “Midpoint”:

ASS = 1 / ANGST

But it was not only eros that fortified Updike against the terrors of nothingness. He also claimed to draw consolation from religion—specifically, from a leap-of-faith version of Christianity—and the hope it offered of all-encompassing grace and personal salvation. Here his heroes were Pascal and Kierkegaard and, especially, Karl Barth. “
Barth’s theology
, at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it (my life),” Updike once observed. He professed to share Barth’s belief that God is
totaliter aliter
—wholly other—and that the divine mysteries could not be approached by rational thought. He was also drawn to Barth’s somewhat mystical equation of nothingness with evil. In an early collection of writings,
Picked-up Pieces
, Updike darkly dilates on the idea of “
Satanic nothingness
”—and then, as if in search of metaphysical relief, transitions directly to an essay on golf.

Updike’s obsession with sex and death, with the goodness of being and the evil of nonbeing, is perhaps not unusual in the literary profession. But only with Updike do you find the mystery of existence figuring directly and explicitly in his fiction. His 1986 novel,
Roger’s Version
, a merry roundelay of theology, science, and sex, culminates in a virtuoso passage that explains, over the course of nearly ten pages, “how things popped up out of nothing.” The explanation is delivered in the course of a cocktail party. It is meant to shatter both the faith and the spirit of the character Dale Kohler, a twenty-eight-year-old Jesus freak and software whiz who has had the effrontery to try to prove the existence of God through a computer-run numerical analysis of the Big Bang. Dale also had the effrontery to sleep with the wife of the novel’s narrator and title character, a middle-aged professor of divinity named Roger Lambert.

Like Updike himself, the cuckolded Roger is “a Barthian all the way.” He resents not only the younger man’s priapic poaching of his sexually athletic wife, but also his “obscene cosmological prying” into the realm of the numinous. A God whose existence could be scientifically proved—let alone one who left his fingerprints all over the Big Bang—would not be God, not, at least, the
totaliter aliter
God of Barth. So, at the end of the novel, Dale gets a double comeuppance. Roger himself doles out the theological punishment for Dale’s heresy. And he gets a friend, a molecular biologist named Myron Kriegman, to ambush Dale from the scientific side. Kriegman does this by accosting Dale at the aforementioned cocktail party and discomfiting him with arguments purporting to show that the physical universe, without the least need of divine assistance, created itself out of nothing at all.

“As you know, inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this spacetime foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunneling into a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing to the size and mass of the observable present universe. How about a drink? You look pretty dry, standing there.”

So Kriegman begins, in his rapid, rasping voice. Then, having supposedly shown how the universe was generated from “almost nothing,” he goes on to explain to the nonplussed Dale that this almost nothing arose from
absolutely
nothing.

“Imagine nothing, a total vacuum. But wait! There’s something in it! A kind of dust of structureless points …” It is this swirling dust of points, he goes on, that by chance becomes “knotted” or “frozen” into a little bit of structured spacetime. “The seed of the universe has come into being,” Kriegman says. And once you’ve got that seed, “ka-
boom!
Big bang is right around the corner.”

And whence does the primordial dust of points arise? Out of nothing at all! Point and anti-point peel apart from the void, the way +1 and –1 can peel apart from 0. “Now you have something, you have
two
somethings, where once you had nothing,” Kriegman says. An anti-point is just a point moving backward in time.

“The dust of birth gives birth to time, and time gives birth to the dust of points,” Kriegman concludes. “Elegant, huh?”

Elegantly
circular
, one wants to say in the speechless Dale’s behalf. Time is needed to give being to the primordial dust of points. But it is the pattern assumed by those points that constitutes time!

No doubt Updike didn’t mean for us to take these ideas too seriously. They are being mouthed, after all, by a character in a novel, and a somewhat ridiculous character to boot. (Updike told me in his postcard that he borrowed the bulk of them from the British chemist, and outspoken atheist, Peter Atkins. Atkins himself, I discovered, was aware of the circularity in his cosmogonic scheme, wherein time is required to give life to points and points are required to give life to time. He called it the “
cosmic bootstrap
,” and left the matter at that.) Still, Updike had clearly pondered the mystery of being from the scientific as well as the theological angle. And that was reason enough to seek out his thoughts.

UPDIKE WAS CALLING
from his longtime home in the town of Ipswich, on the Massachusetts shore an hour north of Boston. In the background I could hear his visiting grandchildren at play. As he spoke, in his characteristically soft and richly modulated voice, I could see him in my mind’s eye: the thick thatch of gray hair, the curved beak of a nose, the mottled, psoriatic complexion, the eyes and mouth forming his habitual expression, that of a man, as Martin Amis once put it, “
beset by an embarrassment
of delicious drolleries.”

I began by asking Updike whether the theology of Karl Barth had really sustained him through a difficult time in his life.

