Averted Vision

“There is no theory that is not a fragment of some autobiography.”
—Paul Valéry

1.

I was in my 30s and engaged to be married when my father drove to the junction of two backwoods roads, pressed the muzzle of a shotgun against his throat, and pulled the trigger. A classic workaholic, the dynamo at the heart of our family myth, my father was nonetheless a softer, sweeter presence in the household than my mother. While she could flip in an instant from gaiety to red-faced fury, he held to a calmer, steadier course, though often one he seemed to sail alone. We had been business partners until a few years before his suicide, building and leasing shops and office space in and around Charlottesville, Virginia, where we lived. When an unexpected offer materialized, we elected to sell the projects, taking back a share of the rents, which gave me a modest income. I left the business and started to work on a novel.

My father found other opportunities and ended up borrowing heavily to invest in them on his own. These went poorly, the loans were called, and at the age of 67 he found himself facing bankruptcy. One day I found him slumped in a chair in his study, head dropped, shoulders heaving with sobs, his big, cupped hands hanging useless at his sides.

A psychiatrist put him on Prozac, and within a couple of weeks, we began to see results. His spine straightened, his eyes cleared, and he began to speak in nearly his normal voice, leaving behind the old man’s quaver that had so alarmed me that first time I had ever seen him cry. Then one morning he drove to the fork in the road, took from the trunk of his car the single-barrel 16 gauge he had bought in a neighboring town (my mother had hidden the guns at home), and closed the file on his recovery.

The death of someone you love leaves a hole in you, but with suicide there is something more—a squirming bewilderment at the heart of the wound that keeps the wound from healing. My fiancée and I had been planning a new family, but the shock of that day blew me back into my old one. In the months after the funeral, we clung together—my mother, my sister, and I—a little clutch of three, pledged to the desperate search for some meaning in the thing. We read books on suicide, books on death and dying, and book after book on grieving. We had ceaseless talks—fevered rummagings through things my father had said or done in the weeks leading up to the act, things said to us by the therapist we saw together, things we had said to each other, or to ourselves. We wept and raged and even laughed together, but of course we found no meaning. And in time I came to see that it wasn’t meaning we were searching for. We were searching for him.

Slowly, for my sister and me, the deep troughs of desolation began to space themselves further and further apart, and by two years out, we could feel ourselves returning to something like normal life. It was clear that our mother had not made it all the way back. She still needed the long talks on the phone, the rehashing, the groping for sense. She called anytime she had something new to tell. Something from his childhood that had been told to her by his brother in Michigan, with whom she had spoken the day before. An article she had read linking depression to eye color. I admit that I started to dread the sight of her number on the caller ID. But we knew she was still fragile, so when she called, we picked up.

One night my sister phoned to tell me she had not been able to reach our mother all day. This was unusual. The two of them typically talked several times a day. By then, I was working as a real estate agent (having abandoned the novel), and I had an appointment the next day to show a farm not far from the mountaintop house where our mother still lived alone. I said I would check in on her after my showing. It was past three o’clock that hazy September afternoon as I drove the winding country roads toward her house. I was worried, but my sister and I had been worried before, and things had turned out all right.

As I pulled into her driveway, I scanned the rock ledges at the far end of her yard that looked out over the Shenandoah Valley. She was a lifelong bird watcher, and I thought I might see her there with her binoculars, checking the sky for migrating hawks. But no one was on the rocks, and I didn’t see my mother’s car parked outside. Some months before, after changing the locks on the house, she had given me not a new key but her spare garage door opener—saying she would always leave the door from the garage to the kitchen unlocked. I parked at the far end of the yard and, taking the transmitter from my glove compartment, stepped out and pointed it at the closed garage door.

