1. SPACE
For a year I lived in Southern California, in a suburb of Los Angeles. Like all cities of its size, Los Angeles suggests the idea of bustling life. In every populous city there is an exuberance of energy and activity: a constant clamor, a continual rushing about, a customary sense of urgency that leaves the small town visitor feeling dazed and overwhelmed, but which the city dweller breathes as his air and element.

In Los Angeles, the freeway is the symbol of incessant motion, and so the symbol of life. Ships come to port in harbors; airplanes, after long flights, park at gates; trains stop at stations. But on the freeway there are neither stoplights, yield signs, nor crosswalks at which to pause, only furious and never-ceasing movement. The freeway, in its very conception, is so disdainful of stasis that it will only let enter its flow those already in motion: thus it does not offer turning lanes or intersections, only entrance ramps on which the aspiring driver must build enough speed to become worthy of its lanes. The freeway is a call to the open road; and in Los Angeles, where every hour is rush hour, it offers the chance to join a million others, whose common bond is a need to go. The only time traffic stops on the L.A. freeways is when there is too much of it. Los Angeles is known for having the worst congestion and the longest commutes in the country. Yet even this is a testament to the unrelenting life and energy of this city, that only its own excess of motion can bring that motion to a standstill.

Many a Saturday during that year of our residence, my wife and I would load our car and take to the freeways, whose sprawling network placed a few hundred cities, the vast Mojave Desert, several mountain ranges, and the mighty Pacific all in an hour's reach. We traveled throughout the area, seeing as much as we could, though only a fraction of what was there: downtown skylines and entertainment districts; train stations and ship harbors; farmers' markets and world bazaars; public parks and botanic gardens; mountaintop villages and lakeside resorts; commonplace lodgings and luxury estates; towns in the desert and cities by the sea. There was almost no place we visited for which I did not conceive at least some small desire to move there. It was never as though I judged that this new setting would suit me better but simply that everywhere I went I saw life, and life attracted me. Driving through the streets of an unfamiliar city, with cars zipping by and taxis taking people places; residents out walking their dogs, merchants setting out their wares, and businessmen hurrying down the sidewalks; couples sitting on verandas, friends chatting in cafes, and surfers heading for the beach; people working in their yards, or on the roads, or on their romances, with the sun going round overhead—all in a place I had never been before—I would think to myself: how is it that life has been going on here all this while, and I not a part of it? Can it be that I shall live only in my own little corner of the world, far from here, and not walk daily down these streets or at evenings retire to those fine homes on the hillside? Know merely my own neighbors, and not learn the names of these people and listen to their stories? Life was happening in that place, and it seemed a shame that I should miss out on it. Though an actual move would have been impossible, I could not help daydreaming about it, not merely playfully but with real hope, for our imagination runs ahead of our reason.

But the drive home on the freeways was invariably enough to curtail my thoughts of moving. On the freeways, which cut their way through an unending progression of cities, my attention was turned from the single place where I had been, to the innumerable places where I might go. In the first city I had seen the streets pulsing with life, but back on the freeways I saw the whole region pulsing with cities, each as rich as the one I had just left. What good would it do to move, when there would still be a thousand places where I was not? It was not life in one or another town that drew me, but life itself, in whatever town. How could I be content then to settle in any town? If my visit to a new place had revealed to me a new life, the drive home revealed a glimpse of far more life than could be joined, thereby stifling hopes, for even imagination cannot picture living everywhere.

I remember once flying into Los Angeles from the East Coast at night. During the day, one sees only the physical features of the land; at night, one sees only the lights of civilization. Flying high above, the sight of cities gives an impression of the human struggle for survival against the harsh inhospitality of nature. We do not space ourselves evenly across the land, but huddle together in little clusters. From the sky our city lights look like the campfires we gather around for safety and warmth, against the cold and dark of nature's night.

The lights of towns and cities were sparse for much of that cross-country trip, as we flew above the Midwest, over the Rocky Mountains, down through northern Arizona, and across the border into the California desert, almost pitch black below. All of a sudden, as we came over the crest of the San Bernardino Mountains, I saw spread out below a breathtaking panoply of urban lights, vast and brilliant, stretching some eighty miles to the Pacific Coast—the Greater Los Angeles metropolis. What a difference from those rickety outposts scattered across the Plains! Here was no mere embattled tribe clinging hard to existence, but a great and glorious empire. Here was a city awake while nature slept, burning its billion candles through the night, as if impatient of the dark. So vast and tremendous a sight filled me with a vague longing to experience in full the richness laid out before me. I wanted to grasp it with my whole being. But what could I do through that narrow airplane window but look with hungry eyes? Never before had all Los Angeles been contained in my field of vision, but the price of seeing so much of it at once was to see it from afar. From the ground it had been too large to take hold of in full; from the sky it was too distant. A city of such size is like a vast and intricate painting: if we step close to examine its details, we lose our view of the whole; if we step back to consider the whole, we cannot make out the details. Our powers of experience are not great enough for so great an object.

It was not only my encounters with the city that impressed me with a sense of life's immensity, but even more my adventures beyond the city. The state of California seemed an infinite gallery displaying the works of civilization as well as the wonders of nature. For all the glories of the former, it is invariably the latter that take first of show. Nature builds bigger and more beautifully than mortal architects. In the city I had seen great monuments, carved by human hands; but beyond the city, I saw where the hand of nature, with violent force, was carving the very continent and raising up new mountains from the sea. In downtowns, I had looked admiringly upon towering skyscrapers, but how could any city skyline rival the spires of the Sierra? The sheer diversity of nature was dazzling. There were cold foggy shorelines, breezy blooming meadows, and dusty dunes of scorching sand; there were ambling streams, quiet lakes, and roaring falls tumbling down granite domes; there were mountains in the deserts, mountains by the ocean, and mountains in the ocean; there were groves of the world's oldest trees, canyons carved by glaciers, and craters blown out by volcanoes—places of gentle beauty and places of thunderous splendor. My wife and I felt something like a moral obligation to see everything we possibly could. Fortune had laid great riches within our reach, and we were vowed not to squander our opportunity. We ate our meals in the car and napped while the other drove, in order to squeeze more touring into our trips. There might have been occasions when, worn and weary, it was difficult to keep going, but with such an abundant land spread out before us, it would have been impossible to stop.

From time immemorial our human race has been called a race of wanderers and wayfarers, a restless people forever setting forth in pursuit of a better life. But as my wife and I rushed frantically around California that year, I sometimes felt that life, far from not being good enough, was on the contrary too good, on a scale we cannot experience except by endless roaming. This whole wide earth is a great Diaspora of beauty, and there is no way to see that beauty unless we travel to it. To stand still is to miss out on life. The reason of my discontent was not that I never found a place worth staying, but that I always saw another place worth going.

