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He still believed that to be true; there was an order to everything in the universe, and the greatest achievement would lie in deciphering it.
Because he knew in his very bones that there could be no reason, nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme of a vast and utterly indifferent cosmos.
No, the reason he didn’t fear death was because he had accepted his place—minuscule as an atom, insignificant as a mayfly—in a mystery and a miracle beyond full comprehension. It was enough to have participated in it and to have achieved as much as one could while here.
The radio, as usual, was right.
“You make the universe sound like a library, where every book is on just the right shelf, waiting to be read.”
It was something like the philosopher Pascal’s wager, to her mind: Although an atheist, Pascal said he would make a deathbed confession to God. If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .
“The soul,” he’d said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, “is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free. When my time comes, let my soul soar into the wind and the sky. Wherever its natural home is meant to be, that’s where it will go.”
“We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof.”
“Oh, Kurt,” Adele said, “why must everything have a meaning? Maybe we are just here to eat spaghetti and talk and laugh and,” she paused, replenishing her glass and raising it to her host, “drink good wine.”
Still, there must be a consistency to it all. The problem is simply that we have not been able to discover—at least not yet—the invisible hand that moves these particles about.”
Time was no illusion; it was a relentless force, and he felt its sharp fingers digging into the small of his back as he tried to straighten up.
“In times like these, it is good to talk about other matters. Art . . . music . . . the higher things.”
‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