In the instant before I registered what I was seeing, there was a little space of silence, as my mind tried to make sense of the scene before me. There, inside the garage, was my mother’s Subaru station wagon, with the engine still running. I stared through the tinted rear window and made out a slumped shape in the front seat. In that moment, my whole existence seemed to flutter helplessly, like a sail in stays as it undergoes an irrevocable change of course. Then my legs gave way, and I found myself on my hands and knees in the gravel, sobbing.

When I had recovered enough to think, I staggered up to the car, clawing at the first door handle I came to. It was locked. I tried all the doors—all locked. I was holding my breath, but now my lungs gave out and I took in a gulp of the thick, acrid exhaust. It made my head swim. I looked around for something heavy, something that would break glass. There were some paint cans in the corner. I grabbed one and, holding tight to the flimsy wire handle, swung it at the passenger-side rear-door window (dimly intending, I think, to protect her from flying glass). The can bounced off uselessly. I swung again, harder, and in perfect slapstick the cap flew off the can. I can still see out of the corner of my eye the ragged loop of white paint, suspended in midair before it splashed into my hair, across my shirt and pants, splattering off the concrete floor onto my shoes. Gasping, dripping with paint, I saw an iron digging bar against the far wall. Taking it in both hands, I smashed through the window, pulled the inside handle and lunged across the shattered glass to the front seat. The instant I put my hand on her, I knew that she was dead.

The next thing I remember is standing at her kitchen phone, feeling the chill of the receiver against my ear and thinking that I was, after all, doing what was necessary, handling things, when at the sound of a human voice at the other end I found myself weeping again into the mouthpiece. As I struggled for breath, the dispatcher kept talking, patiently asking me to repeat some portion of the garbled directions I had tried to give her. I know that I called my wife and my sister after that, though I have no memory of it. All I remember is that I went outside. There was a low rock wall at the edge of my mother’s driveway. I found a spot where I could sit in the sun and watch the road. It was a warm, breezeless day, grasshoppers chattering in the fields. I could feel the paint starting to dry in my hair. This house, my parents’ dream house, stood at the end of a long, steep mountain road, and it took more than half an hour for the police and the medical team to get there. During that time, I didn’t go back inside. All I wanted was to sit and feel the late-September sun on me. Even after help arrived, I sat out in the sun for as long as I could.

Again, the sympathy notes rolled in. I have no mental image of them. Perhaps I threw them away as soon as I read them. I don’t remember responding to any. There was no pain. I was wrapped in the numbing redundancy of it all. Listless, blunt. It was as if, after the explosion of my father’s suicide, my mother had sent a noise-canceling signal back in the other direction. The result was silence.

Perhaps, I told myself, there really was nothing more to say. Perhaps I was just better prepared to endure the loss than I had been before. But my mother’s death had apparently inflicted a different sort of wound, less immediately and viscerally felt, though as time went on, more corrosive to my sense of self. I put food in my mouth, but it had no taste. I lost track of conversations. Sometimes I would notice a distinct impairment of my own physical control: I kept bumping into things or injuring myself in the most ordinary actions—reaching for something across my desk, I would wrench a shoulder; getting out of a car, I would set my weight down wrong and almost put my hip out of joint.

Late that fall—it may have been early December—my wife and I spent a weekend by the ocean. One afternoon, I left her reading on a blanket by the dunes and took a walk along the deserted beach. The day was strangely warm for that time of year, almost hot. Through my amber-tinted sunglasses, the ocean took on a sulfurous, leaden look. Shells and rotting scraps of driftwood glimmered, weirdly iridescent in the sand. I felt an urge to turn back but instead pushed on. The surf heaved and fell, heaved and fell again. Suddenly, and with savage clarity, I saw that everything around me was dead. Not just the ocean and the air, but also things that appeared to be alive. A blue-tinged crab scrabbling sideways across the sand, these tiny white shorebirds darting in and out of the wave-skim—they struck me not as living creatures but as ingeniously crafted mechanisms. Except, of course, that they had not been crafted. They were the siftings of eons of randomness and death. A big gull flapped down, almost at my feet. I watched as it cocked toward me a yellow eye, a depthless black pupil. I turned to go back, and to my horror met a man coming toward me along the sand. He glanced up, nodding as he passed, but it was all illusion. He was a cloud of particles, no more alive than a thunderstorm that might drift along this shoreline on a summer afternoon. I began to recover from the attack, or whatever it was, only after I had made my way back to my wife and lain down beside her on the blanket as she read, keeping my eyes closed and one hand cupped over her arm to feel the continuing warmth of her body. I lay there for a long time without moving, like a half-drowned man clinging to the gunwale of a lifeboat.

