me convinced that the quest should be abandoned. There is nothing I dislike more than premature intellectual closure.
THAT NIGHT I got a personal glimpse into the Abyss of Nonbeing.
The plan for the evening seemed a good one. Adolf, accompanied by his wife Thelma, would pick me up at my hotel. Then we would set off for dinner at a restaurant called Le Mont, perched high above Pittsburgh on Mount Washington. The view was reputedly spectacular.
Adolf was driving a late-model Mercedes-Benz. His wife, a charming and somewhat abstracted woman of the same age, sat next to him. I sat, like their son, in the back seat.
It was when we got onto the freeway running along the Allegheny River that my pulse began to race. A diminutive man, shrunken by age, Adolf could barely see above the dashboard. It was like having, well, Mr. Magoo for a chauffeur. Oblivious to the heavy and fast-moving traffic around us, he maintained a constant monologue as he tried to work out the route. We were having one close call after another, but Adolf and his wife seemed blissfully unaware of the angry honks coming from the other cars. The longer we drove, the more Mount Washington seemed to recede from us. It was like a cruel real-life version of Zeno’s paradox.
Eventually we somehow found ourselves on the other side of the mountain—where, perversely, the speed and volume of the traffic only increased. The angry honking around us continued, and the probability of escaping a serious collision seemed headed toward zero. Would I walk away from the smoking wreckage? Possibly: we were, after all, in a late-model Mercedes. But I couldn’t help fearing that the precious flame of my consciousness was about to be extinguished eternally, that I was in danger of making the transition from Pittsburgh to Nothingness.
Finally Adolf responded to my frantic pleas to pull over with a breathtaking maneuver: he came to a dead stop in the middle lane. A passing state trooper took note of our predicament, and we were kindly set right and escorted to the mountaintop restaurant. On arriving, I found myself to be more than usually in need of a fortifying bumper of champagne.
“Go relax and enjoy yourself! Don’t worry about why there’s a world—it’s an ill-conceived question!” Grünbaum exclaimed to me nonchalantly, with a trace of paternal affection, once the three of us had been seated at our table. The view was indeed stunning. All of Pittsburgh lay spread out below us. I could see where the Allegheny and the Monongahela came together to form the Ohio River. Bridges, festooned with twinkling lights, spanned the waters every which way.
The restaurant itself had a curiously 1950s feel to it, with older waiters in black tie, like extras in a Marx Brothers movie, and lots of crystal and brocade everywhere. Across the room, a local torch singer in sequins, accompanied by a pianist, belted out “At the Copa.”
As I listened to my distinguished interlocutor above the music—“They need p and q, these boys, they need p and q!” he exclaimed, alluding to a pair of premises I had lost track of—a sort of metaphysical tristesse came over me. Earlier, on the road, I had had a near encounter with le néant. Now here I was in a provincial restaurant that, to a New Yorker like myself, seemed a vestige of a departed past, the snows of yesteryear. It was as if the Copa had never left Pittsburgh. In this eerily unreal setting, I could almost feel the Spontaneity of Nothingness. Okay, it was a mood, not a philosophical argument. But it filled me with the conviction that Grünbaum’s ontological certitude—watertight, bulletproof, sunk-hinge, angle-iron, and steel-faced though it was—could not be the last word. The mystery of existence was still out there.
I was driven back to my hotel without incident. Slightly addled by the quantities of champagne and wine I had consumed, I lay down and drifted off to sleep without turning down the bedspread. The next thing I knew, the dawn light was filtering through the curtains and the phone was ringing. It was the Great Rejectionist.
“Did you sleep well?” he buoyantly asked.
5
FINITE OR INFINITE?
Compared to the eternal cosmos envisaged by the ancients, our own universe is something of a Johnny-come-lately. It seems to have been around a mere 14 billion years or so. And its future may well be bounded too. According to current cosmological scenarios, it is destined either to disappear abruptly in a Big Crunch some