We Are the Universe's Fingertips

The great secret at the heart of existence is a gaping abyss of unmeaning.

Such is the proposition of existentialism. And on a night like tonight I can feel a truth in it. The entire trajectory of my life to now has been a headlong, wide-eyed stumble toward anyone or anything which I could fling between myself and that abyss. Anything that means I do not have to stand at its edge alone and feel its icy breath on my own skin.

But as soon as I take that step to the edge of the abyss and gaze into its nothingness, I do not find myself overcome with despair but rather with...inspiration. And with indignation!

My mind blossoms with thoughts. I cannot but question the abyss and demand it justify itself -- You there, if you are the end of everything, the singular truth of the universe, then tell me this about it: Why are we?

We, humans, thinking animals who step up to an abyss and try to understand it.

We are terrified of it; we tremble at its impersonal vastness, its finality, the death smell of it. But we refuse to stop at that. We step up to the abyss and we fling our self-ness at it: our questions, our fears, our poetry, our songs, our bodies, our loves, our passions. We would fill its emptiness with our own fullness.

Why is such a thing as us?

Standing here before the nothing, I cannot reject the us. I cannot accept that a universe, vast and empty as it is, governed by impersonal laws would, at some far-flung extremity of itself, vomit up the one thing incapable of accepting its impersonality: persons. I cannot accept that the engendering of the personal from the impersonal is a random accident.

A god? Perhaps not? But an order to the vastness, yes. A universe that wants to know itself, that strives to grasp its own existence and the unknowable laws which govern it -- the final order of the chaos is the mind. Our questions are the universe's ultimate aim, or its path toward that aim.

For are we not also the universe? If the universe were a body, we would be its senses, touching, hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling the entirety of our universal body. We are the universe's fingertips, groping a way through the dark, tearing back the skin of the future and revealing what lies beneath.