In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (to which I would find my way only years later), Jesus bemoans human spiritual blindness, saying, “The Kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” For me, that day on the beach, the only thing “spread out upon the earth” was death. Not until that day did I link the fading shades of the world around me and my deepening inner emptiness specifically to my encounter with my mother’s corpse. Not until then did I see that the question that had been forcing its way to the surface of my mind was a simple one. It was, “What is death?” What did it mean that my mother, this kaleidoscopic personality—alternately charming, selfish, loving, cruel—this spirit who, in my childhood memories, could spread herself across the sky, had been transformed into an inert object? Had she been nothing more than that all along? A thing complex in its makeup and movement, in its response to stimuli—but still, in the end, a thing?

As I struggled with these thoughts, I remembered a day in an undergraduate biology course—one of the few science courses I took in college. It was an afternoon lab, and we were to dissect rats. Each of us was given an animal already pinned to the wax bottom of a dissecting tray, already sliced up the middle, the white fur and skin splayed to reveal the bright pink muscles of the belly. Dissecting microscopes work at magnifications lower than the more familiar compound models. Instead of shining a light up through a slice of tissue on a slide, they illuminate the specimen from above. More important, there are dual visual pathways, which allow the observer to see in stereo, a crucial factor when working on a specimen in three dimensions. Although the magnification is lower, the stereo effect and the enlargement are still powerful enough to lift you out of yourself, absorbing you in the scene you are viewing. I was afloat in this way, centering the tray with one hand and adjusting the focus with the other, when a strange cream-colored cloud loomed into the field of view. What was it? I nudged the focus knob and felt a swell of nausea as I recognized the foam of cells—it was my finger. For a moment, I thought I was going to pass out.

We go through our days as if it were not so, but deep down there are unquiet shiftings, suspicions that we are not really ourselves, not really selves at all, but assemblages of other things, like those Giuseppe Arcimboldo paintings of humans made of vegetables. I asked myself: Why did we never talk about this? Why were we not screaming at each other about exactly this all the time? Because such talk is deemed indecorous somehow. There is no place in our modern, grown-up lives for that urgent question, What happens when we die? But that was the question I could not stop asking—that, and the deeper one at its marrow: What are we?

2.

As I came to learn, there is a name for the harrowing state I had fallen into. I had become, quite against my will, a “physicalist”—believing that everything in existence, including myself, consists only of physical “stuff” interacting according to the laws of science.

Once I looked squarely at this view of reality, I had to ask myself: Wasn’t this how any educated, informed person in the late 20th century would be compelled to view the world? After all, the laws of science worked. The TV, the coffeemaker, clocks—all had been painstakingly designed in accordance with scientific principles, and all of them worked. Even my mind and mood—what I had allowed myself to think of as things separate from my body—could be explained physically. If I had a glass or two of wine, I felt and thought in a different way, though this was nothing more than the introduction of new chemicals into the chemical and molecular makeup of my brain. And yet, at an emotional level, I had repressed this stark reality. I didn’t think of myself and other people as mechanisms or extended chemical reactions. How could I think that even of my dog, lying beside me on the sofa, staring longingly up before settling his head on my lap with a sigh?