“I’ve certainly said that and it did seem to be true,” he said. “I fell upon Barth having exhausted Kierkegaard as a consoler, and having previously resorted to Chesterton. I discovered Barth through a series of addresses and lectures called
The Word of God and the Word of Man
. He didn’t attempt to play anybody’s game as far as looking at the Gospels as historic documents or anything. He just said, essentially, that this is a faith—take it or leave it. So yes, I did find Barth comforting, and a couple of my early novels—not so early, actually—are sort of Barthian.
Rabbit Run
certainly presents a Barthian point of view, from the standpoint of a Lutheran minister. And in
Roger’s Version
, Barthianism is about the only refuge for Roger from all the besieging elements that would deprive one of one’s faith—both science, which Dale tries to use on behalf of the theist point of view, and the watering down of theology with liberal values. On the other hand, the book is kind of a critique of Barthianism too, as being, in the end, terribly arid and self-enclosed. Dale at least has the virtue of trying to reconcile his Christianity with science as it presently exists. And the whole book is kind of a love triangle, in that Roger, rightly or wrongly, imagines that his wife is having an affair with young Dale up in her studio. So the conflict between the two men is sort of a tussle over … her name escapes me …”

“Esther,” I interject.

“Right, Esther … I like her, she appears in a bumble-bee kind of dress … stripes, big broad stripes bracing her hips. So Roger tries to organize this party so that a number of agile-tongued scientists will be there to debunk, piece by piece, Dale’s natural theology.”

Was their scientific account of the origin of the universe from nothingness meant to be convincing?

“Not entirely, and that’s an embarrassment for science. Science aspires, like theology used to, to explain absolutely everything. But how can you cross this enormous gulf between nothing and something? And not just something, a whole universe. So much … I mean the universe is very big. Ugh! I mean, it’s big beyond imagining squared!”

Updike’s voice rose a register in genuine wonderment.

“It’s interesting,” I said, “that some philosophers are so astonished and awed that anything at all should exist—like Wittgenstein, who said in the
Tractatus
that it’s not
how
the world is that is mystical, but
that
it is. And Heidegger, of course, made heavy weather of this too. He claimed that even people who never thought about why there is something rather than nothing were still ‘grazed’ by the question whether they realized it or not—say, in moments of boredom, when they’d just as soon that nothing at all existed, or in states of joy when everything is transfigured and they see the world anew, as if for the first time. Yet I’ve run into philosophers who don’t see anything very astonishing about existence. And in some moods I agree with them. The question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
sometimes seems vacuous to me. But in other moods it seems very very profound. How does it strike you? Have you ever spent much time brooding over it?”

“Well, to call it ‘brooding’ would be to dignify it,” Updike said. “But I am of the party that thinks that the existence of the world is a kind of miracle. It’s the last resort, really, of naturalistic theology. So many other props have been knocked out from under naturalistic theology—the first principle argument that Aristotle set forth, Aquinas’s prime mover … they’re all gone, but the riddle does remain: why is there something instead of nothing? George Steiner is a lesser thinker than Wittgenstein, but I remember him raising this issue. At the last report that reached my ears, Steiner found the existence of a world amazing, and enough of a puzzle to sustain a faith of a sort.”

I said, “I had no idea Steiner …”

“Yeah, I didn’t know he cared either,” Updike continued. “And I can’t remember where he brought the question up. Steiner has a theological side, which is not evident in everything he writes. But for the scientifically inclined layman, the great hope for explaining ‘something out of nothing’ is quantum physics, where you have these virtual particles that keep popping up out of the vacuum and disappearing. They’re around for miraculously short periods of time, but they’re nevertheless indubitably there.”

He was careful to pronounce each distinct syllable of “indubitably.”

I told Updike that I admired the way he had a character in
Roger’s Version
explain how the universe might have arisen from nothingness via a quantum-mechanical fluctuation. In the decades since he wrote the book, I added, physicists had come up with some very neat scenarios that would allow something to emerge spontaneously out of nothing in accordance with quantum laws. But then, of course, you’re faced with the mystery: Where are these laws written? And what gives them the power to command the void?

“Also, the laws amount to a funny way of saying, ‘Nothing equals something,’ ” Updike said, bursting into laughter. “QED! One opinion I’ve encountered is that, since getting from nothing to something involves time, and time didn’t exist before there was something, the whole question is a meaningless one that we should stop asking ourselves. It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a
permanent
mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain. I have trouble even believing—and this will offend you—the standard scientific explanation of how the universe rapidly grew from
nearly
nothing. Just think of it. The notion that this planet and all the stars we see, and many thousands of times more than those we see—that all this was once bounded in a point with the size of, what, a period or a grape? How, I ask myself, could that possibly be? And, that said, I sort of move on.”