Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

In college, I’d read Walden because a boy I found beautiful found the book beautiful. I understood nothing but highlighted everything, including this: Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.

Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house. I trembled, and in the one second it took for the tremble to move through my body, I stopped believing in God. It happened that quickly, a tremble-length reckoning. One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly, toward an ever-shifting bottom.

Then, my whole body felt raw, all of the time, like if you touched me the open wound of my flesh would throb. Now, I’m scabbed over, hardened.

The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay?

Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, stalking me, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley.

My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.

“I still pray sometimes,” I told my mother’s back. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, though it certainly wasn’t the truth.

At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become—a

I am looking for new names for old feelings. My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that.

I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop,

Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much?

The thing is, we don’t need to change our brains at all. Time does so much of the emptying for us. Live long enough and you’ll forget almost everything you thought you’d always remember.

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

I had never felt anything like it before, and I have never felt anything like it since. Sometimes I tell myself that I made it all up, the feeling of my heart full to bursting, the desire to know God and be known by him, but that is not true either. What I felt that night was real. It was as real as anything a person can feel,

is human beings who think and reason, not their brains. The brain and its activities make it possible for us—not for it—to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects.

But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.

When I was a child, I had this sense of confidence, this assuredness that the things that I felt were real and important, that the world made sense according to divine logic.

I didn’t know where I was going, only that I didn’t want to be around mice or humans. I didn’t really even want to be around myself, and if I could have figured out a way around that, discovered the switch that could turn my own thoughts and feelings and harsh admonishments off, I would have chosen that instead.

“It’s not so bad,” Nana finally said. “What?” “I mean, this is a nice sin, isn’t it?” The moon in gibbous looked off-kilter to me. I was getting cold and tired. “Yeah, it’s a nice sin.”

I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption. In people, I’ve seen even more.