The question of whether there is anything above or beyond the physical is of course a metaphysical question. So, what had been my metaphysics up to this point? Religion had not been entirely absent from my life. As a child, I had knelt and said my prayers before bedtime. In confirmation class at the Presbyterian church that we (sporadically) attended, I endured a weekly hour of boredom, quickened by the nervous attention I was starting to pay to the torsos of the eighth-grade girls. But later, as an adult, what, if anything, had I believed? There had once been something … in times of dejection, confusion, fear, something that had caught me, some mental or emotional net that had kept me from falling utterly into despair. I suppose it was a vague sense that things would be all right, that there was a place, a vantage point, from which the myriad uncertainties and terrors could be seen as fragments of a larger picture, a picture that made sense. There had been this, but now even this was gone. All I had left was the shape of its empty shell—like a plaster cast of the lava dog at Pompeii.

Of course, I couldn’t have endured had I felt this way all the time. And from any normal perspective, there was no reason why I should have. So much in my life was good. I was married to a woman I loved. We now had a young daughter we adored beyond words. I had a job that was satisfying enough. So I didn’t live in a perpetual state of horror. But this bleak view of the world was always with me, something that, once seen, could not be unseen.

Again I sought an anodyne in reading, but this time nothing on grief or recovery from the trauma of suicide. I felt a positive revulsion to such books, as if to a food that had once made me sick. What I could digest now were facts, abstract concepts. And so I read books on history, philosophy, and in time (perhaps in a stumbling search for a homeopathic cure) more and more about science and the history of science. Whatever the reason, I let myself be carried along by this current of reading, by the story of how the laws of motion had been worked out in the first centuries of the modern period, and how later science had teased out the mechanics of biological processes—the intricacies of metabolism and the unimaginably complex structure of the chemicals that make up living tissue. Darwin had shown these systems to be the products not of some divine designer but of the blind workings of natural selection on countless tiny mutations over hundreds of millions of years. All of this had been explained according to physical laws. Biology was chemistry; chemistry was physics. All of it nothing more than “matter in motion.”

Yet … in pressing that explanation to its conclusion, to what seemed the bottom rung of the reductionist ladder, questions remained. What was matter? What was motion—what were space and time, those framing axes in which matter moved? So it was that my current of reading carried me into the alien landscape of post-Newtonian physics, where it turned out that, examined at the largest and smallest scales (the limits of space and time, the finest grains of matter and energy), the physical universe is radically strange. Relativity showed that reality is somehow four-dimensional, and that space and time are not fixed but variable, dependent on perspective. Space can shrink, time can slow down, events that are simultaneous for one observer are separated in time for another. Quantum theory undermined the very notion of a fixed reality, calling into question such fundamental concepts as location and causality. Here, faintly, I felt my interest stir, for I realized that despite science’s vast explanatory reach, there were still things science could not explain.

The unexplained invites supernatural explanation, and plenty of books out there offered mystical interpretations of the so-called New Physics. (Parallels between quantum mechanics and Eastern religions are a favorite theme.) These I rejected early on. In some cases, I couldn’t get past the silly titles—Quantum Sorcery, Quantum Immortality. But even the more serious attempts to draw parallels between science and spirituality struck me as too serene, too already-there, capturing none of the agony and desolation that had drawn me to the subject. So I set out to learn the physics straight, or to learn as much as I could from various layman’s treatments. Because relativity struck me as less perplexing than quantum mechanics, I decided to start there, at the point where Einstein, in his revolutionary 1905 paper, had toppled the Newtonian structure of fixed space and time. How to understand the strange elasticity of the physical world? I knew that special relativity had to do with bizarre things that happen at extreme speeds. At speeds approaching the speed of light, physical objects became compressed, time slows down. I remembered a black-and-white cartoon of a spaceship I’d seen in grade school. As the rocket approached near-light speeds, spooky music played. When we looked again, the ship was shorter, squished front to back. How could this be? I would focus first on this particular mystery. I wanted to understand the strangeness as something more than a cartoon effect or a nerdy brainteaser. If this was the reality of the physical universe, how did it connect to the reality I knew?

