Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (34 page)

My mother’s breathing was getting shallower. Her eyes remained closed. She still looked peaceful, although every once in a while she made a little gasping noise.

Then, as I was standing directly over her, still holding her hand, my mother’s eyes opened wide, as if in alarm. It was the first time I had seen them that day. She seemed to be looking at me. She opened her mouth. I saw her tongue twitch two or three times. Was she trying to say something? Within a couple of seconds, her breathing stopped.

I leaned down and whispered that I loved her. Then I went into the hall and said to the nurse, “I think she just died.”

I returned to the room to be alone with my mother’s body. Her eyes were still a little open, and her head was cocked to the right. I thought about what was going on in her brain, now that her heart had stopped and the blood had ceased to flow. Deprived of oxygen, the brain cells were frantically but vainly attempting to preserve their functioning until, with gathering speed, they chemically unraveled. Perhaps there had been a few seconds of guttering consciousness in my mother’s cortex before she vanished forever. I had just seen the infinitesimal transition from being to nothingness. The room had contained two selves; now it contained one.

A half hour passed before the undertaker, a well-groomed young man in an unseasonable black wool suit, arrived. I gave him instructions and left my mother for the last time.

That night, I treated myself to dinner at a stylish and ambitious new restaurant that a young chef from Manhattan had recently opened in my hometown. I hadn’t eaten all day. I drank champagne at the bar and announced to the bartender, rather glibly, that my mother had just died that afternoon. At the table I ordered monkfish and heritage pork and heirloom beets, and I drank a delicious bottle of a locally produced Cabernet Franc. I got a little drunk and bandied jokes with my waitress, who had a genial red face and husky Southern accent. I had something for dessert and a sweet wine to go with it. Then I left the restaurant and walked the deserted downtown streets for a while, admiring the well-preserved mix of pre–Civil War and Victorian architecture that, as a boy, I had taken for granted. My hometown, like Rome, was built on seven hills. I walked to the top of the highest of them and took in the twinkling lights of the surrounding Shenandoah Valley. Then I broke into convulsive sobs.

When I woke the next morning in what had been my mother’s house—now weirdly empty, despite the profusion of old furniture and antiques and other debris that she had hoarded—the air outside was of an unusual sweetness. There had been heavy showers overnight, but now they had moved east, well out of the valley. I decided to go out for a run: a run with a purpose. I would reenact the Hegelian dialectic of the family, except I would do it backward. Like the title character in John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” I would return home. But whereas Cheever’s character made the journey homeward by breaststroking his way through an almost contiguous series of suburban swimming pools, I would do it by running past the landmarks of my early life, in reverse chronological order, until I ultimately arrived at the site of my conception. I would be The Jogger.

It was a goofy conceit, but one is hardly at one’s subtlest in the immediate aftermath of a parent’s death. And what made it goofier was that I could not get the Rolling Stones’ song “This Will Be the Last Time” out of my head.

As I headed out, the morning fog was beginning to lift. Before long, I could see the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, sharply etched and quite literally blue in the dawn light. I jogged past my old high school, where I had read Sartre and Heidegger in the library and taken up godless existentialism against the orthodox religion my parents thought they had permanently instilled in me, and where my bad companions had taught me to smoke. I jogged past the sprawling faux-Georgian house with the tennis court out back where we had lived during my adolescent years, and where, in a basement bedroom, my sexual awakening had clumsily commenced one night when my parents were out of town. I jogged past the Catholic church where I had received my first communion and where I had piously confessed my absurd childhood sins, and past the old schoolhouse where the nuns had taught me to emulate Saint Francis, the patron saint of the parish.