I could never envy people who are happy to stay at home their entire lives. We are born provincial; and until we learn better, our own little town seems to us the whole world. The greater world cannot draw and entice those who have no inkling of its greatness. For the expansive mind, traveling is an attempt to experience the entire world. But as rapidly as my car carried me to new places, it carried me away from old ones. I admired each and was loath to surrender any. Traveling made of me a tourist and temporary visitor, and so I always felt at a loss. The more I traveled, the more I wanted something no amount of traveling could give: to see the world not merely in stages but in its total and miscellaneous spectrum. Traveling had added to my finite experiences of the world, but the world is infinite, and I wanted to experience it infinitely—to discover a universal habitation. I wanted, perhaps, to make the world smaller, to condense its vast and sprawling beauty into one precious jewel. I wanted to hold the whole world in my hands like a globe, its shrunken semblance, to circumnavigate the planet with my fingers and sail the seven seas in the same hour.

Such a sublime vision of life was no part of our humble birthright. In the old creation accounts, it was said that the Creator, having made the earth and filled it with richness and beauty, gave it to humankind, the last of his creations, to enjoy. But the world seems to have been made more for desire, for by what means can so small a creature as man enjoy so great a thing as the world?

To the creation stories of old, the science of today has added its own narrative, recounting the origin of our species from forms far older and humbler and demonstrating the depth of our interconnection with all that lives and moves upon the earth. We have learned that the strange creatures that share our planet are not only our brothers and sisters, as the poets and mystics have long known, but our earliest parents as well. We have learned not to think of ourselves as created apart but as an outgrowth and offspring of the world, having emerged from within it. These hills around us, the trees and their birds, the rocks and the woods and the streams meandering through them—all the fine sights that stir our love—are the very source from which we came. This fair earth, now the object of our desire, was first the origin of our being. The scientists also say that our planet was born in turn from the primordial pulsations of the stars. Our delicate and intricate bodies, accordingly, are the blown-off dust of ancient suns. The heavens above us are in us, but we are far from them and cannot reach up to their beauty. We are a scrap of life, cut from the infinite fabric of the universe; a few of the world's atoms in love with all the others; a drop in the ocean, enamored of the sea.

2. TIME
I can vividly remember the sense of expectation I felt when, as a college student, I first set myself to the serious pursuit of knowledge. I read with a feverish enthusiasm, revering each new author I studied and rejoicing in the humblest insights. If I grew discouraged by the slow pace of my progress, I would tell myself that even small steps over time would get me to my distant destination. Of that destination I had no definite concept but imagined it vaguely as a kind of summit of accumulated knowledge, the reward for which was to look out across a panoramic vista of life. "Man desires to know something whole and perfect," said St. Thomas Aquinas, in a dictum that conveyed my aspiration. Impossible though I knew it was to master everything there was to learn, I supposed that the sum of my enlightenments would culminate eventually in a grand illumination.

I can remember the excitement I felt at the prospect of such an illumination and the subsequent disappointment of realizing it was but an idle dream, due to the limitations of memory and the narrow scope of consciousness. We may draw deeply from the well of human wisdom, but we draw with a leaky bucket. Time is both an aid and an obstacle to our knowledge, providing the opportunity to learn and the possibility to forget.

But even a perfect memory would not satisfy me so long as I possessed an imperfect consciousness. It is the nature of consciousness to deal with one thought at a time. One may think a multitude of thoughts only by moving among them in sequence. We cannot be in a hundred places at once, no more in thought than in space. To think upon the conclusion of an argument we must cease to think upon its premise. We may accumulate great stores of knowledge, but we never grasp that knowledge in its totality. Our knowing is always incomplete, not merely because we cannot master all that we could know, but because we cannot even master all that we do know.

The mind being imperfect cannot satisfy the desire for whole and perfect knowledge, a desire to comprehend the world as in a vision. Such manner of knowing had been my aspiration long before I could articulate it and, in so doing, realize its futility. It was never enough to read and fill my mind with rich thoughts, to call upon at my pleasure, for I wished to summon them all at once in a moment of supreme consciousness.

The impulse of philosophers to construct philosophical systems stems from this desire for unification of thought. It is a source of frustration to the thinker that he cannot control the chaos, letting go unwittingly one thought each time he grasps another. To write a book is the nearest approximation of mastery that can be achieved, with ideas arranged in some rational order and fixed together for all time. In the physical object of the book, we achieve a semblance of command over the contents inside and feel ourselves in possession of that gathered knowledge. In this respect books may be regarded as symbols, not so much of intellectual achievement as of limitation. We write systematic treatises because we have fragmentary minds.

The inadequacy of our knowing is due to its temporality. We know only in part because we know only in time, grasping our present thought but not those of the past and future. Every aspect of our lives being temporal is partial and, being partial, can stir in us a yearning for wholeness. As the world is always in transit, we never possess it more than in passing. We wade in the stream of time and touch reality as it flows by, each drop no sooner come than gone. We long for an eternal Now, a moment of absolute presence when the waters might converge and we might taste all of life. But reality, like secret gold, lies mostly buried in the past or sealed in the womb of the future; and of its infinite sum, we hold but an infinitesimal share.

It is true that the future is not forever locked up, for it comes rushing out into the present as the present recedes into the past. We observe this pattern yearly in the changing of the seasons as the ephemeral beauty of one withers into the beauty of the next. Joys of the future will relegate others to the past as today is lost in tomorrow. And the wisdom of old age will supersede the passion of our youth. Life is immeasurably rich, but it gives only as it takes away.

Yet even the giving has a limit when the beneficiaries, being mortal, cease to receive. As the span of our lives measured against unending time is exceedingly brief, we are fated to miss out on the unwritten episodes of the future. Benjamin Franklin, in a letter, once expressed regret at having been born so early in the progress of modern science; for having no higher pleasure in life than to learn of a new discovery or a clever invention, he was pained to think of untold advances certain to follow in future centuries, of which he would have no knowledge. Life goes on, but we do not. Only the outward trappings of our existence will endure: the places we lived, the sights we knew, the works we accomplished, the things we possessed. And just as a mollusk shell once vacated may be taken over by a hermit crab, the external forms of our lives will be filled by others after we are gone. The place we live, a hundred years hence, will perhaps be little changed, and yet there will not be a single familiar face. As if from a page of science fiction, this customary planet will play host to an alien people with not so much as a moment's remembrance for us. The men who will rule the world then, declaring wars and deciding the direction of our race, are not yet even in the world. The stage will be the same and the script similar, but all the actors will be different. How little will have changed in a hundred years, and how much!

It is not only our portion in life to be ushered from the world-scene early, we also arrived late to find the world had already been turning for a veritable eternity. More painful by far than reveries of the uncharted future is the thought of the shut and sealed annals of the past. Nostalgia is the longing to break the seal and reopen the book, a longing stirred not only by the thought of ancient worlds we never knew but even more by the memory of our own past—of our youth in old age, of joy in the season of sorrow, of things loved and lost. It was the longing of Wordsworth in the Lucy poems, of Tennyson in In Memoriam, and of A. E. Housman in many of the poems of A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills
     From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
     What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
     I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
     And cannot come again.

