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Gentle Readers: I apologize for having been absent for so long. Life has gotten in the way of life. I hope that you have been well and are entering the new world with increased wisdom and serenity.

      Some years ago, I had the unpleasant task of clearing out the family home after my father’s death. My mother had died before him, so their combined accumulations were all stored in that house. I flew down to Memphis from Boston for the occasion.

        In a closet upstairs, I found several boxes of photographs, hundreds of them, all photos of people. Unlike the tables and chairs, which could be quickly sized up and assigned to one of my brothers or a yard sale, the photographs needed some time. I spread them out on the floor, one box at a time. The floor itself, in a room that my brothers and I used to call the “playroom,” brimmed with memories. That corner there is where we set up a cardboard jail to incarcerate the bad guys in our games of cops and robbers. That orange spot over there is where the mixture of iodine and potassium chloride from my chemistry set  – who knows what I was hoping to use it for –  bubbled up and spilled on the floor.

         As I began studying the photos, I realized that I recognized only a few of the faces. The vast majority were people I didn’t know. I looked at the backs, hoping to see names and dates, but there were none. Undoubtedly, these were meaningful people in the past lives of my parents. These people and my mother and father had probably eaten meals together, told jokes together, driven together on long winding roads. Some were probably good friends, and the parents of friends. I knew none of them. They had vanished, along with the bodies and minds of my parents. I found myself grieving a second time, after the first grieving for my parents. I grieved for my parents’ friends and acquaintances, vanished in a vanishing world.

         What should I do with these photos – each a precious memory, a life? But not my memory. I decided to keep a few, give a few to my brothers. The rest I threw out with the trash. I felt guilty. But my own house, more than a thousand miles away, was already beginning to fill up with things, and I wanted to spare my own children a similar anxiety when they would someday be going through my tables and chairs and old photos.

         And I had the extremely disturbing thought that nothing of us will last more than a few generations or so. My grandchildren will remember me. Their children will know me only from photos, and perhaps a story or two. After that, nothing. My passions, my love affairs, my marriage to the wonderful woman who is my wife, my dear friends, my career, the places I’ve travelled, the sights that I’ve seen – all of it will be gone without a trace in a century. Does it matter what we do with our brief flicker of life?

         The astronomers tell us that the cosmos has been going for some 14 billion years. And will keep going on for infinity. What does the cosmos care? It spins on and on, mindlessly following the laws of physics and biology, on and on and on, one atom after another. It cares not a whit. It is only we humans who care. But our cares might all be illusion, since each of us will be gone within a century or so, disappeared as if we never existed.

         The fundamental question, of course, is: What is it that has meaning in this strange cosmos we find ourselves in? It is a question ten thousand years old. Cro Magnons covered the walls of their caves with paintings of bison and mammoth and horse, colored with red ochre made from dirt and charcoal and bound with saliva and animal fat. In the foothills beyond the caves, these ancient people buried their dead in sewn garments and surrounded the prone bodies with tools and food for the next life. Meaning for them was to be found in the next life and its preparation. Regrettably, I don’t believe in an afterlife.

        Modern science has, for me, only made our existence less meaningful. After Copernicus, we learned that it was the Sun, not planet Earth, that lay at the center of the solar system. Shapley and Hubble discovered that our entire solar system resides on the outskirts of a galaxy, itself containing billions of solar systems. As I wrote in the next to last chapter of my recent book Probable Impossibilities, the discovery twenty-five years ago that the galaxies are speeding away from each other at increasing speed means that in a hundred billion years or so, the galaxies will be cut off from each other, unable to exchange energy, so that when the stars burn out, as they inevitably will, all life in the universe will pass away – not only our individual lives, but all life in the universe. The “era of life” will have come and gone as the universe spins on and on into infinity, colder and dimmer with each passing millennium. Even before that grim discovery of the “accelerating universe,” the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote in his book The First Three Minutes that “the more the universe is comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

     Perhaps I am foolish to insist on meaning in the first place. Isn’t the idea of “meaning” simply a human construction? The mindless thing that is the universe doesn’t seem to care about meaning. Shouldn’t I just get on with it (my life) and stop asking inconvenient questions?

     One thing I do know is that I feel pleasure and pain. Maybe that is the place to begin again. Long ago, the great Greek philosopher Epicurus (341 BC – 270 BC) said we should live so as to maximize our pleasure and minimize our pain (without increasing the pain of others). In his “Letter to Menoeceus,” Epicurus wrote that “We call pleasure the alpha and omega of a happy life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good.” Epicurus was talking about not only physical pleasure, but intellectual and artistic pleasure as well.

         In Buddhism, there is a concept called Bodhicitta, which is the enlightened mind that aims towards awakening, empathy, and compassion for all sentient beings. And a “sentient being,” I was told by a senior Buddhist scholar, is a being that can feel pleasure and pain.

         The philosopher Rebecca Goldstein has another take on these questions. She says that we should be concerned about what matters, not what has meaning. What matters is an individual, personal thing. We know for sure what matters to us personally, whereas the question of what has meaning, and especially what has cosmic meaning, sinks into a bog of uncertainty and dependence on one’s particular religious views. Says Goldstein: “To determine that certain things matter is also to say that we ought to pursue them.” Her definition of mattering is an action item, altogether surprisingly practical for a philosopher. Of course, as Goldstein stresses, each of us has a different set of things that matter.

         I very much like Goldstein’s distinction between mattering and meaning and her emphasis on mattering. Like her, I don’t think that there is any “cosmic meaning” that we should all embrace. 

    I do know what matters to me. Close friends and family matter more and more as I get older, for I am more and more conscious of the brevity of life. Beauty matters to me, and if I can make the world a slightly more beautiful place, that brings me pleasure – and happiness in the language of Epicurus. Other people’s happiness also matters to me. In the odd way that good deeds help the giver as well as the recipient, I myself am happier if I can make others happy.

     I cannot stop grieving over my deceased parents and the lives that they lived. But I am trying to accept the truth that all things pass away, that everything is temporary. It is a hard notion to accept. We have only the moment. And perhaps that makes each moment more precious. I hold my daughter’s hand in this moment, now. I feel the softness of her hand, and perhaps somehow there is a tiny remnant in her hand of my mother and her mother and her mother, back through the fleeting corridors of time.

Notes

“We call pleasure the alpha and omega of a happy life .  .  . ” Letter to Menoeceus, by Epicurus, trans. Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html

“the more the universe seems comprehensible .  .  .  ”  The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 154

“To determine that certain things matter . . . ” Rebecca Goldstein, in Edge, March 16, 2016, https://www.edge.org/conversation/rebecca_newberger_goldstein-the-mattering-instinct