Learning a new subject, especially when you are under no time constraints, isn’t always a linear process. You read this book, and that one. You watch a YouTube video. You sit around and think. It can be more like learning a city, when you have the luxury of days and days to go out and wander the streets. Eventually you turn a corner and find yourself at the same little square with a fountain that you came to by another way the week before. And so you begin to stitch together a map in your mind. Of course, you can also get lost and end up going in circles.

A few months into my struggle to understand special relativity, I found myself one Sunday morning at our kitchen table, penciling slanted lines against the blue grid of a sheet of graph paper. I had marked off horizontal and vertical axes, the horizontal labeled “Space,” the vertical “Time.” The sloped lines I drew—lightly, anticipating erasure—denoted histories of movement, speeds varying according to the steepness of the slopes. Project one line onto another (dotted segments drawn between them), and, unless the original lines are parallel (motion at the same speed), the projections are invariably longer or shorter than the lines themselves. Could this be the seed of the changing lengths predicted by relativity? I strained for some intuitive sense that it could be true, but it was no use. The graphs, the lines, the projections—these were all abstractions, unconnected to my here and now.

It was early, and I was the only one awake. The rising sun cast a rectangle of warm light on the kitchen wall. As I stared at that patch of sunlight, I felt myself drifting toward the same desolate awareness I’d known when sitting on the rock wall outside my mother’s garage. I could name it now: the stark certainty that sunlight, this unexamined ambience of light and warmth, was the product of a simple thing. An object hung in space, emitting light—which in this moment was passing through an aperture, the window of the kitchen I now sat in, projecting a shape onto a surface: our kitchen wall. That was all I was seeing in this patch of light, blurred by the swaying shadows of branches outside. A simple arrangement of things. Sun, window, wall. Nothing more.

I think I must have sat there for a long time before I noticed, at the center of that patch of light, a shadow, slowly contracting, then lengthening again. I knew what it was—the cardboard cutout of a fish hanging from a ribbon in our kitchen window. A preschool project of my daughter’s from a few weeks back—elongate body tapering toward a fanned-out tail fin. I watched as the shadow lazily contracted and lengthened and contracted again, and at first I couldn’t unlink this oscillation from my awareness of the cardboard fish behind me, turning slowly on its ribbon in the faint currents of air leaking in around the window sash. But if I made myself focus solely on the shadow, thinking only of this two-dimensional shape on the two-dimensional surface of the wall, the changes became mysterious. As mysterious, I realized, as a shrinking spaceship would be in the three-dimensional world I knew.

Something fluttered at the edge of my mind, like a memory just beyond reach. I brought my eyes back to the brightly lit wall, straining to imagine it as all of three-dimensional space. Then to the flat cardboard fish in the window, its flatness defining a plane that would also be all of three-dimensional space—yet, in some unimaginable way, aslant relative to the space of the wall. Meaning what? That a difference in velocity simply is such a slanting? If so, it would have to be in a framing unseen by us, and unseeable. And yet here, right here in my own kitchen, something was happening … something more immediate and real-seeming than lines on a sheet of graph paper. Again, I pictured the two planes—the flat cut-out fish, and the fish’s flat shadow on the wall. Between them … this block of clear air. Suddenly, I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Here was Einstein’s insight: for the universe to make sense, to account for the bizarre effects of special relativity, a dimension must be added to what we think of as our reality.

Outside, the wind rose and fell in the trees—a gusty spring morning, clear and cool after days of rain. I opened the glass door and stepped onto the back deck, and there, in that brisk breeze, I began to see for the first time the possibility that everything I knew, the whole of this gusty spring morning—billowing leaves, clouds drifting like snow hills through the blue sky—might be the merest slice of something infinitely more vast. Vast beyond imagining. Far off, a tiny white contrail etched its course against the blue, a glint of silver at its tip. Travelers, their slice of the vastness just offset from mine.