Although there is almost no one who has not sometimes felt these longings, nostalgia has frequently been accused of misapprehending its object and, rather than the real past, loving merely a pleasing phantasm of it, conjured by imagination. According to many a critic, it is dissatisfaction over the present that prompts nostalgia, rather than any perceived excellence of the past. But while the imperfection of the present is very real, the perfection of the past is a fantasy.

A critique of nostalgia would be well in order, if nostalgia were simply a desire to go back in time to a supposed golden age. But I discern in the longing for the past something different, not so much a preference for antiquity as a further instance of the general longing for plenitude. I suspect there are very few of us who, were it in our power, would actually return to those vanished eras and the hardships of an earlier age. We love the past not with foolish idealism but simply as a portion of the drama of life, none the less dear for its imperfections. Fullness of being is not to be found in a simple return to an earlier era but rather in the incorporation of all times into one.

As it is, we possess the past only inadequately through memory and imagination and such things as photographs, ruins and relics. Memory is the mind's cabinet, in which it stores the files and records of past experience. It has, admittedly, a capacity far greater than the eye's, for the eye receives of the moment while the memory is a treasury of years, albeit faded by time. "In the great hall of my memory," boasted St. Augustine, "heaven and earth stand ready for me to perceive." But how dim is that heaven, and how insubstantial that earth! What is the memory of happy times compared to the enjoyment of them? We try to take hold, through remembrance, of what we have loved and lost, but our memories are ghosts and shadows, too subtle to touch. To remember the past is a thin compensation for being without it.

We can possess the past in a more vivid way through the faculty of imagination. Whereas memory brings the past to us, the imagination plants us in that lost world. A book from or about the past can transport us to another era; and that world, though it exists in our mind, takes on its own reality. A vivid imagination is the closest we come to a time machine; but it works only by taking us away from the present. In the whimsical mind of Cervantes' Don Quixote, the old medieval world of knights and chivalry flashed into life again, but only by crowding out the new world of his own modern Spain. In the market of the imagination, the past is indeed for purchase, but only to those who are willing to pay with the present.

Perhaps our most exciting possession of the past comes through photography. With the invention of the photograph came the thrilling prospect of freezing moments in time and preserving them on paper. Fearful of losing anything, we take pictures of almost everything and are often so intent on preserving the moment in a future image that we fail to enjoy its present reality. We fill attics with boxes of old photographs, the running inventory of our lives. But how much is gained from this cult of photography? The purpose of taking pictures is to have them for viewing later. Yet life demands of us that we constantly keep living it; and in our continual headlong fall into the future, there is scarcely an hour's pause to revisit the past, painstakingly preserved as it may be.

We possess the past, finally, through the relics and ruins which survive from years gone by. But these artifacts leave us unsatisfied, too. They are dead symbols of the past rather than its living bearers. To look upon the ruins and relics of our ancestors does not so much resurrect their world as call to mind its irremediable loss. If I see a bust of Caesar or stand in the silent ruins of his once clamorous palace, I reflect not on the greatness of his empire but on the greater empire of Time, which Rome and all her legions could not withstand. In the fall of mighty Rome, I read a parable of our common lot and consider how all that is now standing and that I hold dear must come to a similar reckoning.

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
               -Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV

Time's employment is to erode, and we who watch it sweep away the world must shortly be swept away ourselves. There is no stay against the rush of time. Life is infinite and immeasurable, but we were born to a mortal lot, the inheritors of limits, and have nothing immeasurable of our own with which to grasp it, nothing infinite, except for infinite longing.

As a carryover from childhood camps, I still instinctively check my mailbox with excitement. At camp, when I felt homesick, the arrival of mail from family was a reminder that I was not forgotten, that somewhere in the great world, though not here, my existence was written boldly in another's ledger. Now, despite my Pavlovian reflex, browsing my mail is not merely unexciting but depressing. What am I in this world but a pawn of others' projects? The utility companies require the payments they are owed. The stores have new products they invite me to come and buy. A speaker has planned a lecture and seeks an audience. I owe taxes to the government for making money, for spending that money, for owning a home, for owning a car to leave that home. I am not a name but an account number, a social security number, a customer ID, a "current resident" of this address. Every day I am sought out by people who do not know me but who want something from me. I matter to the world merely as the owner of a bank account from which others wish to withdraw. Most annoying are subscription solicitations I receive from literary magazines that got my name from rejecting work I submitted. They do not want my writing, but might I send them my money—so I can read the writers they chose over me? They thwart my project and subsume me into theirs. Not that, on reflection, I can blame any of these solicitors. A store needs customers, a speaker needs listeners, a publisher needs subscribers. I use others as surely as others use me. They are not my enemies but individuals trying to live and succeed, just as I am. Nevertheless, all those individuals added together make up the world, and the world is cruel.

At every stage of life, we desire to be noticed and affirmed by others. Infants are born craving affection as much as milk. Children playing do not require the active involvement of nearby adults, but if you try to leave they demand that you watch them play. Adolescents, in their perpetual anxiety to be popular, do not so much look at others through their own eyes as look constantly at themselves through others' eyes. The dying worry about being remembered after death, though when dead how can they care if they're forgotten? As adults, our successes give us little pleasure unless sweetened by others' admiration. If we dress up, there must be others to see us or our work seems wasted—no one wears a tuxedo at home. A marvelous gardener once told me (speaking for human nature) that he takes more delight in a single garden visitor's compliment than in all the shrubs and flowers he has ever planted. What is this craving for another's eye to rest upon us?

On reflection, a desire for recognition seems irrational. Since we live in our own mind, why should we care what thoughts are in another's? Is this not like a Canadian fretting about the weather in Mexico? How to explain this need for notice is debatable. Are we so doubtful of our worth that others must attest to it? Conversely, are we so certain of our worth that others must bow down to it?

Growing up in a small town, my life had an audience. I knew everyone at church, at school, on opposing sports teams. Everyone else knew everyone too. Thus we were all each other's audience. This did not always make life pleasant; one had an audience for one's failures as well as one's successes. But it made life meaningful. Everything counted because someone was watching. In high school, the bliss of getting a pretty girlfriend consisted less in having the girl herself than in walking the halls with her on your arm, for others to see. The chief motivation to score goals in sports was not to beat the other team but to impress the fans. To score a goal or get a girl on a desert island would have been a paltry pleasure. Small town life resembled the medieval universe in which saints and angels looked down on the adventures of humankind. Your actions might lead to heaven or hell, but because all eyes were on you, even damnation possessed a coziness.

I see a decisive break in my life occurring when I left town after high school. My well-nurtured ego thought of the outside world as the waiting arena of my actions, where all humanity was expectantly assembled for me, yet when I arrived I found that no one knew my name nor wished to learn it; I was a king without any subjects. Arriving at college was like stepping out of the medieval world into the modern. The campus was a chaos of otherness with nothing at the center, least of all me. Unknown students from unknown places lived unknown lives, unconnected to mine. What did my actions matter anymore, since no one was keeping track of me but me? I studied anomie in my sociology classes and experienced it alone in my dorm room. Though I made friends, I no longer had an audience.

