A Memoir (Draft, written 2008-2010 with minor revisions since)

A Memoir

D. Rosa

I

In the early fall of 1981, at the end of an otherwise unremarkable day, I received an unexpected visit.  There was a brief exchange.  I spoke first, ostensibly to myself since I did not know that the visitor had already arrived and was with me, in the living room.  The visitor replied.  We spoke only those two sentences, twenty words in all, and everything changed.

Life had been comparatively normal until then.  I was 29 years old, with a steady relationship, a full time job, and a small but pleasant apartment in a city that I loved.  Health was good and finances were reasonable.  I had moved from Quebec to British Columbia two years earlier with Elayne, a woman I had met during my graduate studies program, and our trip had been both an adventure and a chance for me to find employment in a more prosperous part of the country.  After a five-hour flight we had walked off the plane carrying all our possessions in four suitcases, and within days I had been hired as a sessional laboratory instructor at the University of Victoria.  Elayne had joined my Department as a third-year student, and not long afterwards my temporary position was upgraded to long term.  

All in all, considering we had arrived without a secured income, the start of our life together had been smooth. 

The new routine, the modest but steady salary and the sense of responsibility that comes from sharing a household soon made a mark.  We were beginning to feel settled, enjoying what to us felt like the trappings of middle class life: minimal furnishings, weekly movie nights and the occasional excursion in a rental car.

In recent months we had traveled through much of Vancouver Island and the BC interior, and as is the case with most newcomers from other provinces, we had fallen in love with the mild climate and spectacular landscapes. A disproportionate number of the people we met were also newcomers, reflecting the demographic shifts at the time.  We had found several friends within this group, discovering that they, too, felt somewhat like outsiders.  Thus, we were naturally drawn together.  

Our closest friends were Richard and Debbie, a couple from Winnipeg who had arrived only weeks ahead of us. Richard was my colleague, and we shared an office that doubled as a storage area.  We also shared an interest in a projectthat was about to take on an unexpected significance.  We had recently begun to differ on what to do with the idea we were working on, but we continued to discuss it during coffee breaks. We both had membership at the University Club, where Elayne and Debbie occasionally joined us for happy hour.  Sometimes our discussions would resume over drinks; but for the most part happy hour was just that, a chance to relax and enjoy the club’s wooded setting.  The seductiveness of the new life was irresistible, and my affected radical-student persona was making its definite exit.  UVic had become a pleasant second home with its abundant green space and easygoing atmosphere.  Its student population was growing, but it remained small compared to what I had been used to at Concordia University.  UVic’s campus was only 16 years old, after all, and its young age showed. 

As summer turned to fall in the unhurried way typical of southern Vancouver Island, the future seemed bright,indefinitely long and with the most productive years still ahead.  In that frame of mind I woke up on September 27, my last ordinary morning.

September 27, 1981

How do you define ‘ordinary’?  In just a few hours the usual meanings of ‘ordinary’ and ‘miraculous’ would trade placesinstantaneously and permanently, but there had been no hints of that at the start of day.  

I remember that it was a Sunday and that the air was still humid from an overnight rain.  It was damp even inside the apartment because I had spent much of the previous day trying to steam-clean the carpet, and the job had not turned out well.  The cleaner was small and underpowered, I had no experience using it, and in the end I had only managed to saturate the carpet.  I had hurried the job hoping that the floor would be dry by the start of the Grand Prix of Canada, which was to be broadcast live from Montreal.  I had a passion for motor sports, and I had been looking forward to stretching out in front of the TV with a cold beer in hand.  But it was late Sunday morning and the carpet was still damp, and lying over it was out of the question.  At the time we did not even have a couch, so I ended up watching the race perched on a kitchen chair.  With the race over the rest of the afternoon was uneventful, leaving no particular memories.  

The definite recollection picks up again in the early evening.  

We had a supper that included mushroom caps prepared like escargots.  As was our habit, we dined while talking about people back in Montreal.  It was our way of easing a longing for old acquaintances, and we rehashed plans to entice family and friends to the West Coast.  

We ended supper with coffee and began to clear the table.  

