by Tim Kreider
Or maybe this is just my twentieth-century pessimism talking. Perhaps these present spasms aren’t death throes but only the growing pains of a civilization in its adolescence. It seems like too much to hope that we might finally be ready to put aside the ancient fairy tales. Christian Fundamentalists, normally so cheered by the prospect of apocalypse, have been oddly resistant to scientists’ warnings about actual imminent threats to the species, I suspect because it challenges their childlike faith that God is on top of things. The fate of the race may depend on how well we all adjust to that disillusionment that marks childhood’s end: the realization that no one is going to take care of us, that we’re going to have to do it all by ourselves. That we’re on our own.
Diana and I broke up for the usual mundane reasons, not over matters of faith. “Don’t worry about me, Tim,” she told me during our breakup talk. “I believe in God.” Three years later we’ve become close friends, more like a couple than a lot of people who are sleeping together. We finally got around to having the Jesus Conversation over a year after we’d broken up. She impressed upon me that this isn’t an incidental difference between us; she really does believe in God. It’s not a metaphor; the Resurrection is the central narrative—“a kind of lens,” she says—through which she understands this life. What we agree on is that the question of whether life means anything is a crucial one, one we both struggle with. Because I, unlike Diana, don’t have any sustaining faith, I can’t always convince myself that it does, that it’s inherently any better to be a bodhisattva than a junkie. But it seems telling that when I can’t believe this, I start to die: I crumple into depression, addiction, potato chips and the Internet. Someone who’s depressed can construct an unassailable case for self-destruction, or for humanity’s deserved extinction. There’s nothing intellectually invalid about nihilism; it’s just incompatible with human life.
Nietzsche valued “truths” less for their empirical accuracy than for whether or not they sustained and promoted life. His own preferred truth was the Eternal Recurrence—the idea that, given an eternal universe with a finite number of particles endlessly recombining, everything that had ever happened would eventually happen all over again an infinite number of times. For him this was a kind of thought experiment, a test of what he called amor fati (love of one’s fate), the highest imaginable affirmation of this life and the world as it is. My friend Lauren (who grew up atheist) and I have a running feud over open versus closed cosmological models. She doesn’t mind the idea that the universe might continue expanding eternally and eventually gutter out in heat death. She not only doesn’t mind it but perversely rejoices in it—partly, I believe, because she knows it gives me the eschatological creeps. I’m still clinging to the oscillating universe model—a sort of revised Eternal Recurrence whereby the universe will someday reach a limit to its expansion and fall back in on itself again, all of us ending up back together where it all started in a big cozy reunion, and then everything beginning all over again, like at the end of the Narnia books. Maybe I just don’t like the idea of ending up alone.
It’s not looking good for the oscillating model; it looks, instead, as if the universe, like us, has a finite, one-time-only life span, and eventually it’ll all gutter out into absolute cold and darkness. My friend Margot, a science reporter, just did a story about the fate of the universe, describing how everything would get farther and farther apart until every elementary particle in the universe is isolated from every other. “It all sounds bleak,” she concluded. The more evidence confirms this theory, the more Lauren gloats. The last time I was over at Lauren’s house, her six-year-old daughter casually mentioned that she didn’t believe in God, and I had to suppress a seditious impulse to lean over and whisper: “No, no, Lulu—God loves you.”