I remember lying awake in my dorm bed the first night I arrived on campus. The thought gripped me that no one on campus or in the city knew I had come or required that I be there in order to function. The local restaurants had been in business for twenty years without my patronage. The dorm where I slept had been housing students since before I was born. If I died tonight, the city would not miss me or pause from its busy routines except for someone to call my family to fetch my body. I felt frightened to be so unnecessary. The one comfort I clung to was that the college had admitted me and, more importantly, had offered me a scholarship, implying it wanted me. For what is the proof of being wanted except being paid?

I began noticing every small sign of my insignificance to others, and minor episodes made deep impressions. One day I was issued a $100 citation for parking seven feet from a fire hydrant, when the law required fifteen feet. I thought the ticket was unreasonable, for although common sense told me not to block a fire hydrant, how was I to know the precise distance required, when no one had posted a sign? I appealed the ticket using this argument but was informed in a formal letter that the law does not bend for the ignorant, and I had to pay. Reading the brief, austere sentences from an authoritative stranger gave me a view of myself through the law's eyes, as a nameless citizen. I had duties more than rights; the law's only concern was that the human herd keep inside the fences, excuses irrelevant.

Another time, having a problem with my television service, I called the cable company and waited on hold for thirty minutes for assistance, and vented my frustration when my call was finally answered. Hearing the polite but wearied apology of the employee, it occurred to me that for her I was just another angry customer adding to her bad day, that she wanted to solve my problem only so that I, who was her problem, would go away. At the time I was taking a seminar on existential philosophers, who advocate being a distinctive individual instead of one of the masses. Such advice appeared hollow, for each of us seems distinctive to ourselves, but to everyone else we are part of the crowd.

Society is adroit at disillusioning newcomers, and many self-assured children grow up to be bitter adults. But bitterness, instead of a form of disillusionment, is really the refusal to give up your childhood illusions of importance. Ignored instead of welcomed by the world, you fault the world as blind and evil in order not to fault yourself as naïve. Bitterness is a child's coddling narcissism within the context of an adult's harsh life. Instead, I knew that the world only trampled me as a street crowd does an earthworm—not out of malice or stupidity, but because no one sees it. Thus my pain was not to feel wrongly slighted, but to feel rightly slighted.

A newspaper article I read about an unemployed man crystallized my sense of society's accidental cruelty toward individuals. There is often a catch-22 of poverty. One needs money to get on one's feet, but one must get on one's feet to make money. Having lost his job, the man could not pay numerous parking tickets and so was finally thrown in jail overnight, causing him to miss a job interview the next morning that would have enabled him to pay parking tickets. I groaned in pity for his snowballing hardships, yet who could be blamed? The employer who did not hire him, when the candidate did not show up? The police officer who jailed him, when social order requires laws, however unfair their particular application? Because we are no single person's or institution's responsibility, we may suffer an unjust fate, although no one has acted unjustly.

Though far less egregiously than the poor, everyone suffers somewhat from peer neglect. Social life is a fierce battle to be heard, in which each person is a tone of sound contributing to the white noise of society. The first requirement of any success is getting others' attention amid the clamor. Therefore smart companies do not so much invest in great products as in great marketing of them, plastering their ads on billboards, magazines, bus stops, trash cans, grocery receipts, anything plasterable—pouring their money into persuading us to give them ours. City-dwelling individuals, like low-budget companies, staple bulletins to telephone poles to advertise their talents and ideas, unashamed to brag since modesty is a liability to success. But since everyone wants to be noticed, there is no one available to do the noticing. How many pedestrians, all hurrying on their own errands, pause to read those bulletins? Only a few, perhaps, as they hastily staple their own bulletin on top. Stores open their doors daily for business, but since most people are also working, there is only a trickle of customers. At town meetings, people only come to share some burning comment, and so, planning their wording while they wait and weighing their words' effectiveness once done, no one listens to anyone else's comment. At conferences and orientations, each newcomer walks in the room and worries what others are thinking of him—a needless anxiety since the others are too worried about themselves to notice his entrance.

In our universal mutual oblivion of each other, fame is a fool's pursuit—but there are many fools. Point a television camera at any sport spectator, and he will gasp and grin and furiously wave, delighted to have his image transmitted to so many retinas. Yet since no one heeds a stranger's face on television, it being a common sight, only his friends who are watching notice him—the very people whose notice does not make him famous. True, a few people achieve real stardom, yet look closer and you will see, each celebrity is his own greatest fan. The crowds clamoring for autographs have not followed the actress's career so closely as she has. Who else has attended every premiere, heard every interview, sat in court through every divorce? Biographers devote whole books to rock stars, but a rock star devotes his whole life to himself. Nor is that rock star so essential to the worshiping world as he believes. Though he struts the stage like a human god, he is in fact a beggar to his fans. Without them, he would have no one to perform to, whereas, without him, they would simply go to other concerts. Wandering in the library, I will sometimes stop by a classic book like Crime and Punishment. Would the shelves be any less crammed, or readers any less busy, if Dostoevsky had not written it? The riches of literature are infinite, and the infinite minus the finite would still be infinite. But always my last thought is, if the great and famous are nothing, what am I?

Some days I feel so insubstantial that I am startled by signs of my visible presence in the world. On a recent afternoon walk, when my thoughts on these matters had gone somewhat too far, a dog rooting in the grass turned its head and barked at me. I turned my head toward the sound in surprise: I had made the rooting dog look up—therefore I did exist. True, the dog hated me, but in its bark I heard a vicious compliment, for it is better to be hated than ignored, hate being a form of acknowledgement, albeit negative.

I can interpret parts of my life as an effort to be a causer of change. I suppose I write to impact others' minds, not for their sake but because, if things give when I push, I will know I have a solid body. Certainly no writer chiefly writes for the love of truth or beauty; we read perhaps for the love of truth or beauty. Writing produces the entirely different pleasure of self-assertion—a pleasure less noble but more intense. What can reading another's fine sentence compare to crafting your own? Writers fatten their self-sense upon their writings. Thanks to them, an order of words exists which was not previously in the world. How could they then be nobody?

Yet the world is a very big ball to budge using only words. Before I started writing, with the faith of a beginner, I vaguely supposed that I would not only succeed but succeed precisely where others had failed, that the problems that had stumped past thinkers were only unsolved because I had not yet worked on them, and I would find the way forward for lost modernity. My future words glimmered as things always do which are not seen but foreseen, and I imagined the distant day when the public would receive my pages, my mind given body. Instead, my first publication punctured my dreaming ego like a pin. The magazine arrived in the mail, I thumbed the pages, I read my name in print, I looked around the silent room. Outside my window cars drove by, unaware of my accomplishment. I reflected that even much greater successes than my small one must always be local and limited, since most of humanity remains ignorant of them. For example, who besides some colleagues can name last year's Nobel Prize winner in economics?