By and by, I arrived at the foot of the hill on which, just over the top, stood the little white-brick bungalow where my mother and father had first set up housekeeping after they married. The hill was steeper than I remembered. I had to summon greater and greater effort as I made my ascent—just like, I thought to myself, a particle accelerator has to attain higher and higher energies to re-create the very earliest state of the universe. Finally, I reached the top. There was the old house. I looked in the window of what had been my parents’ bedroom—the scene of the Big Bang (I forgave myself the execrable pun) that had produced me, or had produced, rather, the little symmetrical blob of protoplasm which, through a long and contingent series of symmetry-breaking events, issued in the messy reality that I was today. Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogony. Here was the ultimate home of my inchoate self. I felt moved, but only for a moment. My journey back was a cliché, a joke. The house had other occupants. Life had moved on. I would not be reunified with my parents until I, too, entered the nothingness that had already absorbed both of them. That was the real eternal home. And now I had a clear run to the Void.

Epilogue

OVER THE SEINE

P
aris, shortly before the turn of the millennium. I am invited, through the good graces of a mutual friend, to attend a small party at the Collège de France in celebration of the ninetieth birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

On the appointed evening, I make my way from the sixteenth-century apartment house where I am staying, between Place Maubert and the Seine, and head up the Rue Saint-Jacques toward the Panthéon. I enter the courtyard of the Collège de France, pass by the statue of the now-forgotten Renaissance scholar Guillaume Budé, and go inside. After the stateliness of the courtyard, the interior rooms seem meanly proportioned and a bit shabby. There are a dozen or so distinguished academics at the party, plus a sprinkling of journalists, but no cameras or microphones. Fortified by a couple of glasses of the Burgundy that’s being served, I obtain an introduction to Lévi-Strauss himself, who rises with difficulty from his chair and shakes my hand tremulously. The conversation is awkward, owing both to my poor French and to my stunned amazement that I am actually having a vis-à-vis with the greatest French intellectual alive.

A few minutes later, Lévi-Strauss is asked to give a little speech to the party. He talks extemporaneously, without notes, in a slow, stately voice.

“Montaigne,” he begins, “said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today”—which, he adds, was one of the “most curious surprises of my existence.” He says he feels like a “shattered hologram” that has lost its unity but that still retains an image of the whole self.

This is not the speech we were expecting. It is intimate, it is about death.

Lévi-Strauss goes on to talk about the “dialogue” between the eroded self he has become—
le moi réel
—and the ideal self that coexists with it—
le moi métonymique
. The latter, planning ambitious new intellectual projects, says to the former, “You must continue.” But the former replies, “That’s your business—only you can see things whole.” Lévi-Strauss then thanks those of us assembled for helping him silence this futile dialogue and allowing his two selves to “coincide” again for a moment—“although,” he adds, “I am well aware that
le moi réel
will continue to sink toward its ultimate dissolution.”

AFTER THE PARTY
I leave the Collège de France and go out into the drizzly Paris night. I walk down the rue des Écoles to the Brasserie Balzar, where I have a nice plate of choucroute and drink the better part of a bottle of Saint-Émilion. Then I head back to my apartment and turn on the TV.

There is a
book-chat show
in progress, hosted by the familiar French television figure Bernard Pivot. His guests tonight are a Dominican priest, a theoretical physicist, and a Buddhist monk. And they are all grappling with a deep metaphysical question, one that was originally posed three centuries ago by Leibniz:
Pourquoi y-a-t-il quelque chose plutôt que rien?
Why is there Something rather than Nothing?

Each of the guests has a different way of answering this question. The priest, a handsome but unsmiling young man wearing severe wire-frame spectacles and attired in a hooded Dominican habit of pure white, argues that reality had to have had a divine origin. Just as each of us came into existence through an act of our parents, the priest says, so the universe must have come into existence through an act of a creator.
Au fond de la question est une cause première—Dieu
. He adds that God was not the first cause in a temporal sense, since God created time itself. God was behind the Big Bang, but not prior to it.

The physicist is an older fellow with a thick head of white hair, wearing a light-blue sport coat and an improbable Western-style string tie. He is grumpily impatient with all this supernatural nonsense. The existence of the universe is purely a matter of chance quantum fluctuations, he says. Just as a particle and its antiparticle can spontaneously arise out of a vacuum, so too can the seed for an entire universe. So quantum theory accounts for why there is something rather than nothing.
Nôtre univers est venu par hasard d’une fluctuation quantique du vide
.
Our universe arose by chance from a quantum fluctuation in the void. And that’s the end of it.