As we put away the leftovers, I spotted a jar of homemade grappa tucked away at the back of the fridge, a present from a worker at Elayne's summer job.  Being from the northern part of what was then Yugoslavia, he had thought that an Italian from just across the border would appreciate a drink that was common to both our cultures.  I had forgotten about the grappa.  Seeing the jar again, I thought that I might sample its contents later in the evening.  

With everything put away, Elayne retired to the bedroom to study.  Apparently we had a spat before she left, mentioned in a journal note from a few days later, but I have no actual memory of it.  As soon as I was alone I went to sit at my writing desk, which was located at the far corner of the living room.  I took out a black-cover copybook and settled down for what I expected to be a quiet couple of hours of work on my project.  

The desk was poorly lit by the ceiling fixture, so I worked by the light of a desk lamp. To my left was the glass patio door through which I could catch glimpses of downtown, barely visible tonight through a light mist.  To the right was the entryway to the bathroom and bedroom areas, and further on stood the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen.  Ours was generally a quiet building, and tonight it was completely silent. 

As the evening progressed, I experienced what is normal for me under the circumstances, a gradual splitting of attention between work and daydreams.  As I wrote equations I began spinning happy visions of what might follow someday from the project.  There might be recognition, maybe even outright fame, but possibly some money as well since the idea was technologically applicable.  But those prospects were not central, because the progress I was making was exciting in itself.  

With one daydream drifting into the next, the evening’s work stretched beyond the intended two hours, until I finally noticed that it was after eleven o’clock, past my usual bedtime.  At that point I decided to write down one more step in a derivation, just to make it easier to resume on the next day, and then call it a night.  

From a daydreaming viewpoint seemingly offset to the left, almost outside my head, I watched my hand writing steadily in the glow of the lamp.  Everything felt normal.  There was no foreboding, no feeling of something out of place, no hint of anything impending.  Then, the hand stopped.  

There had been a strange image, more like a vivid thought than an actual vision. What made the image strange was the ordinariness of what it showed, which was me, bent over a notebook.  The scene was commonplace, even dull,  but for some reason it did not seem so.  Almost in a wistful way, I expanded the view.  All around were sparse apartment furnishings and, in a less concrete sense, the baggage of almost thirty years of existence.  There were memories of having grown up in a tiny valley at the foot of the Dolomites, of having moved to Canada at the age of 16, of having struggled to a degree in Physics and of having recently met a life companion.  There were images, too, of new people and places I had come to know in the last few years, of many changes that had already taken place and of the expectation of more to follow.  Although inevitably unique, the package was also quite ordinary.  With the exception of my project—a big exception in my view—it did not seem to contain much that stood out as bright and good, or dark and regrettable. 

The hand had halted because the thinking had become too intense for the pen to keep up.  

The sleepiness that had been invading me had suddenly vanished, and I felt alert and energized, with the mind gathered again in one place. Something about the work was unexpectedly suggesting that I was about to complete the project.  The equation on which I had been working, half-finished on paper but already complete in my head, was highlighting a mathematical connection to aspects I had been regarding only as philosophical.  The formula had origially been given a narrow scope, but now it seemed that just a minor repackaging would turn it into a universal tool.  The needed steps were definite and clear, and the result would provide immediate solutions to several problems that had been slowing me down.  And that was just for starters; how much more could it solve?

It took a moment to recognize the significance and another to accept it. This was not simply the solution to the step on which I had been working, nor to the section of the project that I was trying to complete.  It was the solution to the whole thing.  The scene had unexpectedly opened up over a wondrous view, encompassing all the so-called big questions, all suddenly answerable.  It was like staring at the promised land of the mind.  

I told myself to slow down, that this was too good to be true.  I had experienced similar moments in the past, after all, with flashes of insight often followed by reappraisal and disappointment.  And yet there seemed to be no doubt this time: I had reached the finish line.  I had achieved what I had set out to do.    

In the emotional rush I foresaw that I would never publish.  What would be the point?  Publishing is done to validate one’s work and enlist the brains of others to further advance the topic.  But that kind of assistance was no longer needed because I felt certain that all questions would be answered regardless.  In principle, they already were!  I had never thought that such a day could come.  

