When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the corpse on the death bed that contained half a century of life and love shared, grasped the cranium where his stubborn and sensitive mind rested, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether:
“Where have you been, my love?”
Regardless of our beliefs, these mental toys, when the time comes for material collapse, we—beings of the moment and matter—just cannot understand that something so beautiful as the universe of thought and feeling within us can vanish into nothingness.
Even if we understand that death is a sign of our present fortune, even if we understand that we are a borrowed star, we will inevitably be returned to the universe that made it – a universe that is headed for nothing as its stars slowly burn out their energy to leave the cold darkness of pure time – this understanding fades as it disturbs the anxious body. disbanded. Driven by the electrical influences and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds simply cannot grasp the timeless and infinite lifelessness – space without existence.
Even Walt Whitman, who could hold so many arguments, could not hold the gap. “I will make poems of my body and of death,” he vowed as a young man as he honored the material things we shared in his timeless declaration that “every beautiful atom of mine is yours.” It was easy, from the glitter of his early days, to look forward to being the “uncut hair of the grave” when he returned his atoms to the grassy ground one day.
However, when that day approached as he grew old and weak, the “poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not understand the complete elimination of his atomic selfishness, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call disintegration.”
Then he dissipated, leaving us his immortal verses, verses written when his particles sang of the electric fusion of youth and life, verses that traced with their fleshy finger a thin line of fundamental truth: “What revives life revives death.”
I wish I could have given it to my grandmother, and to the dying, endlessly renewing Whitman. Mr g: A Novel About Creation (public library) by the poetic physicist Alan Lightman — a magician who meets the science, a symphonic truth teacher about our search for meaning, our hunger for beauty, and what makes our fragile, fleeting lives worth living.
Towards the end of the novel, Mr. g watches, with an unknown heartache in the Void that precedes the existence of the universe and life, an old woman on her deathbed, the film of her long and painful and beautiful life is unchanged in memory, leaving him devastated by its end, shaking in disbelief that all this.
“How can a being with power and mass understand something without substance or mass?” Mr. G wonders as he is saddened to see him defeated by the rules he created. “How can a being who will surely die understand things that will exist forever?”
And then, as a small smile washes over his face, he dies. Lightman writes:
At that moment, there were 3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms in her body. Of his total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, and a smattering of ninety-odd other chemicals created in stars.
When heated, his water evaporates. His carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide gas, which floated up into the sky and mixed with the air. Most of his calcium and phosphorous are baked into a red-brown residue and spread to the soil and air.
But then we see that every atom that belongs to him – or, rather, temporarily borrowed by him – belongs to everything and everyone, just as you and I now inhale the same atoms of oxygen that once filled Walt Whitman's lungs with a passion for life:
Released from their temporary confinement, his atoms slowly spread and spread out into space. In sixty days, they were available in every handful of air in the world. In a hundred days, some of his atoms, the evaporated water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and absorbed by animals and plants. Some of his atoms are absorbed by light-using organisms and transformed into tissues and tubes and leaves. Some were breathed in by the oxygen creatures, and implanted in the organs and bones.
In an evocative central passage in Ursula K. Le Guin's stunning poem “Kinship,” she adds:
Pregnant women eat animals and plants made of his atoms. A year later, children were carrying some of his atoms… A few years after his death, millions of children were carrying some of his atoms. And their children would contain some of his atoms. Their mind contained part of his mind.
Will these millions of children, for generations to come, know that some of their atoms revolve around this woman? It's impossible. Will they hear what he felt in his life, will their memories have flickering memories, will they remember that moment long ago when he stood by the window, full of guilt and confusion, and watched as the tadr bird circled the well? No, it's impossible. Will they have a weak sense of his gaze on the Void? No, it's impossible. It doesn't happen. But I will let them have their brief vision of the Void, just as they pass from life to death, from living to non-living, from consciousness to unconsciousness. For a moment, they will understand the infinite.
And the individual atoms, cycling through his body and cycling through the air and water and soil, cycling through generations and generations of living beings and minds, will once again connect and form each part. Although without memory, they make memory. Although he does not last, he acts forever. Although they are scattered, they form a whole.
Here we are, you and me, Walt and Alan, my present grandmother and my late grandfather – each of us is a trembling totality, made of particles that are completely vulnerable and completely indestructible, hungry for absolutes in the universe of relatives, hungry forever in the universe of endless change, for beauty, for existence.
In these hungers, in these conflicts, we do everything that renews life by life: our art and our music, our poetry and our mathematics, our novels and our lovers.
