Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (17 page)

f.
    
Just for laughs, what if we restacked the potatoes in Box A?

g.
    
Same potatoes, rearranged. Look how much taller! Even better!

6. COMPARING TYPES OF EXISTENCE

a.
    
Now do this:

b.
    
First, compare Box A with this very long but unexciting life, Box E

c.
    
Box E = 30,000 years x 1 value point = 30,000 sqOQ

d.
    
Next, do this: Choose between these two lives.

i.
    
Life E or Life A?

e.
    
Technically, Life E contains more quantity of what matters—

i.
    
30,000 versus 5,000

f.
    
Yet I'm pretty certain most of us would not choose Life E

MID-SUMMATIVE EVALUATION:

Even when we reduce the importance of QUALITY by FOLDING it into QUANTITY, we see that the totals don't account for humanist values.
¹⁰

7. MEASURING PEAKS

a.
    
What else might we consider when choosing between lives A and E?

b.
    
Even though Life A is shorter, it attains a kind of peak, a kind of...

HEIGHT

c.
    
...that isn't approached anyplace in Life E.

d.
    
Perhaps, then, in evaluating and choosing between rival lives, we should

CONSIDER THE PEAKS

e.
    
Look at the heights. Think not just about how much you packed in, but determine your greatest goods, what you acquired or accomplished.

CONSIDER YOUR OWN LIFE:

i.
    
Do you have 1 or 2 really huge potatoes in the mix?

ii.
    
Or do you have tons of small potatoes & none big?

iii.
    
What's your ratio of small to large potatoes?

iv.
    
How high are your potatoes stacked?

f.
    
Maybe you just have one or two really giant potatoes, ones that trump a heap of small potatoes. Or vice versa. Maybe nothing matters except the peaks.

g.
    
I think this is what the Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin is getting at in his poem
To the Parcae
(circa 1800).

In ancient Roman religion and myths, the Parcae (noun; plural) were the female personifications of destiny. The poet wrote:

Grant me but one good summer, you Powerful Ones!
And but one autumn, ripening for my song,
So that my heart, fulfilled by sweet play,
Might the more willingly die, contented.

The soul deprived in life of its godly right
Won't rest in Orcus, either, not down below,
Yet if the sacred boon my heart craves
Should in the future succeed—the poem—

Welcome, then, silence, hail to the world of shades!
I'll rest content, even if my lyre and play
Did not conduct me down there; once I
Lived as the gods live, and more we don't need.

Hôlderlin doesn't care about longevity. If he can accomplish something really spectacular, if he can reach great heights—through his poetry in particular—that's enough.

Once he's lived like the gods, he needs no more.

In thinking about what we want to do with our lives, then, we have to address this question of quality versus quantity. Is quality only important insofar as it gets folded into producing greater quantity? Or does quality matter in its own right as something that's worth going for, even when it means a smaller quantity? And if quality does matter, does quantity matter as well? Or is quality all that matters? Is Hölderlin right when he says
once I've lived like the gods, more is not needed?

I imagine that Hölderlin is thinking about the lasting contribution his poetry might make. There's a sense that if we accomplish something really great, something lasting, we attain a kind of immortality. We live on through our works.

h.
    
Here's a Woody Allen joke:

“I don't want to be immortal through my work;

I want to be immortal through not dying.”

i.
    
Yeah, me too. Sign me up.

j.
    
But given our options, maybe we can take some comfort in the possibility of attaining a certain kind of immortality. Semi-immortality or quasi-immortality. Or pseudo-immortality.

8. HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT, DUE NEXT CLASS

1)
    
Study the potato stacks below. Note their relative peaks and volume.

2)
    
Revisit chapter 34 (on creation myths) and chapter 35 (on
Choose Your Own Adventure
books).

3)
    
Read the attached creation myth (a hybrid of sorts), “Cave of Enlightenment.”

4)
    
Write your own ending to “Cave of Enlightenment.” Be ready to read your story aloud to the class.

9. READING ASSIGNMENT

Cave of Enlightenment—Part 1

In the beginning there was darkness.

There existed no father-daughter relationship, just two estranged adults linked by DNA and yearly phone calls. Both fear (
What if my father dies and I never get to know him?
) and curiosity (
What's he like? Are we similar? What part of him did my mother fall for back in 1963?
) prompted a circuitous journey, a play-it-by-ear voyage via AAA map, from the Garden of Eden (my cozy apartment) to the dangerous desert of Cataviña.

