that nothing at all existed, or in states of joy when everything is transfigured and they see the world anew, as if for the first time. Yet I’ve run into philosophers who don’t see anything very astonishing about existence. And in some moods I agree with them. The question Why is there something rather than nothing? sometimes seems vacuous to me. But in other moods it seems very very profound. How does it strike you? Have you ever spent much time brooding over it?”
“Well, to call it ‘brooding’ would be to dignify it,” Updike said. “But I am of the party that thinks that the existence of the world is a kind of miracle. It’s the last resort, really, of naturalistic theology. So many other props have been knocked out from under naturalistic theology—the first principle argument that Aristotle set forth, Aquinas’s prime mover … they’re all gone, but the riddle does remain: why is there something instead of nothing? George Steiner is a lesser thinker than Wittgenstein, but I remember him raising this issue. At the last report that reached my ears, Steiner found the existence of a world amazing, and enough of a puzzle to sustain a faith of a sort.”
I said, “I had no idea Steiner …”
“Yeah, I didn’t know he cared either,” Updike continued. “And I can’t remember where he brought the question up. Steiner has a theological side, which is not evident in everything he writes. But for the scientifically inclined layman, the great hope for explaining ‘something out of nothing’ is quantum physics, where you have these virtual particles that keep popping up out of the vacuum and disappearing. They’re around for miraculously short periods of time, but they’re nevertheless indubitably there.”
He was careful to pronounce each distinct syllable of “indubitably.”
I told Updike that I admired the way he had a character in Roger’s Version explain how the universe might have arisen from nothingness via a quantum-mechanical fluctuation. In the decades since he wrote the book, I added, physicists had come up with some very neat scenarios that would allow something to emerge spontaneously out of nothing in accordance with quantum laws. But then, of course, you’re faced with the mystery: Where are these laws written? And what gives them the power to command the void?
“Also, the laws amount to a funny way of saying, ‘Nothing equals something,’ ” Updike said, bursting into laughter. “QED! One opinion I’ve encountered is that, since getting from nothing to something involves time, and time didn’t exist before there was something, the whole question is a meaningless one that we should stop asking ourselves. It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain. I have trouble even believing—and this will offend you—the standard scientific explanation of how the universe rapidly grew from nearly nothing. Just think of it. The notion that this planet and all the stars we see, and many thousands of times more than those we see—that all this was once bounded in a point with the size of, what, a period or a grape? How, I ask myself, could that possibly be? And, that said, I sort of move on.”
Updike chuckled softly. His mood appeared to lighten.
“The whole idea of inflationary expansion,” he continued, “seems sort of put forward on a smile and a shoeshine. Granted, it solves a number of cosmological problems that were embarrassing …”
Wait—a smile and a what?
“A smile and a shoeshine …”
I’d never heard that expression, I said. It’s charming.
“Oh, that’s what Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman was out on. He was out there, as they say at his funeral service, ‘on a smile and a shoeshine.’ You’ve never heard that?”
I confessed that I was a theater philistine.
“It’s a phrase I can’t shake, because, in a way, a writer too is out there on a smile and a shoeshine. Although people