“Now, I know you’re familiar with the works of David Hume. I recognized this when you visited my Monday lecture a few weeks back. I’m sure you’re aware of the fundamental ontological problems raised by Hume and other modern philosophers, going all the way back to Descartes.”
I was not, in fact, familiar with any of that. I’d never heard of David Hume. I didn’t know what the word “ontological” meant. I ran over the word in my mind, just to travel its ridges and humps. I said, “Sure. Sure. Go on.” Was that dopey smile still on my face? I’m sure it was.
“Well, I propose to solve that problem.” The Professor said this so definitively that, for a split second, I felt a little foolish for not coming up with this conclusion myself.
I responded the only way I could think to. “Great!”
The Professor stood and took two steps to my bookshelves. I’d taken my books with me when I moved down from Fresno. The shelves were full of a hodgepodge of books on Buddhism and Taoism, grant-writing manuals, political books that I’d likely never read, newer versions of mid-20th century crime paperbacks, contemporary Japanese fiction, a few classics whose spines knew no wear, one crazy novel about carpenters in Florida, and, let’s face it, a lot of junk. The Professor took his time examining the spines. He pulled out Thomas Merton’s translations of Chuang-tzu. “Have you heard the butterfly story?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said. “The guy couldn’t be sure if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or vice versa.”
“The transformation of things,” The Professor said. He clasped hands behind his back and started pacing. My office was only about ten feet wide. His paces were short. His classroom presence had returned. His transformation was complete.
“In essence, this question is endless. It doesn’t matter if it’s Chuangtzu wondering if he’s butterfly or man, or if it’s Descartes staring at his hands, wondering if they really are his hands. The result is the same. We learn that everything we believe to be real isn’t necessarily real. We pause for a second and wonder: if the past is gone, if the future has not yet happened, how can we be sure that our entire existence isn’t simply this moment right now? How do we know that we didn’t make up our past to explain our present? How do we know the future will resemble anything of the past?”
The Professor paused to look for my reaction. Who knows what my external expression was or what he read on my face? Internally, I liked the argument. I liked the idea that the whole universe could be wrapped up in this moment and my past could be a fiction. If it were all fictitious, if there were no past or future, I’d be off the hook. I could let it all float away and just enjoy this one moment: my own private philosophy lecture.
The Professor carried on. “Take you, for instance. You sit at that desk. You imagine yourself to be a grant writer employed by a private university. You have a vague sense that you went to a university yourself. You imagine memories of that university experience. Perhaps you have an idea of classes you took. Perhaps, when you dig through the crevices of your mind, you can unearth little treasures of knowledge from those classes. Perhaps you don’t even dig through these parts of your brain. Perhaps it’s something else, something personal. Your mind lingers on some problems with your love life, or with a sick child, or with unresolved feelings about your parents. Who knows? Maybe your dog just died. Anyway, you know you have this feeling of loss or longing. It’s vague. You don’t really understand where it comes from, so you assign it to a lover or child or parent or pet. But are they real? Are they here? Can you show me this loved one? Can you be certain that it’s not all a fiction you created in your mind? Maybe this isn’t a university at all. Maybe it’s a mental hospital. Maybe you’re an inmate…”
“Patient,” I said.
The Professor stopped pacing. “Excuse me?”
“Residents of psych hospitals are called ‘patients,’ not ‘inmates.’”
The Professor nodded and resumed pacing. “If your dream calls them ‘patients,’ we can go with that. Nonetheless, by any objective criteria, you cannot prove to yourself or me right now that any of it exists. The whole universe may have been created for this split second. There may be no past and no future. This may be everything.”
I nodded and smiled. If only that were the case.
“What’s the smile about?” The Professor asked.
“That idea,” I said, “of the past being an illusion and the future a false hope. It’s funny.”
“It’s not funny,” he said. “Not if you can’t prove otherwise.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I trust that I witnessed my past, and the future will come along, more or less in the way I expect it to. Whether I want it to or not.”
“And what’s the basis for this trust?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“How do you know that this moment isn’t everything?”
“I don’t know.” But I did take a second to think about it. Okay, I figured, maybe there would be a bit of a respite if this moment were everything. Maybe it would be nice to relegate my past to a fiction and not deal with it. But I’d want the future part. Sad and lonely as I was feeling at this moment, I still had hope that things would get better. So I answered The Professor honestly. “It would suck if this moment were everything.”
“It would more than suck. It would drive you mad. It would be unbearable.”
I actually saw where he was going with this. “It would be so bad,” I said, “that I’d probably create a fictional past and a belief in the future, just to keep from going mad.”
“And so there’s no distinction.” The Professor pointed a finger to the sky, I guess to illustrate his point. “You can never know if there is any reality to reality, or if it’s all a fiction created to ward off madness.”
I leaned back in my chair. My pencil commenced its rolling between the pads of my fingertips. “This is the problem that you seek to solve?”
“Exactly.”
It was too much for me. Curiosity had completely taken over my better judgment. And besides, this discussion was proving to be exactly the distraction I was seeking. I asked, “How are you going to solve this problem?”
“A series of objective experiments to show that the world does not necessarily operate the way you imagine. Of course, I’d need funding. Which is where you come in. I have proposals, hypotheses, prospectuses, you name it. It’s all outlined and available for your perusal.” His pacing led him to the window behind me. He opened it. A gust of January filled the room. I spun my seat to watch him.
“I’d like to see it,” I said. I wondered for a second if these documents really existed, or if they were the elaborate pantomimes carried over from the front of the lecture hall.
The Professor snapped his fingers. I watched. He climbed out the window and floated away.
An hour later, the bare wood above the point of my pencil had turned black from pencil lead and the oil of my fingers. I continued to roll it between the pads of my fingers. I still sat in my chair, gazing out the closed window behind my desk. Of course, The Professor hadn’t really floated out of it. He couldn’t have. It’s not humanly possible. He walked out the front door of my office and counted his footsteps to the exit of the Williams Building. There was no other way to explain it.
Still, our conversation had my head reeling. How did I know anything? More particularly, The Professor seemed so genuine in his beliefs, so convinced these grounds were still part of a university and I was a university grant writer that I didn’t know what to think. Which one of us was the crazy one? Could it be that I was the patient? That there was no wife in Fresno, no Lola Diaz, no dead Nietzsche? I thought about the woman in the laundromat. Surely that had to be part of my overactive imagination, no?