The Givenness Of Things

by Marilynne Robinson

physical, if we give the word “physical” its proper meaning. As the word is used casually, ordinarily, inexactly, it means only what is accessible to our senses. But our senses select arbitrarily. Is space a void or a substance? This is debated. If antimatter should cross the little margin of relative scarcity that allows matter to exist, Being would be gone in the blink of an eye, solid Mars extinct as the dream I might have had the next night. But who has any conception of antimatter? These are conditions for the existence of everything we call physical, and we don’t know what they are. Like the word “human,” the word “physical” carries an implicit modifier that conditions its meaning – “merely” human, “merely” physical. It is absolutely medieval, downright pre-Copernican, to isolate the world we know from the heavens as we know them to be. Creation can only be altogether one phenomenon, ourselves included. Taken down to its essence, it is energy, whatever that is.