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The old man felt the time had come to shut up. He had said enough, nearly 40,000 words this time. He had often wondered why he kept on writing…more than thirty books. The best answer he could come up with was that it allowed himself somebody to talk to. When he read what he had written the day – or week or month or years – before, at least he had somebody to talk to. He tended to agree with himself. He had a friend in himself. There were so few other people with whom he felt a shared vision of existence.  He wondered if that came out in this book, “The Old Man and the Stone”. 

The “last word” here would be a perfect example of what he was talking about, i.e. how soul mates were so hard to come by.  

The old man had often said that “nothing can be other than what it is”. He had rarely explained what this idea meant for him and for his vision of the world. That explanation would be his last word: 

Nothing in the universe can be other that what it is… 

The thought is extremely difficult to fathom. It really is a “last word” because when you feel to the bone that nothing  – absolutely nothing – can be other that what it is, your old vision of life will disappear forever. Every “thing” you see in existence will cease to exist. There will be no things. All concreteness will vanish. There will be no more “Trump” to criticize, no “Biden” to make fun of, no “eagle”, no “mouse”, no “atom” or “electron” or “quark” to identify, and there will be no “today”, “tomorrow”, or “yesterday”. All Being will be tied together and all will be in constant flux. Nothing will be fixed and hence nothing can be “talked about”. It will all be gone as soon as it comes to be. All will be ethereal, and hence impossible to make sense of.  

Most human beings cannot grasp this idea because it goes against everything they think and do. Their whole lives they have been taught to break existence into pieces and to make sense of it (and to think they have made sense of it…and for themselves, they have…). They separate everything, give names to everything, think they see causal relationships happening between all the “things” they have identified, believe in beginnings and ends, believe their fixed identifiable things are “real” things, and once they have “their view of the world”, they tend to stick with it for life. A tree is a tree. A dog is a dog. A Trump is a Trump. A country is a country. An atom is an atom. You are you. I am I. And “that’s the way things are!” 

But none of these things are fixed things. They are constantly changing. All parts of existence are constantly changing. The whole of existence is constantly changing.  Existence is a great swirl. It has no beginning and no end.   

This is the last word. Given that there are no fixed things, all judgments about “things” are wrong. All judgments about things are purely human constructions that have nothing to do with reality. Reality can never be identified because it is always in flux. Man can never know reality. He is part of the great swirl. His reality is not reality. It never has been and it never will be. He is simply that creature who decided he could “know” things. But he doesn’t know things because there are no things to know. And every bit of being is what it is at any given moment and can be nothing other than what it is. Absolutely nothing in the entire universe can be other than what it is forever and ever and ever. Here, we are not knocking on heaven’s door, but on infinity’s door, and infinity is deeper – much much deeper – than most human minds can grasp, or even hope to entertain.  We groveling humans are to the universe what crabs crawling on the bottom of the ocean are to the earth. We have no clue as to what Being really is.  

Mankind and all his cares are but a tiny muffled heartbeat in the infinite cosmic swirl. Nothing is free. Nothing is determined. Everything simply is what it is at every given instant and every instant is gone as soon as it happens. 

When one feels this kind of thing, one finds very few other people with whom to share the world. It would be the old man’s last word. 

                                                                                  Sept. 16, 2020