I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about nothing.

The idea of nothing once intimidated me. When I saw something that seemed purposeless, or when I thought there might be an absence of life, a paranoia drove me to put something there. That something, for me, was God.

I should say here that my contemplation of nothing is not necessarily an unimpeachable feature of atheism. There are many atheists who do not think about the idea of nothing at all — to them, what I say may be nonsense. But for me…

Let me try to explain.

Yesterday I saw a movie called The Walk, and it was about Philippe Petit, a man who wanted to walk between the World Trade Center Twin Towers back in 1974. As I watched the film, I noticed that several cues hinted his motivation. He wanted to impress crowds. He wanted to fulfill a dream. There was a drive, a purpose.

But that purpose faded for me for five minutes near the end of the movie, where he was walking on the wire, between the two towers. Everything fades for a while — the height, the crowds, even the buildings. All that was there, for about 30 seconds in the film, was the wire, stretching out some indeterminable length. It was calming. Peaceful. Beautiful.

A wire through a void.

And in walking the wire with him, I felt….

***

We live in a huge, vast universe of space. And we’re, like, this spinning ball making our way round a sun a million earths large in this vast…well, I know there are stars, and satellites, and planets and asteroids, and comets, and the rest. But still, it just strikes me as this vast, wide, overwhelming nothingness.

Not impregnated with a God or anyone who cares about us save ourselves. Just a spinning, pale, blue dot traveling along a line of nothingness. This infinitesimal thread of time and space.

And when I used to think about it, it frightened me, because I thought it was supposed to frighten me, as I thought the sense of emptiness was meant be filled with faith in an authority I saw as God. But now, thinking about that speck of dust spinning around an enormous universe, silently, peacefully, along a line through the vast blackness and winds of seemingly (or perhaps really) infinite nature of space — it makes me feel…

***

So I was running once, through Sedona, AZ, about seven or eight miles. At first, I ran for the beauty of the light dashing through shadows in the red canyon. But there’s a point in running when all your concerns and worries and distractions begin to fade. So eventually, I ran…just because…I honestly couldn’t tell you. It was just beautiful and raw, like “the fact is the only beauty labor knows” shit. It felt so peaceful, so quiet, so overwhelmingly gorgeous of an experience. Focusing on the trail ahead, like I was gliding on the surface of existence…and yet bound tightly within it. Floating and grounded, in that empty, wondrously meaningless space of consciousness that maybe you could call…

***

So a couple years ago I was reading A Farewell To Arms, and throughout it, there’s a soldier of World War I who is an ambulance driver named Frederic Henry. He leaves war, with all its shattered idealism, as a deserter, and is going to have a child with his wife that he marries on the run, Catherine Barkley, and they escape from the War, and it’s a fairy tale ending, full of bright hope and promise, until the end, the very last couple pages or so, when Ernest Hemingway (the author) kills off Catherine Barkley as she gives birth to her long-awaited child, who also dies, and the novel ends with Frederic Henry, with everything taken from him — glory, honor, love of his life, offspring, everything — walking out the hospital in the rain, away from largely indifferent nurses who are just spending another day of work at the hospital, and he is thoroughly alone enough for my core to feel it..

Anyways, this feeling overtook me, and I thought this feeling represented this real fact in this fiction that was a small, like, microcosm or symbol of life, or whatever — a microcosm or symbolic thing of life in how it seemed so often chock-full of a pursuit of a dream of beauty that we call “the American dream” or “justice” or some other such idealistic thing, but that somehow, propping it up, or underneath it all, and underlying it, and lying all around its edges is something of a raw void that seems, perhaps, horrifying but only if you’re still holding on to the dream that it’s not real. But when you lose the faith in the dream — and in that moment, that’s what Hemingway made me do, through his character Frederic — there are no tears, no smiles, no sadness, no happiness, no pain. Maybe peace, and yet that’s both too simple and too complex. It’s like…losing everything and realizing you’re still there, and that all along, you were still there — not the definition of you, but just a raw you, and you’re everything but you’re also, in the truest sense…