Although the actual geometry is a good deal more complex, the rotation of my daughter’s cardboard fish had captured an essential principle of special relativity. The apparent paradoxes of Einstein’s theory (contractions of space, slowing of time) begin to resolve themselves when one accepts that the arena in which all physical phenomena play out is not Newtonian three-dimensional space with time ticking by but a complex, four-dimensional “manifold” in which space and time are merged into a single entity: spacetime. The shock I experienced that morning in my kitchen was understandable. More than a century after Einstein’s work, this astonishing truth has still not been absorbed into the general consciousness, into our perception of the reality we inhabit.

The interpretation of special relativity in terms of four-dimensional geometry, which was actually proposed by his former teacher Hermann Minkowski only after the publication of Einstein’s original paper, drew on the work of earlier mathematicians such as Bernhard Riemann, who in the mid-19th century began to explore (in what was assumed to be the realm of purely abstract thought) characteristics of “spaces” with dimensions more than three. By 1908, Einstein and Minkowski had demonstrated that the universe actually is higher-dimensional and that baffling relativistic effects, such as length contraction and the slowing of time, can be roughly understood by treating differences in velocity as rotations in this higher context.

Minkowski was not, in the way of science-fiction writers or 19th-century spiritualists, adding a fourth dimension of space. Relativity inserted no new component into Newton’s framework of 3D space plus time. Time is the fourth dimension, with properties analogous, but not identical, to the three spatial dimensions. Thus, the theory revealed that elements we already knew constituted a reality vast beyond imagining, a transcendent depth unseen. How could we have seen it? Four-dimensional spaces can’t be visualized. We can imagine them only indirectly, by considering models in dimensions of three or fewer, such as the three-dimensional arrangement of my daughter’s cardboard fish and its shadow on our kitchen wall.

More and more, as I thought about the enhanced standing that relativity confers upon time—no longer a succession of fleeting moments, but something with extended and persisting qualities comparable to those of space—I felt myself drawn into time’s depth, into my own past. Sometimes a memory would float up before I knew exactly what the physics had latched onto—what snag in the fabric of the past had caught my mind’s eye. Only as it played itself out could I identify the detail that had evoked it. Some presence that had always been there, unnoticed. It was like looking again at a familiar family photograph and seeing for the first time, far in the background, a ghost.

Once, when reading the chapter on special relativity in Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the depths of four-dimensional spacetime, when my mind drifted back to a fall day from my childhood. I was standing on a flat rock in the middle of a field of tall grass with my mother. I must have been four or five; she was squatting down to bring her face close to mine, keeping an insistent grip on my upper arm as she tried to get me to look at some distant specks in the sky—birds wheeling in a wide, slow circle above us. There must have been 20 or 30 of them, but the longer I looked, the deeper into the sky I saw—more and more, hundreds of them, rising ever tinier, fainter, in what I now know was a “kettle” of migrating hawks, turning above us in a great, stacked cylinder of air.

Later, a passage on general relativity in Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here took me back to another early memory. This time, I was eight or nine, standing with my father at the railing of a raised platform inside an enormous tent, staring down into a huge wooden tub, where a pair of motorcycles roared around the tub’s vertical walls, perfectly parallel to the ground. A dazzling impossibility, but one that I now viewed as evidence of the unseen depth exposed by general relativity’s revelation that curved motion through space results in a force indistinguishable from the gravitational force produced when spacetime—that unpicturable framing—is curved by a massive body such as the Earth. Who would not be moved by the transcendence pointed to by this link between matter and motion?

As I puzzled over the implications of this expanded framing of existence, its ties to time and to my own past, I came upon a passage from a condolence letter Einstein had written to the widow of a close friend, the engineer Michele Besso, in the spring of 1955—only a few months before Einstein’s own death. Characteristically circumspect, and no doubt softened to fit the occasion, his words nonetheless reveal a mind striving to reconcile this expansively reconceived model of the physical universe with the finality of death. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” Einstein wrote of Besso. “That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

3.