Anyway, art is long, and my patience is short. I make my head hurt trying to catch subtleties of thought and feeling, and a week's labors yield a few paltry paragraphs. In magazines, I see critics scribbling book reviews every month, highlighting the errors and toppling the hopes of some new author, and I reflect on the wisdom of critics. To destroy is vastly easier than to create, yet it affects the world as powerfully. An author's years of labor lift him tentatively toward respect; a critic's hour of faultfinding sinks him back into scorn, which soon reverts to oblivion.

Destruction is a surrogate for creation—self-assertion for the uncreative. Normally, instead of squashing bugs I find in my house, I transfer them outside in respect of life. My example and inspiration are the Jains of India, who stare at the ground to avoid trampling and wear masks to avoid swallowing any brother in being. Yet I have killed, and not solely for convenience, the door being too far away, or because I find a fellow creature loathsome, like the roach. There is a fascinating feeling of power in destruction. A beetle that just now lived and moved, its matrix of tiny organs and muscles and nerves unutterably complex, is now a smudge of yellow slime, and I have done it. God planned the beetle before the world and in the fullness of time knit its body in its mother's egg, but with a tap of my foot I have stained the ground with guts and thwarted providence.

Alas, such episodes of petty Satanism are a poor consolation. We do not want to stamp on the world's throat to get its attention, but to be freely received. We want to be wanted and welcomed, not for our money or as a means to any end, nor even for any traits or characteristics, but for our rock bottom being, that irreducible essence of us which is best outwardly symbolized by our having a particular name. I give thanks for a wife, family, and friends, a few beings among the world's six billion, who know my name. While a child's and parent's bond is intrinsic, based on blood, a wife's and husband's is extrinsic, built on time. When I first met my wife, we fell in love not so much with each other but with whatever qualities we liked about each other, and if we had woken before our wedding day to find each other altered, we might have split. But five years later, already those traits we fell in love with have become predicates attached to the subject hidden within, and we love the traits because they belong to the subject, rather than the subject because of the traits. Thus in old age, when a man and woman are ugly and senile and bear no resemblance to the boy and girl who got married, they care for each other not less tenderly but more, because time has tied them with a bond that is stronger than blood.

Besides in my marriage, I find affirmation in my church (the Episcopal). Let others write of the hypocrisy of churches, in the fashion of modernity. I walk through the great wood doors and gladly leave the world of market relations behind. I am welcomed, not as the first step toward trying to get something from me, but simply because here it is the order of things to welcome, as outside it is the order of things to try to get. Unlike the pocket-picking by corporations, the passing of church offering plates and sign-up sheets does not seem base since they are passed among peers for the good of the group. At its best, church community can be more heartening than a family. Whereas a family affirms you because of your special tie with them, at church you can shake hands and exchange peace with total strangers, because universal welcome is written into the canons and statutes like a law of nature. Thus whereas family is a haven from a hostile world, church is a vision of a better world.

Nevertheless, I am no monk or homebody, I cannot be content to live in retreat. I must make peace with the world or have no peace. Nor should this be difficult. I can easily accept the insignificance of others without doubting their right to exist. A toothless woman takes my change at a gas station. At the beach, a dandy loafs on his father's yacht. They are not destined for history books, but this does not invalidate them, for the rich and various world, to be complete, needs toothless clerks and loafing dandies as much as statesmen and celebrities. Yet, regarding myself, I seem to think I should be Caesar and, not being, I reproach myself for taking up six feet of space, ricocheting from absurd hope to absurd despair. This shows how self-love can not only make us too easy on ourselves, but also too hard, for we cannot accept in ourselves the inevitable limitations which, in others, seem natural and uncatastrophic.

There must be a Copernican revolution of the self. Instead of pointlessly cursing the sun to go around me, my chance of contentment is learning to orbit, being the world's audience instead of demanding the world be mine. If the world is a stage, then everyone's an extra, acting minor roles in simultaneous scenes in which no one has the lead. With so much happening, society is poorly made to satisfy pride, but well-made to satisfy interest, if we will let go of vanity and join the swirl of activity.

Thus reason tries to teach me, but experience must show me. For several years I have traded stocks, and some days trading converts me into commending the cutthroat world. On a typical morning, after a jog and breakfast, I turn on my computer to check the markets and consider if I will make any trades that day. At precisely 9:30, the silent symbols and numbers covering my screen begin to flicker furiously. Stock quotes flash green or red, bid prices and ask prices feint and jockey against each other, volume of shares traded jumps upward by thousands. As I watch this sudden electronic burst of life, I think of all the anonymous traders whom the flickering numbers represent, each trying to outsmart and defeat the others from the hidden command center of his or her desk, each of us believing we can succeed though the odds say some must lose. Pausing from my contest with other traders, I browse the internet for news, and almost every headline tells of some similar contest between feuding parties: politicians campaigning for limited votes, athletes negotiating with team owners for more lucrative contracts, litigants suing over someone's supposed error, startup companies stealing market share from established rivals. Meanwhile, through my open window come the shouts of nearby middle school children at recess, screaming and battling to be the best at soccer or kickball, while, inside the classrooms, they train and study to decide who in fifteen years will work for whom. How many aspirers there are, for how few prizes! Yet on the days I speak of, when my soul is sturdy, this universal strife and rivalry does not offend me; on the contrary, I pause to praise it. Is there not something sublime in competition? I admire the free market somewhat as I admire the world of the Iliad, not for any moral virtues, but for the strength and fierce ambition of the participants, what might be called their masculine virtues. Like the heroism of Greeks and Trojans who go into battle although most likely they will die, all people seem heroic as they strive to succeed in a vast society, though out of five hundred children, four hundred ninety nine will grow up to be less than they dreamed.

On such days, I acquiesce in being nothing, yet this acquiescence involves no passivity. If everyone is battling for a foothold in life, then my proper business is to battle too, and neither to be vain nor self-disparaging about the outcome. I make my peace with the world by embracing war.

I open my eyes to a flash of lightning: colors and forms filling the room, a sensory explosion of matter and elements. Nightstand, dresser, curtain, window. And through the window: earth, air, ocean water, fire of the sun. Light meeting eye, world meeting sensation in perfect complementarity. I sit up in bed. The ancients said that light was made for the eye and the eye for light: the doctrine of teleology. Today we say that light came first and the eye caught up with it later: the doctrine of evolution. In the deep primeval past, as sluggish organisms groped for their environment, the first eye opened and beheld the never seen world. Morning was streaming through my window while I slept in darkness, but I lifted my lids and shook away sleep so I, too, could glimpse this blazing incandescence.

A walk on the beach begins my day. Down the hillside path I send my two feet and five senses, past creaking, wind-gnarled trees with moss-draped limbs, amid verdant ferns and glistening rocks and blooming wildflowers whose names I do not know. Better that I do not know them, for if I knew, I would say foxglove or lupine and think I knew what flowers were, whereas, untricked by names, I see stalk-shapes and leaf-shapes and purple-and-pink-dappled greenness rising wildly and unaccountably from the ground. Stalks sucking dirt up their roots and sending delicate pink petals out their buds—a magic chemistry. The ground is growing green stalks and pretty petals in woods no path cuts through. So beauty, like light, does not await the appreciative eye. But if not mine, whose world have I stumbled into? Did God abandon creation to me? Did blind chance splatter matter into this miracle? I'd unfurl the flowers' petals and uncoil their stems to know, for they seem like signs, but no signatures are engraved within, not in characters I can read.