***

I’m driving down a road late on a Friday night, my last night I would call myself religious, and my faith is coming together and falling apart at the same time. I’ve spent hours over the years haunting bookstores and libraries and message boards, thinking, reading, thinking, praying, thinking, talking, thinking, writing…seeking confidence in doubt in all the supposedly right places I could. The doubts were there for greater trust, I thought, as in those gaps was God. And I filled them, filled them, filled them…for twenty years I’d tried to anxiously fill the gaping hole of doubts with more evidence, more faith, more trust, more love, more passion, more, more, more, and more — it was the solution, until now. Now, late on a Friday night driving down Highway 121, it wasn’t a solution anymore. The edifice all caved in on itself; my doubts had coalesced to burn off the illusions and I realized…

I wasn’t a Christian anymore. At that moment, though I am currently an atheist, I had no idea whether God existed or not; I just knew I wasn’t a Christian anymore.

And when I knew that, I lost my sense of up and down. Everything that had made up that solid ground that I had been so firmly standing on emptied under me. And I had been afraid, before, that this moment of losing God would feel like a free falling existential crisis, with constant horror, with a frantic searching of paranoia. To be sure, later there would be a storm as family and friends reacted to the news, and the contours of where I stood might become a bit more defined again, but right now….now I felt…not calm, not ecstatic — maybe a bit relieved, but also vaguely overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time, because at the heart of my existence was just the raw fact of me, and for the first time in my life there was this raw realization that it was up to me what I was going to do with me and my perspective and existence in general…and I realized that as I just sat there in the dark, alone, and it wasn’t just a shrugging OK but it wasn’t not OK — it was…

***

I’m reading David Foster Wallace, that writer who committed suicide, and he wrote this book Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and I’m reading about the fictional interview some woman has with some man called subject 46. And he talks about brutal things — rape, murder, starving to death, experimenting on people during the Holocaust — all these horrific things. And in talking about this, he goes over the way people can treat you. And the words that haunt me, that pierce me to the core of my being with claws that haven’t left it ever since, are, “they can treat you like a thing.” Like, people can treat you as a thing. Worse than Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where they see you as different than you are — no, they can treat you like a thing.

Like, your dignity or — lemme make it personal — my dignity as a fucking human being who deserves, innately, rights and respect and honor and to be the grand star at the center of the goddamn universe…people can say, “Fuck that shit” and see me as a thing. Worse than a “Coloreds Only” sign on a water faucet — I can be treated like a cadaver to be operated on and experimented on and hurt, except the people hurting me don’t think about hurting me and feel no malice, no cruelty, nothing. Just nothing. They can treat me like a thing.

And so I’m reading this standing there in Barnes and Noble with the bright calming lights over my head and the clacking of coffee cups and the polite chatter and the rustling turning pages and Sarah Bareilles singing in the fucking background — all of it together in a chorus saying, “It’s OK” over and over as this book is stripping me raw and I feel more naked than I’ve ever been in the entire history of my life…

And then, in my soul (which I don’t believe in but I need a word like that now), I believed it. In whatever is that deepest part of the psyche, I suddenly knew it was true.

And you would think this was terrifying. But the next thing subject 46 said was also true — that I DECIDE in this void who I am. This is a void and realizing that it is a void gives us the freedom to own our beauty, or brilliance, or…whatever the fucking hell it is — it’s whatever makes us, “ourselves,” it’s this…

It’s what Nietzsche said about the watchman who, in the face of God’s death, declared that we had to become gods to replace Him…it’s like, we know we are nothing, or — more, exactly, could be nothing, or whatever — but, that doesn’t matter a damn, because we can decide to see ourselves as human beings with some innate dignity while being fully aware of the gaping void, like a focus on a wire stretching out to infinity between the twin towers or…

we can DECIDE….

And it’s all in the face of…

***

So Emily Dickinson has this fucking awesome poem that I read for the first time back in undergrad and that I read maybe once every couple weeks to remind me of it…and it’s in the public domain, so I can actually quote it in full — here it is:

There’s a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons,

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes.



Heavenly hurt it gives us;

We can find no scar,

But internal difference

Where the meanings are.



None may teach it anything,

‘ T is the seal, despair, —

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the air.