I still call myself as an atheist, as opposed to an agnostic, because I hate hedging my bets and it’d only give proselytizers a chink to try to pry open with their crude crowbar arguments. Margot used to say that we had as much chance of ever imagining the true nature of God as her own goldfish did of ever understanding who she, Margot, was based on the warped, shifting shapes visible outside the fishbowl and the daily rain of manna flakes from heaven. We still don’t know—it may be ontologically impossible to know—why the universe is here instead of not, why it’s so improbably hospitable, or why it should be intelligible to us. We don’t understand what consciousness is or how it can arise from the operations of matter. The profoundest, most insoluble problem known to us—what scientists call the Hard Problem—is how what’s going on in your head at this instant can be happening at all. The more you learn about these questions, the more mysterious this world, and we in it, start to seem. This may sound similar to a religious sense, but the intellectual humility that grows out of education is very different from the complacency that arises out of ignorance. To the virtue of certitude I would oppose the idle vice of wonder. The savor of not knowing. A theology, like Diana’s, of uncertainty. First thing every morning, before looking at the headlines or checking my mail, I look at a website called Astronomy Picture of the Day: stellar nurseries and supernovas, Jovian aurorae, backlit geysers on Enceladus, spiral galaxies colliding. Diana calls it “a daily practice, something akin to prayer.”
I suppose you might attribute this softening of my formerly hard line on atheism—which I like to think of as a more mature, qualified philosophical stance—as so much panicky revisionism as my mortality starts to seem less abstract. Poor Nietzsche suffered the ghastliest fate imaginable, the kind of grotesquely undeserved punishment he would’ve recognized from Greek tragedy: reduced to a catatonic husk by some undiagnosed dementia for the last decade of his life, remanded to the care of his unscrupulous sister, who exhibited his breathing corpse to intellectual tourists and allowed his philosophy to be appropriated by proto-Nazis while his mind rotted, imprisoned in his skull. If he could have foreseen all this somehow, I don’t know if even he still could have written, as he did in the prelude to Ecce Homo: “How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?”
Me, I’m just hoping that I’ll somehow acquire more spiritual wisdom than I now possess sometime before I die—that, after the current earthquakes and upheavals have subsided, I’ll find my way to a new plateau. So far I’m not making much progress; I’m not practicing meditation or reading any sacred texts or even giving to the March of Dimes. I’m afraid I’ll probably always be about like I am now: struggling feebly awhile, then giving up, struggling and giving up again, over and over, like a trapped bug. Maybe I’ll go the old deathbed conversion route just to play it safe, repenting of my sins and accepting Jesus Christ as my Personal Lord and Savior right after fucking a candy striper and finally trying heroin.
Diana never felt it was her job to help people to be better, but to tell them they were fine the way they were. Most of us limp around feeling broken or defective, as if we’re missing some crucial piece of human equipment. The nicest thing Diana ever said to me—one of those things I secretly inscribed in glue and glitter and hung up with yarn in my heart—was, “You seem very whole to me.” She always seemed to think I was a better person than I did. I never knew whether she was deluding herself, and her affection was only for a bowdlerized version of me, or whether she saw me more clearly than I could. She pointed out to me recently that one reason she seemed so happy when we were first dating was because she was with me. How it could make Diana happy to be around me was mysterious to me, since I was always around me and I was never happy. We always forget the Heisenberg effect of our own presence—that we only ever get to see what other people are like when we’re around. I’d been drawn to her hoping I might absorb some of her radiance, not realizing it was, in part, my own reflected light.
* * *
I. For readers who did not regularly attend Sunday school: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” —Matthew 19:24. People who would like to call themselves Christians but a
lso own Audis and plasma flat screens favor a nuanced interpretation of this aphorism.
II. Research reveals that the scallop shell is a symbol of baptism, which the water droplets would seem to confirm. Is it possible they secretly baptized us at preschool?
III. Karl, not Groucho.
I Never Went to Iceland
I suppose I should say I didn’t go to Iceland—never sounds a little melodramatic. It’s not as if I’ve died and all hope of ever having gone to Iceland is obviated. But for some reason this missed opportunity is occasioning more than the usual level of regret. I’ve had a free apartment in Reykjavík to stay in on offer for several years, and somehow I’ve never made it there. The owner sends me photos of the aurora borealis that look as hopelessly distant to me as Hubble photos of stellar nebulae.
This was going to be the summer I finally went. Airfares were cheap. I’d just finished writing a draft of a manuscript in May, and for the first time in three years the awful obligation to Work on My Book was not weighing on my soul. The summer looked as wide-open and shimmering with possibility as the summer vacations of childhood.