The monk, attired in crimson and saffron robes, with bare shoulders and a freshly shaved head, has the most interesting line on the question. He also has the most pleasant demeanor. In contrast to the prim-mouthed young priest and the irritable old physicist, the monk beams happiness. A smile continuously plays about his lips. As a Buddhist, he says, he believes that the universe had no beginning.
Il n’y a pas de début
. Nothingness—
le néant
—could never give way to being, he says, because it is defined in opposition to that which exists. A billion causes could not make a universe come into existence out of what does not exist. That is why, the monk says, the Buddhist doctrine of a beginning-less universe makes the most metaphysical sense.
C’est encore plus simple
.

Vous trouvez?
interjects Bernard Pivot, eyebrow arched.

The Buddhist monk genially protests that he is not evading the question of origins. Rather, he is using it to explore the nature of reality. What is the universe, after all?
Ce n’est pas bien sûr le néant.
It is not nothingness. Yet it is something very close: an emptiness—
une vacuité.
Things don’t really have the solidity we attribute to them. The world is like a dream, an illusion. But in our thinking, we transform its fluidity into something fixed and solid-seeming. This engenders
le désir
,
l’orgueil
,
la jalousie
. Buddhism, by correcting our metaphysical error, thus has a therapeutic purpose. It offers
un chemin vers l’éveil
—a path to enlightenment. And it also resolves the mystery of being. When Leibniz asked,
Pourquoi quelque chose plutôt que rien?
his question presupposed that something really and truly exists. And that’s an illusion.

Ah oui?
says Pivot, again skeptically arching an eyebrow.

Oui!
replies the monk, smiling radiantly.

I SWITCH OFF
the TV and go out into the chill Paris night for a stroll and a smoke. Leaving my building, I turn toward the Seine, a short block away. Just across the water looms the back of Nôtre Dame, with its flying buttresses. I walk along the quay downriver for a bit, until I get to the Pont des Arts—my favorite bridge, since it has no traffic and is thus (aside from the buskers) quiet. I go halfway across the bridge, where I pause to light a cigarette and take in the view of Paris at midnight.

Before me stretches a gorgeously illumined patch of the great
vacuité
that the Buddhist monk had spoken of. Is it really an insubstantial dream, an empty illusion? Is it gross and viscous and absurd, as Sartre held, or is it a divine gift, as that Dominican priest was just saying? Or could the whole thing just be an inexplicable quantum fluke?

This
pourquoi quelque chose plutôt que rien
business, I think to myself, it’s really awfully mysterious. Worth looking into further. Maybe I should write a book about it some day.

I flick my cigarette butt into the dark waters flowing below and head home.

Philosophy
,
n.
A route of many roads leading from
nowhere to nothing.

—AMBROSE BIERCE,
The Devil’s Dictionary

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Adolph Grünbaum, Richard Swinburne, David Deutsch, Andre Linde, Alex Vilenkin, Steven Weinberg, Roger Penrose, John Leslie, Derek Parfit, and the late John Updike, all of whom were kind enough to share their time and thoughts with me. Among those with whom I did not speak directly, it should be obvious that I owe the most to Thomas Nagel, a philosopher I have always revered for his originality, depth, and integrity.

I am also grateful to Samuel Scheffler, whose 2010 seminar on the metaphysics of death I was privileged to attend; to my philosophical confidants Anthony Gottlieb, Ned Block, Paul Boghossian, and Jonathan Adler; to my witty and industrious intern, Jimmy O’Higgins; to my agent, Chris Calhoun; and to my editor, Bob Weil, and his adjutant, Philip Marino.

Among my regrets, the greatest is that Christopher Hitchens is no longer around to argue over the book. When I asked him for a blurb, he wrote back from the cancer center in Houston where he was undergoing last-chance treatment, “Sling it over … I’d be proud.” Ten days later he was dead.

Finally, for helping me stave off cosmic torpor, thanks to Jared, Malcolm, Jenny, and, most of all, Jon.