The gravel crunches under my feet. Weeds wet with fog-drip overhang the path. They brush my pant leg, I feel the dampness there, begin to feel it seeping through my shoes, through my socks, between my toes. I stop for a snail in the path. Its toes would be wet, too, if its foot had toes. Careful I don't crunch you like the gravel, loitering in the path like that. Crunch and squish in the same step.

My guidebook calls the beach here a strip of desert between the ocean and coastal forest—a strip of barrenness between two zones of teeming life. Once on the beach, act and sensation: I pull off my shoes and socks, feel my wet feet sink in the dry, cool sand. I suck salt-air hard through my nostrils, close my eyes to feed on it in my brain. The flowers were silent: what will this shell say? I press it to my ear but hear only huuummmmmmmmmm. I press harder, and seem to catch a faint word in the hum: I come from across the sea. I throw the cryptic oracle down, and turn from sensation and feckless interpretation back to action: onward. Crossing a desert is toilsome, this thick sand sucks at your feet, like running in a dream. A wonder camels ever make it across Arabia. Human feet do better on this sea-packed sand. The tide covered this spot a few hours ago: hence, look at me; I am standing on the bottom of the ocean.

These clouds and fog will burn off soon. Sunlight already breaking through. Portholes of blue in a steel-gray sky. Splashes of glitter on a slate-gray sea. Over the beach, mist ascending and descending. Shafts of sunlight slicing the mist sideways. Fog concentrates perception—I see better in fog. It is a veil wrapped around this moment in space and time. It tells me, there is more out there, but I am here.

Who else is here with me? I peek in a tide pool to see. Mostly anemones in this one. A strange animal to share the earth with: a slimy hole rimmed with tentacles. Fools search the skies for alien life when they could look in tide pools. Yet, if it had eyes and a slimy brain down its tentacled hole, might not this anemone say: Fools search in tide pools for aliens when they could look in mirrors. Look down at these naked, knuckled, pore-pocked hands cleft into nailed fingers, at these bony, knee-capped legs bent and flattened at the bottom into feet, then split at the end into stubby toes. Is this forked form a norm for measuring weirdness? Everything is weird if you look at it. In high school, I would stare at my friends' faces until eyes, nose, and mouth seemed to unfix themselves and hover freely in place, so that I could move them around in imagination, and realize how arbitrary their actual arrangement was. If an anemone did have consciousness, it would be conscious of an intolerably boring existence—an animal living a plant's life. Waving your tentacles, waiting to see what crumbs the sea will throw you. And what if mother sea threw you nothing? You would starve upon her dry teat. We finned and winged and legged creatures deceive ourselves—masters of our fate because we have movement. Where can we move but within the world's four walls? What can we chase but the crumbs mother fate throws in?

Nevertheless, I am glad for legs and would be gladder for wings. If I had them, you wouldn't catch me lounging on the shore like these gulls, acquiescing to gravity. A huge gathering of them. What will they do if I run at them? They look at me lazily, assess me, begin to waddle, now flap, flap, flap, a commotion of wings, and now hundreds taking flight!—and I am running with outspread arms, I am flying with them, laughing and ecstatic! Already they land so close by? Foolish gulls. I will run at you again: and again waddle, wings, flight, ecstasy. Is it wrong to bother them? No matter: look at their faces, they've already forgotten.

No footprints in the sand. I must be the first on the beach this morning. I made footprints yesterday, but the tide washed them away. I was here yesterday, but time washed yesterday away, swapped it with today while I was sleeping. See this driftwood where it lies in the sand. It was once a proud tree. Rains felled it, rivers carried it to the sea, the sea spat it back on the shore—puppet of the water cycle. Time makes something into nothing and nothing into something, for it destroys the tree on the riverbank and creates the driftwood on the beach. It destroys and creates me, too. Like the driftwood, I did not exist yesterday, for I was the tree on the river, which is to say, I was another me, was that whoever-I-was that I was yesterday, not this whoever-I-am that I am today. And the world blathers and talks stupidly of time, saying "time flies" and "time is money" and hasn't a clue what time is, this invisible medium enfolding the visible world.

I am walking forward through time, as well as through space, along the beach and into the future. I can see the ground ahead but not the moment ahead. The next moment does not exist until I get there. Every second I stand at the edge of a precipice and blindly step forward, and new reality appears below me as I walk.

I cannot see where I go, while behind me, I see but cannot go where I went. This present moment is malleable: I could walk north up the shore or south; put a pebble in my pocket or throw it in the sea; step on a sand flea or let it live: I hold the power of life and death over different options. Yesterday I squashed a flea for sport, saying Thus it shall be and it was, and now I cannot revoke the deed of death. Every choice I make, I am pouring possibility into actuality, and it instantly hardens.

The past is solid, the future is air, the present is liquid. I cannot move through solid; it is impervious; I am not a ghost. I cannot move through air; it does not hold up my weight; I am not a bird. I am a fish; I swim in the liquid present.

Thales of Miletus, the first philosopher, believed that everything is composed of water. Heraclitus similarly taught that everything flows. Not only earth's oceans are liquid, but its solid parts, too. Look at the wave-beaten, time-smoothed rocks: they are flowing like slow lava, they are pouring their sharp corners and rough edges into silt.

I, too, am liquid, both my body and mind. My cells are compartments of saline. (Try to feel them sloshing as you walk.) My consciousness dances like the whitecaps from one day to the next. I pop my crest up here, now here, now here, and I only know is, not was, for memory is not the past but merely another part of the present—an idea in the present mind-state labeled "past." So then, I am not a fish, for a fish has bones and structure: phylum Chordata. I am a drop of oil in this world of water (or else a drop of water in this world of oil). I float on the water, I try to walk on water, but the water is slippery and so mainly I squirt about, as fate or God or the gods tilt and spin the container.

This shore crab scuttling past me is a drop of oil, too. In search of a meal or a mate or safety, I presume—what other instincts are there? Noticing me, the crab pauses nervously, waiting to see what I will do, wondering am I friend or foe. At ease, I am friend. Do we not share something rare in common—this moment of existence? One by one, earth's days fell from heaven's hand since time's beginning. Days accumulated into years, years into eons. Throughout the ages, you and I were but the shadow of a dream, two wisps of smoke in the phantom future. Other crabs scoured the beach, other mortals pondered the waves' meaning. The shells of your ancestors are seafloor sediment now, and the bones of mine are humus under their graves. The present is a current of electricity flowing through the wire of time, and the current is passing here, and we are charged and glowing. Only briefly, for the current keeps flowing, the ancestral lines wind onward to raise from dust and sediment other crabs, other sea-visitors.

