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Everything Just Is

The summer that men first landed on the moon I spent time on a tiny Mediterranean island called Formentara with no electricity or running water.  I had just graduated from college and was traveling with my friend George.  We stayed with an old friend of my mother’s who had led the life of an expatriate in Europe after World War II.  One night we attended a full-moon party, which had become something of a tribal ritual among the young nomads who flocked to Formentara in the late nineteen-sixties.  Walking back home at dawn, I was struck with the force of a revelation.  Too tired to think, my mind slipped its knot; suddenly, the world flooded into my consciousness unframed by any thought.  My mind swam freely in a realm of pure sensation: light, color, form, feeling – not words but the world itself.  “Everything just is,” I babbled to George, unable to restrain the impulse to embalm my experience in words, and then laughed at the absurdity of it.   

To elude your own thoughts, however briefly, is to suddenly come upon the world as it is.  The experience can be both liberating and terrifying.  The first time or two may be nothing more than a quick look around before retreating once again into the comfort of one’s thoughts.  For Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, the encounter with naked existence was nightmarish.  He was befuddled by familiar objects, which were mysteriously stripped of their names.  Past and future disappeared, marooning him in an unrelenting present.  His was now a world of bare fact, unadorned by any meaning.  “Now I knew,” he wrote in his journal, “things are entirely what they appear to be – and behind them…there is nothing.”

How much reality can we stand?  Normally, our thoughts keep the world at a safe distance.  We have only to name it to tame it, or so we would like to think.  Our incantations, our rituals, our philosophies, our scientific inquiries are all meant to quell the essential mystery of being.  Yet for all that, reality remains utterly impenetrable.  We know nothing, and our words explain nothing.  There is only the why of all whys.  As the philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed it: Why is there anything rather than nothing at all?   To which there is no answer, only a fathomless silence we call God.

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