When it comes, the landscape listens,

Shadows hold their breath;

When it goes, ‘t is like the distance

On the look of death.

The oppression Dickinson is talking about, I learned, is the gap — the gap between our existence and the brilliance of nature. And I think this is the sense of awe we know — we look at the vaulted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel or the brilliance of the stars in the night sky and we feel the “heavenly hurt” of being small and different compared to the universe that we’re in.

But we are made up of stars like those we see twinkling in the night sky. This computer, these fingers, our eyes, everything…it’s all just…there. The stars, in our minds, in all their spectacular beauty, are as lifeless as corpses…and yet, when I look in the night sky or sit near a swiftly moving stream or set my eyes on a beautiful landscape I begin to think or know that I’m part of it all and it’s beautiful because I am the universe looking at itself and it’s beautiful to me.

As Zora Neale Hurston put it:

When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

***

I’ve thought a lot about the soul, which is strange for an atheist. And yet there is this…this raw…this thing I’ve been talking about, this nothing that I’ve been trying to get at, this gap in, as Dickinson put it, “where the meanings are.” Defining it as God seems to be a lie. But maybe, I’ve wondered…maybe when we’re talking about a soul, we’re talking about that nothing, that void. And it’s not frightening. It’s like a peaceful thing. It’s not a soul in the sense of something necessarily conscious. It’s like…just nothingness.

But it’s this part of ourselves that makes nothing, that makes the void, so pregnant with beautiful meaning in our lives. Our desires, our logic, our beauty, our perspectives, our decisions to give ourselves and each other dignity on this spinning “pale, blue dot”…this comes from there being, in my mind, no God, and in its place a void containing nothing but ourselves and the entirety of existence…just there, with no meaning save that which we give it.

That makes me eagerly embrace my life, because in this nothing, no meaning is mandated or handed down; for me it is decided by care and empathy for others and my own passions. And the freedom of there being a ” nothing” there, a void on which to paint my life, gives me something to live for. It makes the basis of my existence, if it makes sense to put it this way, “pure.” As Alan Watts put it:

So if you really go the how way and see how you feel at the prospect of vanishing forever — of all your efforts, and all your achievements, and all your attainments turning into dust and nothingness — what is the feeling? What happens to you? All kinds of poetry emphasize the theme of transcendence. There is a kind of nostalgic beauty to it. “The Banquet Hall deserted, after the revelry, all the guests had left and gone on their ways. The table with overturned glasses, crumbled napkins, bread crumbs , and dirty knives and forks lies empty. And the laughter echoes only in one’s mind. And then the echo goes, the memory, the traces are all gone. That’s the end you see.”

Do you see, in a way, how that is saying the most real state is the state of nothing? That’s what it’s all going to come to. With these physicists who think of the energy of the universe as running down dissipating into radiation, and gradually and gradually, and gradually, gradually, until there is nothing left. And, for some reason, we are supposed to find this depressing. But if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is nothingness — where does all this come from? Obviously from nothingness. Once again you get how this looks behind your eyes. So cheer up….Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the sun and the stars and mountains, and rivers, and the good men and the bad men, and the animals, and insects, and the whole bit. All are contained in void. So out of this void comes everything and you it. What else could you be?

So…I’m typing this now, but one day the heat-death of the universe will happen, and all I strive for today will turn to dust, and that may well be the end of everything. And the scary thing about it, the reason why people cling to God, is that, I think, they (like me, once) cannot bear the thought of there being nothing. But — and I realize this is a controversial point, but it is mine — to a major extent, I’m OK with nothing. I’m not a thoroughoing nihilist, understand — we still have feelings, emotions, joys, sadnesses, passions, logic, science, and the rest. But it’s all based, at the heart of it, on nothing. And the more I think about this, the more I’m ecstatic about life while, at the same time, at peace with the fact that consciousness will quite possibly dissipate into the nothingness it came from and, if you catch my drift, still is. It’s a beautiful, colorful, peaceful opportunity here, a deep joy in embracing the void and playing its variations, in accessing everything through the embrace of the raw void, so to speak.

Thanks for reading.