Father and Daughter wandered through the desert while poking the sand for rattlesnakes, not for forty years, but for at least forty minutes, searching for the makeshift sign pointing the way toward a maze of boulders, a nature-made obstacle course promising enlightenment (in the form of ancient rock paintings) in what they assumed would be a dark cave overhead.

On the trail, Father tromped ahead.

Daughter stepped cautiously, slowly. She stood on one leg for an instant, midstride, listening for the rustle of snakes in the sand, anticipating the moment right before the bite, that sliver of time between question and answer, wonder and revelation. Paralyzed with fear, Daughter weighed the risks—continue or turn back? It was then, in that intermediate moment—the blip of time between the firing of one synapse and the next—that all the worldly knowledge unknown to Daughter, the collective consciousness of humankind, flooded her brain with abstract truth, with the specific answer to the same question, if applied to others—past, present, and future, real and fictional—that would explain her own drive to continue: What if Saint Augustine had not explored his thoughts (“
the disease of curiosity
”), had not written
Confessions
—how would Western thought have evolved differently had he not taken the risk of applying his background in rhetoric to the principles of Christianity? What if Professor Mackessy at the University of Colorado had given up his research—that risky business of extracting snake venom in plastic measuring cups—which just might lead to a cure for cancer? What if Indiana Jones hadn't overcome, hadn't braved the pit of snakes—how many teenage girls of the 1980s would have missed out on his fictional adventures, the lessons of empowerment and go-get-'em that would someday fuel one of those girls to swim the Amazon River, to live her own real-life adventure, a shared mother-daughter journey worthy of deathbed conversation? What if Daughter and Father turned back now, never made it to the Cave of Enlightenment?

She pressed on.

They made it to the cave.

They sat for a while in the shaded
respaldo
overhang, sipping from their canteens and gazing silently at the primitive, childlike scrawls on the rock wall.

“I have so many things I want to tell you,” Father said, “about the origins of life and the universe and what it all means.”

That was it, the moment leading up to the cataclysmic epiphany, the pause right before the click.

NOW WRITE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE ENDING

 

Class dismissed.

6.
Or the Mexican desert. Or the Amazon jungle.

7.
Say a rerun of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Or
Charlie's Angels
.

8.
Monk
.

9.
Moby Dick the Sequel: Good Whales Gone Bad
.

10.
Perhaps the authors of the
Choose Your Own Adventure
series were onto something. Taking the canoe is very risky compared to walking along the riverbank, but I'm willing to wager that most kids choose the canoe.

My mother and I, deep in the Amazon Rainforest—we chose the canoe. We knew good and well that the waters were infested with piranhas and caiman and snakes. But we chose the canoe. I'd choose it again.

Hiking with my father through the snake-filled Mexican desert of Cataviña—poking the sand for sidewinders—in search of rumored cave paintings. Worth the risk? It depends on what one values in life. That trip was a do-over for me, a chance to get to know a father I'd not really known until then—a chance to satisfy my curiosity as well as ease my conscience—what if he were to die before I ever got to know him? I preempted future regrets by choosing a new ending to the Estranged Father story. Taking that road trip gave us the occasion to talk, leisurely and in depth, to let the long silences settle around us when we'd tired of conversation, to simply inhale the sun-baked oxygen perfumed with cactus blooms.

 

PART V

Songbirds

 

Thirty-Seven

 

(2005)—

Extending four hundred miles north to south, California's Sierra Nevada mountain range reaches its zenith just a few miles east of our flatland neighborhood in the San Joaquin Valley. From my father's Visalia home just down the street from mine, you can see the rolling yellow foothills of Three Rivers, and beyond, the backcountry's jagged peaks. Early childhood travels with my parents—racing the desert stretches of Death Valley and Mojave and Baja Mexico, inhaling salt-moist winds of the Pacific Ocean, wading the shores of lakes in the Sierra Nevada and San Gabriel Mountains—those early ventures instilled in me a love of nature and travel that has shaped me as an adult, has fueled my wanderlust, my sense of curiosity, and my abiding trust in the raw comforts of the natural world. It seemed fitting, then, to celebrate my father's move from Southern California to Visalia with a trek into nature—just the two of us—father and daughter.