I decided that it was a good moment to take a break, pace around a little and then resume the work despite the late hour.  There would be much to write about, even if only to myself.  

But first I would celebrate, maybe with a beer left over from the morning’s Grand Prix.  

How layered our thoughts reveal themselves to be when we have the chance to examine them in a flash-frozen moment!  Even as I considered the beer, I remembered the grappa.  That would be more fitting.  Although the thought would not fully form, it is easy to guess where it was headed.  I was going to celebrate the moment like a son of Friuli, the land that had inspired the impossible question that was being answered tonight.  I would fill the bottom of a wine glass with the harsh drink of Italian peasantry and raise it to myself.  I was grinning as a new feeling, one that had been brewing in yet another part of the brain, finally turned to words.  The sentence that formed was summation and valediction, a verbal apotheosis that seemed justified by the circumstance.  I savoured each syllable in cadence, and then I began to rise from the chair. 

Someone replied.  

The words resounded only in my head, exactly as when we make an imaginary character speak in our own thoughts, except that I had neither initiated nor directed the sentence. The words were like a rejoinder to my last thought, but spoken with a disheartened sadness that, for some reason, was to terrify me the most. 

For an instant I froze in surprise, and then I attempted to puzzle over what was to be only a moment in transition.  But there would be no chance for analysis.  There was instead a startling perception, like the weight of a hand cupping over my face.  The light of the living room died out and was replaced by a vast darkness.  Those two impressions, of the hand and the darkness, also bore the characteristics of something internal, yet real and forcefully compelled.  Next, still in darkness and still not having had a chance to react, I received a wordless message.  

What followed was perhaps the mental equivalent of a brutal autoimmune reaction, a primal rebellion against an unbelievable violation of the mind.  The reaction flared up, combusting the existing thoughts and snuffing them out. Instantly the darkness crawled with an overwhelming feeling, a crushing, all-smothering emotion.  Finally, all sensation of darkness and hand pressure vanished and the living room reappeared, unchanged.  

But the emotion remained, like a corrosive vapour.  

The darkness had lasted no more than a second and the delivery of the silent message even less.  The emotion flooded out of that short interval and invaded the rational part of myself.  It unhinged, overthrew and scattered as it went until no meaning remained attached to the memories, impressions and concepts that had been stored in that place.  All that was left was the naked machinery of the mind windmilling madly without a load. 

I had been rising from the desk at the start of all this, and somewhere along the line I had reached a standing position.  Now I dropped to my knees with hands stretched towards the ceiling, like the caricature of a supplicant.  No! No! No!  

I was suffocating.  Both the inner and outer landscapes had slammed into sharp focus and I was seeing the world in frightening detail, all familiar, all strange—and all fictitious! In panic I tried to restore the original perspective on things, but my effort only managed to knock it further out of reach.

Finally I got up and stumbled to the kitchen.  

I opened the fridge, grabbed jar that held the grappa and fumbled with the lid.  The contents went down in choking gulps, a dose that should have easily incapacitated me, and, I craved improbably, erased the memory of the past few seconds.  But it affected neither the memory nor the feeling.  I was panicking and recoiling even from the urge to understand what was happening, because to understand might mean to accept, and I was terrified that it was too late, that I understood already and I was trapped.  Only moments had passed since I had been sitting quietly at my desk, and that image was now receding in a curious way, as if it still existed, but in a separate place and deprived of substance.  It was like watching a train pulling away from the station with a picture nailed to the caboose, the image of a man sitting and writing in the glow of a lamp, absorbed and oblivious.  

Staring at the picture was the new man, me!  I was frantically trying to come to terms with surroundings, memories and feelings that ought to have added up to a sense of identity, but that were utterly failing to do so. 

Now I staggered to the bathroom, the instinctive place of retreat in acute sickness.  I walked in a stoop through the entrance and stood by the mirror, not daring to look up.  I reasoned confusedly that all this was bound to leave a sign, perhaps an outright physical mark.  I don’t really know what I expected, but there might have been an element of hope in it: If no change would show in the mirror, then perhaps everything could be reversed. 