A few months after I came across Einstein’s letter, when we were visiting an old English professor of mine at his farm in New Hampshire, I found myself trying to describe to him the way relativity suggests this larger framing of existence, in which past, present, and future can be seen as a single enduring reality. He suggested I read what I now know is a famous passage in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions. I looked it up as soon as I got home.

The passage is a long meditation on the temporal, and my teacher saw rightly that the author’s intellectual struggles echoed my own. “What, then, is time?” Augustine inquires. “If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know.” The Confessions is actually a single extended prayer, a search for a God who is at once utterly transcendent and fully immanent in the visible world. Secretissime, presentissime: most hidden, most present. Groping for a way to model the eternal in his mind, Augustine explores the paradoxical nature of time, using images of spatial dimensionality—point and line. We can imagine “lengths” of time in the past or the future, but, because the past is no more and the future is not yet, we can have no direct experience of them. Our only immediate awareness is of the present moment, which, in Augustine’s words, always vanishes into “a point without extension.”

At the very moment of perception, the looked-for thing blinks out of sight. My conversation with my professor had been on his back patio after dinner, on a summer night under the stars. And now, as I reflected on Augustine’s words, I thought of the way the faintest specks of light in the night sky—the smudge of a distant galaxy or star cluster—disappear the moment you fix them in your gaze. But then, shift your eyes slightly to the side, and something shimmers again at the periphery of sight. Astronomers have a term for the technique: averted vision. A way of seeing after seeing fails.

Augustine, like other early Christian thinkers, came of age in late antiquity, in an intellectual climate dominated by Neoplatonist thought. For Plato, ultimate reality was severed from the physical world; the human person was composed of a physical body and a separate soul that, divine by nature, is destined to return to its home among the eternal Forms. The body at death is left behind, discarded like the skin of a snake. But early Christian theologians could not devalue the physical universe as Platonism did. They were heirs to ancient Israel’s religious tradition, which taught that the natural world had been created by the one true God, who had pronounced it good. Consequently, in thinking through the identity of Christ, the Church could not dismiss the physical, human body of the man Jesus. In their efforts to hammer out a solution to the problem of Jesus’s identity, the Church fathers in the generations before Augustine had considered every rational possibility: (1) a human body had walked the earth but with a divine spirit in the place of a human soul; (2) Jesus was a divine being but of a lower rank, like an angel; (3) there was no man Jesus—God had come into the world cloaked in the illusion of a human body. The details of the arguments were abstruse, but from the remove of centuries and through the lens of my own agnostic attitude, the particulars of these intellectual quarrels faded, and what presented itself to me was the broader topology of the debate, which I saw as a struggle to reconcile the material, time-bound world with a larger reality that was believed to transcend it.

What struck me most forcefully was the way the Church’s final reconciliation of the physical and the transcendent in every case involved the most logic-defying, unpicturable solution, starting always from the premise that God can be described only by saying what God is not, an approach that theologians term apophatic (Greek for “speaking away from”). Plato’s model of a physical body inhabited by a divine soul—a ghost in the machine, in the phrase of the 20th-century philosopher Gilbert Ryle—while mysterious, was a mystery that could be pictured. But a being who was seamlessly fully human and fully divine, whose physical body was not discarded at his death but was in some unimaginable way enhanced and made transcendent—this was a profound paradox, one that Saint Paul recognized would be “foolishness to the Greeks.” Two fundamental qualities, the spiritual and the physical, the divine and the mundane, were, in a manner that made no sense, superposed and inseparable. And the nature of divinity itself reflected this superposition, this paradox. God was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and yet was one God, a God whose kingdom was, and always had been, “laid out upon the Earth.” Even for as staunch a skeptic of mystical interpretations of the New Physics as I was then, it was hard not to see parallels—epistemological ones, at least—with theories where every subatomic particle is also a wave, and where space and time, in a framing beyond our comprehension, merge into a higher unity.

