You wake up and face the gaping maw of the universe: screeching, whirring, dark. It’s 5:13. You peer over the edge of the black hole, see time and space sucked down and pressed into a fine powder. It’s dreadful.
“No,” your eyes counter, “it’s the ceiling.”
Oh. Yes. It is the ceiling. That’s what it is, suspended and solid. You’re back in your body.
But what is the ceiling?
The ceiling is drywall, covered in plaster, painted white, with a chip missing near the bedroom wall. That is the ceiling.
But when the chip fell, did it cease to be the ceiling? Or did it become, immediately, something else: a chip? Maybe the chip is still the ceiling, even now, after the drywall has disintegrated and the paint has flaked to dust. Maybe the chip was always the ceiling, even before, when the gypsum that would become the drywall that would become the chip sat packed into a rock in Texas.
And what about the atoms that make up the drywall? And what about the electrons that buzz away over seconds and years? And what about – God bless your soul – quarks? What the hell is the ceiling?
You see a solid surface. It appears to be a rock. But you get closer and find that the rock is broken up and alive: It’s not a rock, but a mass of wriggling ants. “Everything is only ants after all!” you say, disturbed and relieved by the fullness of your own knowledge. You pick up a single ant on the tip of your finger (“You little beauty!”) and comfort yourself by watching it nuzzle the lines of your fingerprint.
Then you look closer. Horror: This ant is itself made up of smaller ants, all writhing together, masquerading as the bigger sum.
You smash the ant.
“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever,” C.S. Lewis tells you. “The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.”
Yes. But what if the street and the garden are made up of ants? What if the ants are made up of ants? What if there is no bottom to the gaping maw of the universe? How can you face it? How is it that you have a face at all? Tremble before God, all the earth!
It’s 5:15. It’s time to make coffee.