I looked up.  The mirror reflected back known features, but not a familiar face.  Recognition and estrangement alternated in the mirror: change, yet no change.  Apparently nothing would be simple again, not even this elemental assessment.  

Then something screamed.  It is even possible that only then I began to hear a scream that had actually started back in the living room.  In any case, it, too, was internal, not even a scream in proper form, but something equally disheveled.  Whatever it might have been, it seemed to recede to become a disturbed background in the mind, leaving in its wake the remnants of a thousand thoughts convulsing like shocked fibers.  

This cannot be happening!  This cannot be real!

But it was; nothing I had ever experienced had been as real as this.  

But if this is real I cannot exist. 

The last thought was not based on recognizable logic.  It seemed to spring from a new perception, one that felt more obvious and inescapable than any product of formal logic.  The perception presented everything in the form of contradiction:  I do not exist.  The world does not exist.  I look at the world.  The world exists for me.  I alone exist.  

These statements seemed, each in turn, to be self-evident and absolutely true, and they looped into what felt like a sickening circular nightmare.  And still, as bad as all this already was, the worst was about to happen: nothing. 

No change.  There would be no settling to ground of emotional debris, no shocked survey of the aftermath from which a process of rebuilding could start.  Instead, the moment endured indefinitely.  From then on there would only be the excruciating awareness of the present moment, focused on an image that would remain too clear and too hazy, too familiar and too strange, too real and too unreal.  

I turned away from the mirror and went through those motions that mark the end an ordinary day:  use the toilet, wash hands, brush teeth, go to bed.  But nothing was ordinary and nothing would be again.  It is tempting to describe the seconds separating the man working at the desk from the man stumbling towards the fridge in the language of psychology.  In fact, a psychological explanation had been a hoped-for solution, a kind of lifeboat toward which I had turned even while unscrewing the lid of the jar.  Please let this be madness: simple, clear-cut, clinical insanity.  

But it was too enormous for that. 

The scream continued as I dove under the covers and grabbed hold of Elayne, who was already sleeping: another possible lifeboat.  But she woke up just long enough to mumble goodnight and turn the other way.  I had not really expected to find salvation there, and something was already telling me that if anyone could possibly understand it would not be her.  The scream continued as I abandoned even that last qualifier and faced the obvious: No one would understand what had just happened.  The notebook left open in the living room seemed to block communication with everyone and everything.  

I made a shaky attempt at examining the steps that had led to an abyss, but I had to terminate it immediately.  I could not look at that landscape.  I could not afford to.  I felt I needed all the remaining strength just to keep the structure of the intellect from flying apart. 

Structure? Intellect? Even thinking the words made what was left of reality wobble and warp.  I tried to steer clear of destabilizing thoughts, but apparently that was a category that included all thought.  I temporarily managed to reduce the mind’s activity, but the scream continued, unchanged and unchanging.  

I felt surrounded by chaos.  

But that had to be wrong; the chaos must be within.  Please, let it be within.  Let this be simple, wholesome madness!  

That incantation was already getting stale.  

Maybe the chaos was without.  Why not?  But the image of the notebook again blocked the path.  It seemed to say, evenly and without emotion, You are seeing everything exactly as it is. Chaos is within, without, and everywhere.  Even you should not exist, but you do.  

I felt that I was about to vanish. 

The feeling exploded into blind panic and again I tried to stop all thought, but it was like wrestling with a mountain that shifted, crumbled and engulfed.  I tried to turn to life as it had been only minutes earlier, in a futile attempt that I was to repeat countless times.  I told myself that all this could not be permanent, that it had to be just a weird moment.  I even wondered whether I might be experiencing a bad dream.  It was a particularly disturbing thought, because it was the previous life that now seemed a dream, a blissful dream that had just ended.  This was too real.  I had awakened from a dream into a hyper-real nightmare. 

It was now past midnight. Why not just pretend that things were normal, and try to sleep?  But could I really sleep, and what would sleep be like, from now on?  And if I could not find a way to sleep, would I die?  Yet it seemed altogether pointless to consider dying.  Poor Death!  It looked so small now, an irrelevant idea, useless as a solution as the grappa had been.