The crab, no longer anxious of me, scuttles off. A pelican lands on a salt-sprayed rock. A wave breaks. Look around, eyes, everything is on fire with existence. Say the date. This day has never before appeared in the history of the world, nor will again. There is no such thing as an ordinary day.

Some enlightenments happen only in the dark. Last night I left my home and drove a few miles out of town on a mountain road, to look at the stars. Though I know it happens nightly, and though I had gone to the mountains precisely in order to see it, stepping from my car I was startled to look up and find that someone had rolled back the great blue ceiling of the sky, uncovering a dark and vast world undreamt of by day. Stripped of the sky, the land lay naked against the immensity of the universe. I could see silhouettes of leafless trees only a field's length away; through their branches, the fathomless depths of outer space. In the valley below was visible the cluster of city lights from which I had come. It appeared as if, merely by driving thirty miles beyond it toward the horizon, one might fall off the planet into the chasm of space. Against the backdrop of stars and space, the silhouetted land looked like a moonscape, the glowing city like a far-flung civilization out of science fiction—a strange rendering of the familiar locale. By day we are residents of towns and states and countries, but night reveals a different citizenship. Gazing up through the world's open roof at the worlds beyond, with awe and uncertainty we confess ourselves inhabitants of infinity.

The light of a thousand stars shone down on me, but I could not see the ground at my feet. Ordinarily we think of darkness and light dualistically, as complementary opposites like the yin and yang. This view is based in our experience of equal cycles of night and day. But the night sky reveals the true balance of opposites. Darkness is the proper element of the universe, and light an occasional interruption in that otherwise continuous fabric.

Coldness too is the rule of the universe, and heat the exception. According to physics, coldness is the absence of heat, the nothing to heat's something, and heat is the result of the motion of particles. Since the universe is mostly one gigantic absence of anything, it follows that it is cold by simple default. There is nearly nothing in it, and so nearly nothing to heat it up; no particles, and therefore no warming motion of particles. Only around the few glowing bodies that intermittently break up its magnificent emptiness may an eddy of warmth be found in the universal chill.

There is a wonder in the contemplation of these desolate spaces, the wonder of the sentient mind to find itself alone in a great theater of nonbeing. The probing eye scans in vain for any stir of activity overhead; in whatever direction the spinning earth turns, we look outward into motionless calm. The stars stay suspended in relative eternity, and though they burn with the roar of a billion infernos, only deep silence echoes down through their empty mansions. We are friendless in this vacant landscape of space and time, the sole inhabitants of creation. Some people dream of other races in other worlds, far across the yawning gulfs of light-years, searching the skies for us as we for them. Yet these circlers of unknown suns, if they exist, are as distant to us as the dead, for no neighborly greetings they cast into the night will ever make it across the great divide.

It is startling to reside in the middle of nowhere, and one's thoughts turn naturally to the question of life's origin. What marvelous circumstances, or what great or perilous journey, could have brought us to so obscure an address? Plato taught that we are strangers in the universe, children of eternity lost in the province of time.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
                                -WORDSWORTH

To the spiritually-minded the question of origin is a question of God, and many have searched the encircling deeps for our missing maker. One imagines that somewhere beyond the edges of infinity, on the other side of the darkness, if only we could get there we would find him, the deus absconditus. "God is at home," wrote Meister Eckhart, "we are in the far country." Creation has been conceived as a great exile of life from its source, a casting off of the created from the light of divine presence into the outer darkness of individual existence. To the workaday consciousness, such an idea is as dim and doubtful as a dream, but under a midnight sky I can easily believe it, easily imagine the human race as a lost colony washed ashore on these earthly sands from a forgotten fatherland, far across the lonely ocean of outer space.

Tennyson called the stars "cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand / his nothingness into man." I have never shared the common sentiment that the vastness of the cosmos demonstrates our insignificance. The thought of us alone amid never-ending space inclines me more to admire than to disparage humankind, for such an extraordinary setting casts the human enterprise itself as something extraordinary. Unexpectedly, we arrive in a world we did not choose or make, we are born into the unarguable givenness of our existence. Taking stock of our new home, we find it a flying ball of water next to a floating ball of fire, suspended in an ether of universal darkness. There is not another living intelligence to be met with anywhere, and no blueprints for living to be found: no divine guidebook, no instructional notes from an elder race, no owner's manual stapled to the earth's surface. The only furnishings throughout our roomy but spare accommodations are the dim and inaccessible lights of distant objects. We are left to find our own way and figure things out for ourselves. And somehow, amazingly, we have done it. We have cut a path as we go, we have used the resources at hand and invented what we lacked, we have made a life for ourselves. Homo sapiens—this little leaf blown in on the cosmic winds—is the supreme entrepreneur and the great opportunist. Not pausing to weep for his solitary fate or to curse the God who abandoned him, he sets himself straight to work as if this strange planet were his chosen real estate, and through centuries of accumulated labor and ingenuity he builds a great society for himself: a civilization under the stars, shining like the lone lantern in a perpetual night. If there is reason to speak of human greatness, it is not, as the Renaissance humanists believed, because man is infinite and therefore can do everything, but because man is nothing and yet has done so much. Some people complain that reality is dull and devoid of wonder, but they have thought little about it. Science fiction has added nothing to these facts but to people other worlds with races as wondrous as ours, and to give us ships that can sail the empty black seas in order to find them.

Under the stars I feel intensely small, but I cannot really say I feel insignificant. This obscure earth, this inconsequential pebble circling an average sun, is being's home in a wilderness of oblivion, and in that title bears a worthy distinction. Under the stars I like to go for a journey in my imagination. Aiming at Rigel or Vega or Aldebaran, I leave my earth-bound body behind and travel the uncharted light-years in the starship of my mind. I ride past the silent galaxies and soar on the solar winds, across the circuits of time, past the rim of the known universe to the outermost edge of creation. When I get there, I look back along the measureless path I've come, to see the earth below. I see a blue speck amid infinite blackness, and what I think about is not human significance or insignificance, but the lonely miracle of being alive.

A few weeks ago, in the middle of the night I awoke to darkness from a session of sleep so deep that, for all I knew, half an hour might have elapsed since I lay down to bed, or half a century. My state of mind was dreamlike yet alert, and where am I was my first fleeting, unarticulated thought. The moon or a streetlight cast a pale white glow across the room, revealing I was home in my bed, but in the darkness my home seemed an unfamiliar place. Looking around, I could not judge depths nor make out details but only discern the flat shapes and bare outlines of objects, dim yet boldly visible—for my eyes, having less to see, saw everything more. In their vagueness, common items took on uncanny appearances. Overnight, my chest of drawers and bedside lamp and clothes on the floor where I left them had transformed into shadowy blobs and sluggish life-forms in whose presence I felt uneasy, as if they were living out a secret existence while I slept, and only posing by day as my belongings. The clock beside the bed displayed 2:26. I stared for a long minute at the sharp red digits, staring back at me with cold, unblinking steadiness. Amid the shadows and shapelessness of the room, the numbers stood out as an eerie emblem of rationality; their precision and functionality seemed like evidence of a conscious intelligence inside the clock. Suddenly the 6 flicked to 7, as if confirming my suspicion, and without a pause the cold steady stare continued, outlasting my stare. All night this lone watchman had been marking the silent hours, displaying the time for whoever cared to look, or for no one at all. Mortals sleep but their machines stay awake, for they are more steadfast than their makers. I closed my eyes but my brain did not follow cue. As several sleepless minutes passed I felt a growing gnaw of anxiety, like I should not be awake when no one else was, a witness to this inhuman hour. What was I doing in this no-man's-land of time, among blobs and machines? These minutes were not part of either yesterday or tomorrow, were not even entered in the register of human life. At my side my wife lay sleeping, as I should have been, unseen though audibly breathing. Despite her breathing, she did not seem a living being but a portion of the surrounding darkness, which formed a backdrop and contrast to me. Nature and humanity slumbered, and I alone in the silent universe lay awake. I had no body, for my body was buried beneath the covers in blissful comfort that made me forget entirely it was there. I was an abstract mind suspended in an abyss, a pale and glassy eyeball watching the figures my own brain began to trace on the canvas of darkness.

