WHEN I GOT back to Nyack, I checked into the Time Hotel again, and for the first time really appreciated the irony of its name. A hotel called the Time, with a skull as its logo, with rooms that looked out onto a cemetery. Life really did have an odd way of slipping meaning into things, just when they seemed at their most meaningless.
This time around, however, I was given a room on the other side of the hotel—the side that looked onto 287, the highway that funneled drivers over the Tappan Zee Bridge into Westchester and beyond. This room, unlike the first one, where I’d spent that miserable month at the beginning of the summer, had a porch, and sitting out on it in the mornings, I’d watch the cars whoosh past toward the Tappan Zee the way someone might watch a flowing river. You never, said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, step into the same river twice, and though a lot of that philosopher’s sayings were cryptic, that one wasn’t. The world around us changes constantly, that’s what Heraclitus was saying. Everything is flowing sand.
But not quite everything. For in truth, the being who looks out at the flowing sand is looking from a place he cannot recognize, because he has his back to it. We are born with our backs toward God, and come to know him not by turning around, but by turning, as Jesus himself counsels us to do, within. When we do, we see that everything comes from Him. Not just the passing world before us, but we ourselves, the beings looking out upon that world, and wondering on it.
Bernie is a man who speaks with the utmost caution about what he knows, and is more than ready to lay out what he doesn’t know. The sciences, I continue to believe, should have more Bernies in them. Because science is, at this great crisis point of faith, exactly what we need. A bit of basic knowledge of what physics has uncovered in the last hundred or so years is far from a deterrent to belief. Instead, it is something that spurs us toward it. Science tells us the universe is a place of intense purpose: a place from which God has partially removed Himself, so that possibility (including, most importantly and problematically, free will) may unfold. As beings fashioned by God, we carry bodies made of stardust, and a consciousness that transcends all physical matter and links us directly to our maker. We are here for a reason.
Perfectly baked blueberry pies do not just appear on countertops. It is as simple, and as fantastically, wonderfully complex, as that.
After a few days at the Time Hotel, I collected some possessions from Colleen’s house and drove up to Islesboro, that same island off the coast of Maine where I’d spent my childhood summers. My sister and brother-in-law had a summer house that had been winterized, where they said I was welcome to stay. I got to work on this book, and in the afternoons I took long walks down to the end of the island, to the same spot I’d visited when I was a child, and then a teenager.
On either side of the road, the rocks were unchanged from how they’d been when I’d looked at them as a ten-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, and then a twenty-year-old.
But while the rocks were the same, I had changed considerably. I’d put on weight, my lungs were less than what they once were, thanks to all the cigarettes I’d smoked in my twenties and thirties, and my head was crowded full of all sorts of life experiences: losses and gains, confusions and clarities . . . a parade of things good and bad that I was glad I hadn’t known were coming at me when I was fifteen.
Most of the time on these walks, I listened to music on the same iPhone I’d used to record Bernie’s and my talks. For reasons unknown, I found myself listening almost exclusively to Led Zeppelin, and in particular to “Stairway to Heaven.”
How, I wondered, was it possible for someone like me, a male American born in 1962, who had certainly heard “Stairway to Heaven” somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand times, to be able to play it, again and again, as I took that two-hour walk down to the end of the island and back?
When I got to the tip of the island, I usually hit the beach around the time that the sun—a sun I had spent a lot of time thinking about that summer—was nearing the horizon, sinking below the pines on an island just across the water called, amusingly enough to me, Job Island.
All around me, the rocks I’d known since I was a child lit up with that strange, dense, super-orange light that the sun gives off just before it sets.
One day, watching this show, I realized why it was that I was able to listen to “Stairway to Heaven” with such fresh ears, despite having heard it so many times over my life. Toward the end of the song, Robert Plant talks about things turning to gold, and how, if one listens hard enough, one will find the tune—the tune that, in the song, is a metaphor for the reason one is alive.
I was listening to “Stairway to Heaven” again and again because finding the tune, and things turning, in the end, to gold, was what my summer—and the book I was now going to try to write—were all about.
