My children like to play an age-old game with me called, “Why?”
I’ll tell them, for instance, that I need them to finish breakfast, and they’ll
say why, and I’ll say so you can receive adequate nutrition and hydration,
and they’ll say why, and I’ll say because as your parent I feel obligated to protect
your health, and they’ll say why, and I’ll say uhh I mean partly because I love you
and partly because of evolutionary imperatives baked into my biology,
and they’ll say why, and I’ll say because the species wants to go on,
and they’ll say why, and I’ll pause for a long time before saying, “I don’t know.
I guess I believe in spite of it all that the human enterprise has value.”
And then there will be a silence. A blessed and beautiful silence
will spread across the breakfast table. I might even see a kid pick up a fork.
And then, just as the silence seems ready to take off its coat and stay awhile,
one of my kids will say, “Why?” My brain likes to play a somewhat
similar game. That game is called, “What’s even the point?” There’s an Edna St.
Vincent Millay poem I’ve quoted in two of my novels and will now quote again,
because I’ve never come across anything that describes my depressive
blizzards so perfectly. “The chill is in the air,” the poem begins, “which the wise know
well and have even learned to bear. This joy, I know, will soon be under snow.”
I’m in an airport when suddenly I feel the chill in the air. What’s even the
point? I’m about to fly to Milwaukee on a Tuesday afternoon, about to herd
with other moderately intelligent apes into a tube that will spew a truly
astonishing amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in order to
transport us from one population center to a different one. Nothing that anyone
has to do in Milwaukee really matters, because nothing really matters.
There’s no point to the human endeavor in the largest sense. We will leave no
permanent legacy in this impermanent universe, and our central lasting
contribution to Earth will be that we were the first species to grow powerful
enough to muck up the planet. When my mind starts playing
What’s Even the Point, I can’t find a point to making art—which is just
using the finite resources of our planet to decorate, and I can’t find a point to planting
gardens, which is just inefficiently creating food that will sustain our useless vessels
for a little while longer, and I can’t find a point to falling in love—which is just
a desperate attempt to stave off the loneliness that you can never really solve for,
because you are always alone in what Robert Penn Warren called,
“the darkness, which is you.” Except it’s not really a darkness.
It’s much worse than that. The writer Jacqueline Woodson has said that
we need to consider carefully what we construct as dark, and she’s right.
When my brain plays What’s Even the Point, what really descends upon me
is a blizzard of blinding, frozen white light. Being in the dark doesn’t hurt, but this
does, like staring at the sun. That Millay poem refers to “the eye’s
bright trouble.” It seems to me that bright trouble is the light you see the first
time you open your eyes after birth, the light that makes you cry your first
tears, the light that is your first and greatest fear.
What’s even the point? All this trial and travail for what will become nothing,
and soon. Sitting in this airport, I’m disgusted by my excesses,
my failures, my pathetic attempts to forge some meaning or hope from
the materials of this meaningless world. I’ve been tricking myself, thinking there
was some reason for all of it, thinking that consciousness was a miracle
when it’s really a burden, thinking that to be alive was wondrous when it’s
really a terror. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game,
is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here. Night falls fast, Millay wrote.
Today is in the past. The thing about this game is that once my brain starts
playing it, I can’t seem to find a way to stop. Any defense I try to mount
is destroyed instantaneously by the blinding light. It feels like the
only way to survive life is to cultivate an ironic detachment from it.
If I can’t be happy, I at least want to be cool. When my brain is playing
What’s Even the Point, hope feels so flimsy and naïve—especially in the face
of the endless outrages and horrors of human life. What kind of mouth-breathing
jackass looks at the state of human experience and responds with anything
other than nihilistic despair? But of course the problem with despair
is that it isn’t very productive. Like a replicating virus, all despair makes
is more of itself. If playing What’s Even the Point made me a
more committed advocate for justice or environmental protection,
I’d be all for it. But the white light of despair instead renders me inert and
apathetic. I struggle to do anything. I often can’t find a reason to get out of
bed in the morning.Philosophical questions— what’s the point of being alive, what should
we seek from life, how can we know what we know, how and where should
we seek meaning—are often dismissed as pointless. What’s the difference between
a philosophy degree and a pepperoni pizza? The pepperoni pizza can feed a family of four.
And so on. But I think those questions are genuinely important, because
I need to be able to survive my mind playing What’s Even the Point.
I don’t want to give it to despair; I don’t want to take refuge in detached
ridicule of unironized emotion. I don’t want to be cool if cool means
being cold to or distant from the reality of experience. I want to feel what there
is to feel while I am here. You don’t choose when your kids
play the Why game, and you don’t choose when your brain plays
What’s Even the Point. It’s exhausting. It gets old so fast, listening to the
elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you’re an idiot for even trying.
When the game is being played, it feels like it will never end, like
you will be in active combat with your brain for what remains of
your wretched life. But no. No. Now always feels
infinite and never is. You keep going. You go to therapy. You try a different medication.
You meditate, even though you dislike meditation. You exercise.
You wait. Your mind keeps playing What’s Even the Point, and you
keep refusing to give in to it, battling it with philosophy and self-help books
and religion and whatever else that works. And then one day, the air is a bit warmer,
and the sky is not so blindingly bright. It’s overcast, and you’re walking
through a forested park with your children. Your nine-year-old points out two
squirrels racing up an immense American Sycamore tree, its white
bark peeling in patches, its leaves bigger than dinner plates. You think,
my God that’s a beautiful tree. It must be a hundred years old,
maybe more. Later, you’ll go home and read up on sycamores and
learn that there are sycamore trees alive today that date back more than
three hundred years, trees that are older than your nation. You’ll learn that
George Washington once measured a sycamore tree that was over thirteen
meters in circumference. You’ll read that Herodotus wrote 2,400 years ago that
the Persian emperor Xerxes was marching his army through a grove of
sycamore trees when he came across one of “such beauty that he was moved
to decorate it with golden ornaments and to leave behind one of his
soldiers to guard it.” But for now you’re just looking up at that tree,
thinking about how it turned dirt and water and sunshine into wood and
bark and leaves, how it turned nothing into a place where squirrels play,
and you realize you are in the vast dark shade of this giant tree, and
that’s the point. I give sycamore trees four and a half stars.