A Meandering History of Time: A Lonely Freshman, an Unnatural Death, and the Ecstatic Emptiness at the Heart of Wandering
A Brief History of Loneliness
“[Abraham’s brother] Haran died in the lifetime of his father Terah, in his native land, Ur of the Chaldeans….Now Sarah was barren, she had no child…” (Genesis 11:30)
“For this significant pair {Abraham & Sarah] are marked by an emptiness…there is death (not the natural kind, but before the shocked face of the father), and there is sterility…Here, the language of the Torah enacts what Bergson calls ‘the peculiar possibility of the negative….Every human action has its starting point in a dissatisfaction, and thereby a feeling of absence…The ‘human action’ of Abram and Sarai begins in this absence….What is suggested here in this first human experience of ein [absence/emptiness] is a new and difficult mode of being and having: absence leads a man and a woman to travel far in search of a realization of self that comes effortlessly to those who preceded and surrounded them…Abraham and Sarah are the first to live this possibility – to move to a new place, to deconstruct all the structures of the old place of being, and in a radical act of kri’ah [shredding] and akirah [uprooting], to create entirely new paradigms of reality. (Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, 73-79; emphasis added)“
In the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, when the earth was desolate and void (tohu u’bohu) and darkness was on the face of the murmuring deep (tehom)...” (Genesis 1:1-2)
Rashi: “desolate and void”: The word tohu-desolate signifies astonishment and amazement, for a person would have been astonished and amazed at its emptiness (bohu).
My first year of college, A Brief History of Time, the Errol Morris documentary about physicist Steven Hawking, made its way to the local repertory theater on the one main street, possibly but not actually called Main Street, which screened only one movie at a time. The documentary had a lot of buzz, both nationally and among the professors at my elite liberal arts college. It was the rare cultural touchstone that actually sparked a public debate about Big Ideas. In this case, the Big Idea was not DOES God exist – but COULD God exist?
At issue were two opposing theories about the Big Bang, the beginning of everything. In short, one was that the world began at a point, the other is that it never had a beginning. Depending on which version of the beginning of the universe mathematical physics proved to be true, there would or would not be room, logically, for the concept of a Creator-God. We just had to wait for the final calculations to come in, and we would know once and for all if this God business had any legs or not.
Even at the time, with zero theological background – with no overt religious impulses or commitments, no experience at or interest in religious debate – this all struck me as self-evidently ludicrous, like a unintentional real-life self-satire. I can’t overstate how little it meant to me at the time, how little I cared about theology or belief. I experienced it not as heresy but an affront to basic common sense. If the idea of God were to mean anything at all, it meant a Thing that couldn’t be contained within human conceptual frameworks. Adhere to logic? By nature it would be riddled with paradox. Defer to human categories? How could the Creator of categories be circumscribed by them? Conversely, if God did yield to our attempts to define and confine It – if we allowed It to be relegated to the status of another human object – what good would It be to us, and what need would we have for It in the first place?
If there was a God, They could do whatever TF They wanted to do. If there wasn’t, there wasn’t and the shape of the universe has nothing to do with it and nothing to tell us about it one way or the other.
The spectacle of physicists holding forth with neither irony nor humility on the odds of the possibility of God’s existence, and the mathematical limitations on what God may or may not have done or been – and some of the nation’s smartest people filling the theater night in and night out to nod along with the seriousness of these questions – was the birth of another set of unspoken provocations. Why was I the only one I knew thinking like this? None of it scanned to me as a way to think about any of the things it was claiming to be thinking about.
To answer your next question: yes, I was very lonely freshman year of college. Out of sorts within myself and out of sync with the culture I found myself in – with precious little understanding of WHY the adjustment was proving so impossible; but also too raw to be able to fake it or even just successfully make small talk; too intense and impatient to have casual friends…I spent a lot of time reading and blissing out to CDs alone in my bunk bed, feeling like society, culture, and community were teaming up to ambush me with alienation whenever I walked out the door…
But why was I so exercised over origins…in the first place?