Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,129

Void.

Epilogue

OVER THE SEINE

Paris, shortly before the turn of the millennium. I am invited, through the good graces of a mutual friend, to attend a small party at the Collège de France in celebration of the ninetieth birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

On the appointed evening, I make my way from the sixteenth-century apartment house where I am staying, between Place Maubert and the Seine, and head up the Rue Saint-Jacques toward the Panthéon. I enter the courtyard of the Collège de France, pass by the statue of the now-forgotten Renaissance scholar Guillaume Budé, and go inside. After the stateliness of the courtyard, the interior rooms seem meanly proportioned and a bit shabby. There are a dozen or so distinguished academics at the party, plus a sprinkling of journalists, but no cameras or microphones. Fortified by a couple of glasses of the Burgundy that’s being served, I obtain an introduction to Lévi-Strauss himself, who rises with difficulty from his chair and shakes my hand tremulously. The conversation is awkward, owing both to my poor French and to my stunned amazement that I am actually having a vis-à-vis with the greatest French intellectual alive.

A few minutes later, Lévi-Strauss is asked to give a little speech to the party. He talks extemporaneously, without notes, in a slow, stately voice.

“Montaigne,” he begins, “said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today”—which, he adds, was one of the “most curious surprises of my existence.” He says he feels like a “shattered hologram” that has lost its unity but that still retains an image of the whole self.

This is not the speech we were expecting. It is intimate, it is about death.

Lévi-Strauss goes on to talk about the “dialogue” between the eroded self he has become—le moi réel—and the ideal self that coexists with it—le moi métonymique. The latter, planning ambitious new intellectual projects, says to the former, “You must continue.” But the former replies, “That’s your business—only you can see things whole.” Lévi-Strauss then thanks those of us assembled for helping him silence this futile dialogue and allowing his two selves to “coincide” again for a moment—“although,” he adds, “I am well aware that le moi réel will continue to sink toward its ultimate dissolution.”

AFTER THE PARTY I leave the Collège de France and go out into the drizzly Paris night. I walk down the rue des Écoles to the Brasserie Balzar, where I have a nice plate of choucroute and drink the better part of a bottle of Saint-Émilion. Then I head back to my apartment and turn on the TV.

There is a book-chat show in progress, hosted by the familiar French television figure Bernard Pivot. His guests tonight are a Dominican priest, a theoretical physicist, and a Buddhist monk. And they are all grappling with a deep metaphysical question, one that was originally posed three centuries ago by Leibniz: Pourquoi y-a-t-il quelque chose plutôt que rien? Why is there Something rather than Nothing?

Each of the guests has a different way of answering this question. The priest, a handsome but unsmiling young man wearing severe wire-frame spectacles and attired in a hooded Dominican habit of pure white, argues that reality had to have had a divine origin. Just as each of us came into existence through an act of our parents, the priest says, so the universe must have come into existence through an act of a creator. Au fond de la question est une cause première—Dieu. He adds that God was not the first cause in a temporal sense, since God created time itself. God was behind the Big Bang, but not prior to it.

The physicist is an older fellow with a thick head of white hair, wearing a light-blue sport coat and an improbable Western-style string tie. He is grumpily impatient with all this supernatural nonsense. The existence of the universe is purely a matter of chance quantum fluctuations, he says. Just as a particle and its antiparticle can spontaneously arise out of a vacuum, so too can the seed for an entire universe. So quantum theory accounts for why there is something rather than nothing. Nôtre univers est venu par hasard d’une fluctuation quantique du vide. Our universe arose by chance from a quantum fluctuation in the void. And that’s the end of