Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,128
time.
That night, I treated myself to dinner at a stylish and ambitious new restaurant that a young chef from Manhattan had recently opened in my hometown. I hadn’t eaten all day. I drank champagne at the bar and announced to the bartender, rather glibly, that my mother had just died that afternoon. At the table I ordered monkfish and heritage pork and heirloom beets, and I drank a delicious bottle of a locally produced Cabernet Franc. I got a little drunk and bandied jokes with my waitress, who had a genial red face and husky Southern accent. I had something for dessert and a sweet wine to go with it. Then I left the restaurant and walked the deserted downtown streets for a while, admiring the well-preserved mix of pre–Civil War and Victorian architecture that, as a boy, I had taken for granted. My hometown, like Rome, was built on seven hills. I walked to the top of the highest of them and took in the twinkling lights of the surrounding Shenandoah Valley. Then I broke into convulsive sobs.
When I woke the next morning in what had been my mother’s house—now weirdly empty, despite the profusion of old furniture and antiques and other debris that she had hoarded—the air outside was of an unusual sweetness. There had been heavy showers overnight, but now they had moved east, well out of the valley. I decided to go out for a run: a run with a purpose. I would reenact the Hegelian dialectic of the family, except I would do it backward. Like the title character in John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” I would return home. But whereas Cheever’s character made the journey homeward by breaststroking his way through an almost contiguous series of suburban swimming pools, I would do it by running past the landmarks of my early life, in reverse chronological order, until I ultimately arrived at the site of my conception. I would be The Jogger.
It was a goofy conceit, but one is hardly at one’s subtlest in the immediate aftermath of a parent’s death. And what made it goofier was that I could not get the Rolling Stones’ song “This Will Be the Last Time” out of my head.
As I headed out, the morning fog was beginning to lift. Before long, I could see the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, sharply etched and quite literally blue in the dawn light. I jogged past my old high school, where I had read Sartre and Heidegger in the library and taken up godless existentialism against the orthodox religion my parents thought they had permanently instilled in me, and where my bad companions had taught me to smoke. I jogged past the sprawling faux-Georgian house with the tennis court out back where we had lived during my adolescent years, and where, in a basement bedroom, my sexual awakening had clumsily commenced one night when my parents were out of town. I jogged past the Catholic church where I had received my first communion and where I had piously confessed my absurd childhood sins, and past the old schoolhouse where the nuns had taught me to emulate Saint Francis, the patron saint of the parish.
By and by, I arrived at the foot of the hill on which, just over the top, stood the little white-brick bungalow where my mother and father had first set up housekeeping after they married. The hill was steeper than I remembered. I had to summon greater and greater effort as I made my ascent—just like, I thought to myself, a particle accelerator has to attain higher and higher energies to re-create the very earliest state of the universe. Finally, I reached the top. There was the old house. I looked in the window of what had been my parents’ bedroom—the scene of the Big Bang (I forgave myself the execrable pun) that had produced me, or had produced, rather, the little symmetrical blob of protoplasm which, through a long and contingent series of symmetry-breaking events, issued in the messy reality that I was today. Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogony. Here was the ultimate home of my inchoate self. I felt moved, but only for a moment. My journey back was a cliché, a joke. The house had other occupants. Life had moved on. I would not be reunified with my parents until I, too, entered the nothingness that had already absorbed both of them. That was the real eternal home. And now I had a clear run to the