But sleep did come, which is a puzzle in itself.  It was complete and uninterrupted, punctuated only by some perfectly ordinary dreams. The next morning I woke up with the alarm clock, glanced at the dial and the memories of the previous night flooded back, and so did the scream.

Again

Six days passed, all similar: Wake up, hear the scream. Take a shower, hear the scream.  Go to work, do some teaching, do some marking, hear the scream.  

  I was apparently condemned to hear it in every waking moment.  Especially bewildering was the fact that I could go through the usual motions and function normally to most appearances.  Seemingly on autopilot, I could answer questions, exchange pleasantries, look for mistakes in lab reports and have lunch with colleagues.  All the while, woven into every mental process that dealt with each situation, was the scream.  It continued relentlessly throughout the day, into the evening, and all the way to the last waking moment.  There would be respite during a few hours of intermittent sleep, but not once while awake.  

It was now the early evening of Saturday, almost a week since the event, and things were not getting better.  If anything, during the past few minutes they had taken a turn for the worse.

It had happened while reading a book that I had started a few months earlier and abandoned halfway through.  Both the book and the author had enjoyed fame (some might say notoriety) three decades earlier, and they would soon undergo an unfortunate resurgence on the North American scene.  But I had been teetering all week long on the edge of an abyss, and I was looking for ways to avoid being sucked back into it.  I had finally thought that reading the rest of the book might provide a distraction.  After all, its author delivered messages of certitude in human affairs, and maybe some of her steady vision might transfer unto me.  

I had gone through only a few pages and it was not working.  The author’s certainties now sounded like a repetitive rant, adding a pall of depression to an already pervasive sense of panic.  

Suddenly I felt that I was slipping.  The slope I was on grew mirror-smooth and the abyss rotated toward me like a yawning throat. 

I tossed the book and bolted from the apartment.  

Outside, I began to run.  One hundred meters past our building the street came to an end at the edge of a school field.  Still panicking, I remembered that I had been a good sprinter in high school, but a hopeless long distance runner.  Now I decided to outrun whatever was chasing me, which felt like an advancing cumulus at my back but which was actually growing at my center, its nature still unknown.  But whatever else it might have been, this was definitely the same thing of six days ago.  The struggles I had endured in between had been skirmishes in comparison.  This, on the other hand, felt for real and for keeps.  

I formed a desperation plan.  I would run myself to exhaustion and maybe beyond it.  After a few hundred meters, a burning would start in my lungs, followed by a pounding in the temples that would drown out all thought.  Then the landscape would darken and all would be agony and effort just to put motion into stride.  There would be no spare energy to think, no way for the thing to exploit the passageways of thought to invade me, and in this way I might delay the end by a few minutes.

A hundred meters across the field, some diagonally uphill, and I wasn’t even breathing hard.  I exited onto the sidewalk of a multilane boulevard.  The grade kept rising, but I was maintaining speed without strain.  It was like the grappa, all over again. 

The street eventually crested and began to slope downhill, with the lights of a mall coming into view at lower left.  Forgetting that the mall would be closed at that hour, I abandoned the earlier plan for one that was even less promising:  reach the mall, mix in with the shoppers, do normal things, try to feel normal…

All energy left me at once, forcing me to divert to a nearby parking lot.  But if my legs were finished, my mind felt clear, alert and defenseless.  That clarity was my enemy.  I could not understand why no one else seemed aware of what I had seen.  But if they were aware of it (and how could they not be?) why did they act as if everything was normal?  Even more pointedly, why had I not noticed anything myself, before last Sunday?  Nothing could have been more blatant than the absurdity at the center of the human condition.  And if the new vision showed things as they really were, how was it that I continued to exist?

The abyss was all around.  

Struggle, I urged myself, a self that seemed to pulse in and out of existence.  Struggle, because this may be a one way trip.

“Are you all right?” 

Someone had stopped on the way to his car and was looking at me with concern.  I was in mid motion, about to sit down on a low cement step at the edge of the lot, but I must have been doing or saying other things.  I found the strength to answer, “I’m okay,” and sound plausible.  But the effort cost me.  

