venturing backward: monet (extracts: march 2012; written November 27, 2014)
extracts from a post on my old blog “venturing backward”
When I came back to Michigan that spring break, I was interested in a girl – Monet. I’d met her in person once back in August and again in December. Otherwise, we had been chatting for several months on the Internet.
Monet didn’t sympathize with my belief in the fundamental meaninglessness of existence. She didn’t accept my assertions about human beings just being a grand assembly of atoms.
Even if she didn’t believe in a monotheistic God, she believed there was far more to reality than merely the physical; she perceived a spiritual world beyond – one that we could connect with, one that had meaning. She believed very strongly in the inherent worth of all living things.
She read Indian spiritualists. She kept a little shrine in her bedroom with one of their pictures on it. I knelt down in front of the shrine with her once in December; I could see in her eyes how much it meant to her, and I wished I wasn’t so confused by it. She prayed in some way, and I was never sure exactly to what.
I wanted her prayers to mean something to me; I wanted to find an answer in her little shrine.
I adored the idea of this spiritual world. I liked this idea that I had a soul, even if I found the concept ridiculous. I wanted in some way to connect to this non-physical world.
But I never really understood Monet or anything she believed in.
She was still living in her college town that March, working on a new degree in a medical field. So I drove out there from Rochester to see her. It was probably going to be the second time I had slept in her living room while she slept on her bed.
Just being in her apartment made the world seem more meaningful. I remember sitting there on the floor with her for over an hour one time. I just kept asking her questions about what she believed. I kept listening to the answers. Never truly comprehending anything she said. But still asking questions again and again – as if eventually I could endorse her perspective.
But then, as soon as I was ready to believe, I always remembered something about neuroscience that I thought proved all this was bullshit. Against my will, I always concluded that science showed it was all a hallucination. Because I could still see the indifference built into that wall of skulls. I could still sense that infinite black space around me; I could still feel those billions of empty years.
My mind could not see what hers did. For me, whatever her brain experienced was a kind of hallucination, a kind of dream.
But how could I know that it was not just the opposite? That I had become so hardened by my radical atheism that I myself was too biased to truly find reality?
I didn’t usually argue with her. Because I wanted her to be right, and I wanted myself to be wrong.
But when I did argue with her, it didn’t bother her one bit. And that made me jealous. What did she feel, what did she see, what did she experiencethat I just couldn’t?
And why couldn’t I?
I wanted to be like Monet. I even constructed a fantasy world where I was just like Monet and the two of us connected and lived happily ever after.
But I was on a different path. I believed only in a limited physical reality of protons and neutrons and electrons. I could not truly comprehend anything more than that.
And I knew that, in such a world, it was up to humanity to create its own meaning. We wouldn’t find it from anywhere else; values were our own invention, and we controlled their evolution.
Fortunately – I was, I remembered, about to have a chance to help construct the kind of world I wanted to live in. I was going to be teaching science in Detroit, and I had to prepare myself.
The time for endless fantasies and existential crises had to end; the time for action had arrived.
Chockley loaned me an ecology textbook to accompany the biology coursework I was doing online. He knew I had only taken one science class in college, and that I hadn’t done very well.
I worked through that textbook in my parents’ house for a few days on their dining room table.
And when I flew back to DC, I locked myself in my bedroom every other day to prepare myself for my approaching job. I spent countless evenings watching biology, physics, and chemistry lectures until as late as two in the morning. I flooded a notebook with notes. I stayed up late analyzing them and memorizing them. I double-checked things with Kayla, my sister who was heading to medical school. And of course sometimes with Chockley, my best friend who was going to earn a graduate degree in neuroscience.
I was determined to be the greatest teacher I could possibly be.
In some sense, it didn’t matter who was right – a hardened atheist like me or an ardent spiritualist like Monet. What mattered was that both of us were doing our best to create positive values in the world with the resources we had.