from the notebooks of craig swanson
I recently decided to read some of my old journals. I chanced upon this undated entry of me in my more pensive moments. I figure that I must have been four or five when I wrote this.
“Today Mom took me to some fancy shop in town. She told me to touch nothing. I didn’t see nothing. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what nothing was. But, not wanting to be disobedient, I decided to touch everything, in hopes that I might chance upon it. Nothing doing. Mom apparently does not subscribe to a heuristic, discover as you explore approach to learning. It seems I am expected to have an a priori knowledge of nothing.
“But I don’t know nothing!
“When I got home I decided to look it up. Our family dictionary only says that nothing is something that does not exist. Hmmm. Dad recently told me that monsters don’t exist. Does that mean that a monster is nothing? Or that nothing is a monster? Well, it certainly is true that since a monster does not exist, then nothing is a monster - but I don’t feel any closer to nothing.
“Nothing to fear. Whenever I find myself utterly confused, I always turn to my good friend Jean-Paul Sartre for a simple, clear elucidation: ‘Nothingness does not itself have Being, yet it is supported by Being. It comes into the world by the For-itself and is the recoil from fullness of self-contained Being which allows consciousness to exist as such.’ Ok, so nothing could be clearer.
“Let’s try Dad’s library….
“Literature offers little. No useful definitions, only vague characteristics. This is what I’ve found so far: It is the significance of a tale told by an idiot. It succeeds just like success. It is gained when it is ventured. It comes of itself. It’s what you ain’t heard yet. It is even finer than to be in Caroliner in the morning.
“I have to stop now. It’s night-night time. And after a full day of looking, I now have plenty of nothing, and that should be plenty for me.”
Post Script. Many years have passed since I wrote this, and I don’t feel much closer. As Edward Dahlberg said, “It takes a long time to understand nothing.”
- July 2001
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