But events conspired against me. I just couldn’t afford the flight until a check I was waiting on arrived, and although all other transactions in the twenty-first century are conducted electronically and instantaneously, writers are still paid through a system of scriveners, countinghouses, and small boys dispatched on errands with shillings in their pockets. So by the time I had enough money, I’d run out of summer.
Other unexpected complications arose, like they always do. I’d also intended to be less of recluse this summer, to see old friends more often, make regular trips down to Baltimore and have visitors at my cabin every weekend. But just before the Fourth of July, a visiting friend nearly tore off her little toe falling down the stairs at my house, and was laid up on crutches at my place for the next several weeks. She tried to be as independent as possible, but there are limits to what a woman with two surgical pins in her toe can do, so my job became to fetch objects for her, make her tea, and occasionally convey her from place to place, carrying her like the Creature from the Black Lagoon abducting his beloved, the girl in the white one-piece.
She’d recovered enough to go home by the end of July, and since then I’ve been frantically cramming all the idle goofing off I didn’t get to do all summer into its last few weeks. But goofing off isn’t the sort of thing you can cram. Now every reminder of time squandered—the empty hammock I hardly ever lay in, a little sugar cube melon that went bad before I’d cut even one slice from it—makes me want to cry. (Is there a word, perhaps in French, for nostalgia for the present? One Japanese scholar coined the term mono no aware—an exquisite, wistful sensitivity to the ephemerality of all things.) This end-of-summer melancholy is commonplace, as endemic to August as chest colds are to February. Part of it is just my hatred and dread of back-to-school time, unchanged since childhood. The whole world of work and productivity still seems to me like an unconscionable waste of time; the only parts of life that we’ll remember with any joy are the summers, the Saturdays, the smoke breaks and happy hours, the stolen in-between moments and goofing off.
But there’s something else lurking underneath this moping, something scarier. I use the word never in my Icelandic lament because there is attached to it a sense of desolation, as of a possibility lost forever. For me, at least, it feels less like melancholy, which is a gentle, almost pleasant emotion, than suppressed terror. It’s only the superficial throb of a pain that goes much deeper, in the same the way that these few oddly cool days in August are the first innocuous evidence of an entire planet tilting inexorably into the shadow.
I’m not old but I’m not young anymore, either, and if you’re a daydreamer and a ditherer like me, you can manage to sustain until well into midlife the delusion that you might yet get around to doing all the things you meant to do: making a movie, getting married, living in Paris. But at some point you start to suspect that you might not end up doing that stuff after all, and have to consider the possibility that the life you have right now might be pretty much it: your life. This realization could, in theory, free you to experience your actual life instead of dismissing it as an unimportant prelude to the good part, or comparing it to the imaginary one you plotted out for yourself at age twelve, or back in May. The spring romance I’d hoped might turn into a lasting relationship culminated, instead, in a really unpleasant overnight visit. But I found myself involved instead with someone made sanguine by tragedy, with the alien capacity to appreciate whatever happiness comes her way without either second-guessing it to death or crushing it by grasping at it clamoring for more. She’s a hypnotherapist, and I’ve been thinking of asking her whether it’d be possible to induce a similar quality in me.
Because although I didn’t go to Iceland this summer, I did take care of a friend. The time she and I spent together, conscripted into our roles as invalid and manservant, was kind of like going on a cross-country road trip or to sleepaway camp together. We’re now less like friends than siblings or an old married couple: we have running in-jokes and recurring squabbles and speak a language of catchphrases incomprehensible to outsiders (“You got to put it on the Moose!”). We call ourselves Heroes of Fun. We may briefly hate each other now and then but we’re doomed to love each other forever. Once you’ve carried someone in your arms while she’s bleeding, you are never indifferent to her again.