Drifting in and out of half-sleep, suddenly I beheld in front of me, in visible letters, the image of a sentence I had written the prior day as part of an essay. When I had gone to bed the sentence was still too fresh to judge, but now its clumsiness and unsatisfactoriness were plain. I read it again and again with growing dissatisfaction and distress, but I felt paralyzed to alter a single word, and in my paralysis I stared the sentence into a crisis. In my vision of it, there was no surrounding paragraph, no essay in which the sentence was a passing thought. This alone had I ever written, this alone would any reader ever read, so that its mediocrity called my hope of being a writer into grave doubt. How long I lay rereading it I do not know, whether five or fifty minutes, but I felt no boredom from the repetition. I was outside of time, in an eternal now, contemplating my single, ill-written sentence as simply and intensely as God must contemplate creation.

There are day thoughts and night thoughts, the thoughts we think when awake and the thoughts that keep us from our sleep. Day thoughts occur in context, and their context keeps them reasonable. Each idea is checked and balanced by competing ideas. Ne quid nimis is the rule: nothing too much. Night thoughts are monomaniacal and obsessive. Their content is the same, but they lack the context. One after another, the brain sets a single image in the window of consciousness, and each image while it lasts is the only and absolute reality—it is thus that they keep us awake. Night thoughts, I imagine, offer a glimpse into the lunatic's world. For the lunatic sees a single fact or object with such utter lucidity, but also with such utter myopia, that it assumes a false appearance—false, at least, in the judgment of common sense.

I wiggled my toes and twitched my leg muscles and cupped a hand behind my skull, and with these actions my forgotten body rematerialized. I could feel it extending outward from me, a dark lump of flesh, me yet not me. It felt strange to have a body, this bulky apparatus I carry around with me. I can control its outward movements, reposition it if I desire, but the real activity is inside, not only beyond my control but beyond my knowledge. These unseen inner processes keep me alive. The sudden thought of this frightened me, for what assurance was there that the systems might not fail at any minute? I felt my heart beating inside my rib cage, and reflected how it had been beating continuously since my birth, and how, had it stopped even once, I would be dead. I felt amazed that it had worked so dependably for so long, and more amazed that my existence hangs so precariously.

Was it a dream that had woken me from my sleep? It seemed so, but I could not remember the details. Upon waking, I could sense movement around the periphery of my consciousness, a hurried flight and shuffling away, but the center was black. Then the edges went black, and all was quiet. Nevertheless, even an unremembered dream is an oracle. The day before, I had filed my impressions in back cabinets of my mind, and while I slept the magic drawers began opening and shutting of their own accord, and the papers arranging into new and fantastical scripts. I was allowed to watch the spectacle, though powerless to intervene or to guess its significance, but before waking I had to drink from the river Lethe, which had washed me of all but a memory without any content. Who or what was awake inside me while I slept? Freud called it "the unconscious," but it is spurious to name a mystery and thereby tame it into a thing. Leave it unnamed; enough if I know that I am not the lord and sovereign of my own inner kingdom. My cells metabolize without my help; my neurons fire and fantasize without my consent. I am a jobless general riding the shoulders of a self-marching army.

Night thoughts, like dreams, come unbidden, and now my unbidden thoughts took me on a journey of self-observation. Mentally I crept from my body and floated out of the bedroom, a ghostly consciousness, down the dark hallway to the door of my study. The door was closed, but a strip of light shone from under it. I cracked the door and peeked in to see myself sitting at my desk with a book in my hand, reading and studying as I do every day. Then the view shifted, and I was looking down at my house from above. I could see the light coming from the study window, and the houses around mine, and the city where I live, and the land around the city. Normally, living blinds us to the knowledge of our life. We are like actors who, being on stage, cannot watch their own play. But from above, I could see my life in its utter finitude and specificity. I was living this particular life and not another. I had chosen these pursuits, settled into these habits, come to reside in this location. Was it a worthy life to be living? I felt no regret at any specific detail, but I felt trepidation that I was engraving the tablets of my life without knowing it, for there I sat casually at my desk as if the shape my life had taken were as inevitable as an algebraic sum.

I perceived clearly that my familiar repeating pattern of work and play is a bounded series. From the delivery room to the morgue, it is only a short walk down the hallway of life. I imagined myself as an old man, my body falling apart, my days consumed in doctor visits. How could that wretched fate lie down the path of this young, healthy present? Much better if we could endure our decrepitude first, then savor our good years, like wise children who eat their vegetables before dessert and do homework before they play. Instead, after the worse comes the worst. Like the bedroom's palpable darkness against my eyeballs, the thought of death pressed against my consciousness. How long had it been since I last thought of death? It seemed incredible that I had lived in disregard of it for so many weeks or months, though it had not through my inattention ceased to be my destiny. I had been too busy building the clay castle of my life, too busy reading books and, though many of them about death, too lost in their general reflections to think the singular thought that I shall die. It felt strange that everyone must die yet no one knows what death is. The human race has been dying for millions of years, yet I will meet my doom no surer what happens next than the first grunting mortal who fell down dead in the first cave. I thought of my dead grandfathers, impressed as an outsider that they had already been initiated into the mystery. Where did they land when they fell through the wormhole of death? Skeptics scoff at the notion of worlds they cannot see, but only because they lack amazement at the world they can see. Would it be any more surprising to wake after death in some hell or heaven than to have woken on earth at birth, a naked I in this universe of not-I?

Yet, no wonder for skepticism, for familiarity is easy, and ignorance is hard. When I woke the next morning, sunlight was pouring through the slats of the window blinds, my clothes lay in a lifeless heap on the floor, and I could hear the television's mumble-grumble and the whir of my wife's hairdryer coming from the bathroom. I kicked off the sheets, stood up, and stretched my arms, feeling rested and ready for my morning jog, and having forgotten my thoughts and impressions of a few hours earlier. The well-lit world seemed sensible, death was an abstract proposition, and I once again supposed I knew who I am and what I'm doing here.