My situation with Colleen was still a mess, my future was uncertain, and I was, at that point, still struggling to put together what my summer spent in Bernie’s company had meant. But despite all these problems, I knew, somehow, that the aquarium I swam in, the field of existence I was immersed in at all times, had become larger. Or, rather, it had revealed itself to have been larger the whole time.
On the days when the golden light from the about-to-set sun was especially strong, and the beach and the trees and the rocks and everything around me really turned to gold, I was able to see that light for what it really was: an earthly reflection of another, higher light. The light which the Gospel of John calls the light of all men, and which it describes as shining in the darkness: a darkness that, however often that it seems it might, does not overcome it.
The story of material things is never, in the end, a happy one. Shipwreck awaits every last piece of the material world. In the end, there is nothing solid, nothing firm enough to hold on to.
Yet solidity exists. In this world of passing shades and shadows, of loss and disillusionment, something isn’t lost, something doesn’t disappoint, something doesn’t fade away to nothing. The Bible calls this mysterious something the “light of men,” and says that it is consoling. Why is this light consoling? The Gospel of John is clear on this. Because darkness does not overcome it. This darkness has many synonyms, especially today. Separation. Alienation. Ignorance. Loneliness. Sadness. Violence. Dishonesty. Discord. All these and more fall under the cloak of the “darkness” that the New Testament speaks of, just as all manner of words fall under the cloak of the “light” that overcomes it. Unity. Return. And above all, love. The darkness is the darkness of the superficial world, which is that of separation. The light that overcomes it is the true light of all men, which is the light of return. Of unity. Of the conquest of all apparent separation. The light of God.
By the time I turned around and headed back toward the empty house where I was working on this book, the light, the golden light that, minutes before, had seemed like it would never go away, was gone. The familiar rock formations that I’d passed on the way to the beach were no longer glowing and alive, but indistinct, vaguely sinister shapes, humped in darkness.
But I was not fooled. I was solid. The people I loved, the people who came in and out of my life . . . they were solid as well. The emotions I felt, those seemingly most fleeting and flimsy things, were solid too. And the rock-hard, rough-and-tumble world around me, the one I had been struggling through for fifty-four years—that world was not solid, all appearances to the contrary. It was a quantum illusion—a dance of energy in particulate form that my brain was trained to read as solid and substantial, but which in fact was the furthest thing imaginable from these qualities.
I had now spent enough time with Bernie, and spent enough time bending my brain over the Zero Point Field and computer analogies and whatever else, to pick up the essential point—the third Key on that mental key chain that I had been looking, and hoping, to find. Love is real. Personality is real. Human experience, good and bad, is real. Human beings, as C. S. Lewis once boldly put it, will outlive the universe. The digitized rocks and trees around me would fall away, because they weren’t made of anything to begin with. But the place at the very center of myself, the place not outside me but deep within me, so deep and so central that it was impossible to see because it was where seeing itself came from . . . that would not fall away. It would not because it was, and always had been, a gift—a pure gift from the God who created this far-from-random cosmos—given out of pure generosity, with no strings attached.
One day in Maine, while I was trying to get this book into shape and taking my walks down to the end of the island and timing my walks so that I could watch the sun, the star that was responsible for the earth, and for my being there on the earth, watching it with eyes made with materials forged within other, long-dead, faraway stars. (In the simulation model of reality, astrophysical processes are, of course, a simulation.) On one of those days, Bernie called and asked how the book was doing.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s coming together.”
But of course, that wasn’t quite the case. In the real world, nothing just comes together. From books, to universes, to blueberry pies, a little extra help is always needed.
1. The physical world is not real. It is not substantive. It feels that way, and it looks that way, but it isn’t. There’s nothing in it, because there’s no such thing as solid matter.
2. Consciousness is the only reality in our universe. Matter, energy, space . . . All these things are only simulations, generated by God using the sole and single “thing” in this universe that actually exists. The world of objects we move through is not conscious, but we are. And because we are conscious, we are real.
3. Love is real and connects us all.