The epiphany, if you can call it that, is far from complete. I don’t believe that relativistic and quantum phenomena prove the existence of God or heaven or the human soul. Nor do I think that fourth-century theologians were offering up exact, Nostradamic prophecies of post-Newtonian physics. A further disappointment, for me, is that neither physics nor philosophy seems to offer much insight into the ontological knot that is suicide. Intimations, inklings emanate from the concept, for that old imponderable—the question of free will—shimmers around its edges. If we are no more than chemical reactions, how is it that a chemical reaction can choose to end itself? Whatever else it may be, suicide is a potent distillation of the mind-body problem. And so, as I keep company with enigma, I continue to be intensely drawn to the negative theology of these ancient Christian thinkers—whether the muscular assertions of Athanasius or the ethereal reflections of Gregory of Nyssa. Drawn to their struggle to fix a transcendent reality in rational, logically definable terms, and to how the inevitable failure of that struggle opens onto something beyond itself.

I am still not a churchgoer, and this, I know, is in Christian terms a failing. Faith, a true Christian would say, is not a thing held, but an activity in the world, something inseparable from life in community. One reason why I don’t go to church is that I don’t know how to reconcile this pull toward life and community, which I do feel, with a fascination (a morbid fascination, I suppose) with the darker strains I hear in the Christian story—the Church’s obsession with “blood” and “flesh” and “body.” How sometimes from this slant, as I think of the mournful cadences of the liturgy and the gruesome symbolism of the Eucharist, it can seem that all of Christian theology should be read as one long meditation on the corpse. This, for me, is a powerful and central resonance, but it’s hard to imagine bringing it up over cookies and punch in the parish hall.

And yet, one sign that my brush with Christianity has changed me, rendered me more tolerant, more open to others and to life itself, is a change in my memory of my mother. I resent her less—for her instabilities, her jaggedness, her rages—and for inflicting on me the trauma of finding her that day in her garage. I value her more for her love of the natural order—of wildflowers, birds, and the seasons. I see that in her way, she perceived, as I did not until now, a transcendent depth at the heart of the physical world.

In one of the most moving passages in the Confessions, Augustine tells of a conversation with his mother, Monica, not long before her death. The two are standing together at a window, overlooking a garden in Ostia, where the River Tiber empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Alone, speaking intimately, they ask themselves “what quality of life the eternal life of the saints will have.” There follows an ascent out of ordinary discourse, out of rational thought, to a shared vision of the transcendent—one that surpasses understanding or expression: “Higher still we mounted by inward thought … and we arrived at the summit of our own minds, and this too we transcended.”

The ascent fades into aphasia just as the transcendent is glimpsed. From this silence, they descend again to the world of sequential time and inadequate expression, where the fullness of truth must be drawn out into speech. Where “each word has a beginning and an end” and one word must follow another. A world where to know each other’s minds we must unspool the thread of language, and to know ourselves, as Augustine’s great work testifies, our only choice is to tell the story of our lives.

I have a favorite photograph of my mother and me, taken by my sister on the rock ledges in front of my parents’ house at the crest of the Blue Ridge. I am there beside her as she cups her hands to her ears, staring intently into the distance. Listening for a bird call. A sound at the limit of her hearing. No telling if she actually hears it, or if I do, as I stand there, the late sunlight reflected off my glasses. But, for me, the intensity of our attention imbues the listening itself with meaning.

Sometimes I look and see only an old photograph. There have been times when I saw not even that—just blotches of color blurred by tears. But there are other times, more rare, when I look at that image and catch a glimpse of the whole scene, even ourselves, as cascades of timelessness poured through the sieve of that moment. It is at those times that I feel I am approaching the merest edge of what Augustine and Monica must have felt at that window in Ostia 1,600 years ago, secure in their faith that

… so too eternal life is of the nature of that moment of understanding after which we sighed.