I didn’t go to Iceland, but I ate Taco Bell while watching Zapped! in a hospital bed late at night, spent indolent afternoons drinking wine on a back porch garlanded with honeysuckle in Baltimore, played a little cornhole at a pleasure club (not what it sounds like), and opened a humane mousetrap only to have the captive mouse spring out straight into my face while a friend was trying to leave an “out-of-office” voice mail message, which suddenly erupted into a chaos of little-girl screams and berserk cursing. I swam naked in the Chesapeake Bay, made martinis at five every day, and watched fireflies after dark. I learned, late in life, that I am competent in a crisis, and a good dancer. I lay in a field spotting satellites with my ex-girlfriend Margot and saw a Perseid meteor streak across the sky. It vanished so fast it was hard to tell whether its incandescent trail was in the atmosphere, on my retina, or only in memory.
I suspect that the way I feel now, at summer’s end, is about how I’ll feel at the end of my life, assuming I have time and mind enough left to reflect: bewildered by how unexpectedly everything turned out, regretful about all the things I didn’t get around to, clutching the handful of friends and funny stories I’ve amassed, and wondering where it all went. And I’ll probably still be evading the same fact I’m evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I wanted. And that whatever dissatisfactions I have with it are really with my own character.
In a couple of weeks I’ll resume teaching for the fall, and start boarding up my psyche for another hateful winter in New York. But the summer’s unconsummated lust for travel still torments me. A couple of weeks ago I went to the American Museum of Natural History and it occurred to me, looking at the dioramas in the Hall of North American Mammals, that I would come to this museum to look at those dioramas even without any animals in them. It’s like a peep show of nature for New Yorkers. Those realistic vistas of Alaskan glaciers, the Great Plains, and Yosemite National Park pull at my insides with a longing that hurts. God, how I long to go out west again someday—to drive some blue highway in Nevada or Utah until there’s absolutely nothing around me, then stop the car, in the middle of the road, maybe, and get out and just stand there, where I can see from one horizon to the other, and smell the air and feel the sun and listen to the silence of the desert. I have this idea that if I could do this, time might hold still for a second, and I would know, for just a moment, what it feels like to be here.
Acknowledgments
The people who always believed in this book and got me through the writing of it were: Amber Qur
eshi, my editor-for-life; Emily Scott, friend and spiritual advisor; and my agent, the feared Meg Thompson—cheerleader, bodyguard, blue fairy. And, of course, the Friend of the Man, poet James Boyd White.
Jon Karp, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, gave me as much time as I needed to write this book, which turned out to be a lot. This book had two editors at Simon & Schuster, Jon Cox and Sean Manning: Jon saw this book drunk with its pants off and poured black coffee down its throat and made it halfway presentable; Sean gave it a last-minute hair smoothing and tie straightening before shoving it out onstage. Copyeditor David Chesanow spared me many an embarrassment and unearthed even grislier details of the New Fire ceremony. Thanks also to the editors who refined earlier versions of some of these essays: Peter Catapano of the New York Times, whom I would trust to edit my work sight unseen; Mark Healy of Men’s Journal; and Molly Pisani (née Lindley), formerly of Simon & Schuster.
Thanks to my other, unpaid readers—Myla Goldberg, Nell Greenfieldboyce, Martha Joseph, Megan Kelso, Laura Kipnis, Dana Jeri Maier, and Ellen Twaddell. And to all my other advisors, collaborators, conversationalists, and benefactors: Chris Beck, Jenny Boylan, Claire and Emma Connolly, Dave Dudley, Carolyn Ewald, Jim Fisher, Lisa Hanawalt, Tom Hart, Sam Holden, Isabelle Johnson, Mildred Kreider, Aaron Long, Sadie Lune, Steve McLoughlin, Alex Robinson, Melissa Shaw, Mishka Shubaly, the (Formerly?) Evil Ben Walker, Robin Wetherill, and the Peripatetic Wednesday crowd. And thanks sincerely to everyone who consented to be written about.