The stranger had provided a distraction, but not a timely one.  The thing caught up with me at that moment, and the stranger, the parking lot, the mall, the people and things that were not visible but that had once carried an unquestioned certificate of existence — Elayne, my friends, my parents in Montreal, my brother in Italy—all these and others swept past in the mind’s eye, stripped of substance and careening out of sight over a circular horizon.  The image of a place called Gravena was the last to vanish.

I had lost.  It was all lost for good.

One Day Later

A school complex stood like an untidy assembly of boxes at the top of a rise.  From halfway up the slope one could look back along a green incline towards Hillside Avenue and the first downtown buildings.  Beyond them, past eighteen miles of water, the angular profile of the Olympics Range stretched across the horizon.  The scene seemed a painting on a distant wall, viewed through an endless series of glass doors that grew thicker with distance.  Even the ground on which I was leaning felt distant and disconnected.  

I was sitting on the grass, facing the view and clutching a notepad with a light-colour cover (any colour but black!), questioning the purpose of what I was about to do.   It was a late afternoon on a clear October day, and I had come to this spot to be alone.  But that sentiment felt like a joke because I was already as alone as anyone could be.  Something permanent had happened, and for the sake of remaining a functioning entity I had to find a way to deal with it. 

I started writing notes.  Years later, their disconnectedness from my actual state of mind would make for baffling reading.  

I wrote about the fortune of having a steady job, a woman who loved me, good health, living parents, and “three places I could call home.”  Meanwhile the scream kept howling that it was all delusion.  I needed some support against the scream, some reassurance that not all was chaos, even if such encouragement were to come only from my own writing.  So there I sat, simultaneously grieving, ruing and yearning for something that, I was now certain, had never even actually existed.  And hovering above it all was a question that I could not address directly: What had happened that night, a week ago?  

That night in my living room, a black notebook had apparently opened a door to the unthinkable.  Or, had it?  It did not require a great shift of the mind (the screaming mind, the mind that inexplicably still functioned) to view the notebook as filling a role quite opposite to that of opening doors: It seemed to bar escape to former territory.  

Desperate to make any kind of progress, I accepted it. My work is blocking retreat.  

But the notebook was only a portion of the puzzle.  It was just a detail of something that had started a year earlier,when Richard and I, bored by a light summer workload, had begun speculating on the nature of intelligence and knowledge.  The thinking had led to what had seemed like a startling insight into the workings of the mind, which we had elaborated along different but complementary tracks.  I had taken a mathematical approach, and in my notebook I had attempted to sketch nothing less than the quantitative structure of the mind.  Initially, the whole business had amounted to no more than an eccentric interest, but it had since grown to become almost an obsession, and eventually other colleagues and friends had become intrigued.  And then, a week ago while working on a derivation, I had seen an unexpected solution capable of removing the usual ambiguities that lie at the base of even the best of theories.  It had mesmerized me.  

Later that night, in the screaming silence of the bedroom, I had attempted to peek at the solution again, but I had been overcome by revulsion.  The beautiful concept had suddenly looked like bait at the center of a sprung trap.  I was by now convinced that it had been a trap, carefully laid.  But this raised obvious questions.  Who was the trapper? What was the nature of the trap?  What had, so to speak, played the part of the steel jaws?  In sum, what had really happened on that night?

What made the question intractable was an immediate answer that was too simple, too obvious and too plain: God had spoken to me, and delivered a package to my door.  

Simple, obvious and plain, but still metaphorical.  Metaphors, similes and allegories had never been a big part of my speech, but now they were growing in number and complexity with every attempt to understand and explain, even in notes intended only for myself.  To this day, metaphors, with their inherent limitations, remain my only means to describe the indescribable.  Yet, it is fair to say that if God, in physical garb, had actually rang the doorbell and handed me a package while I gazed at its face, the impact would have been mild in comparison.  

As it was, God spoke eleven words. They were disconcertingly trivial, apparently nothing more than the rephrasing of one of my own thoughts.  Both God’s sentence and mine had started with “So…”  

I felt confident that there were no hidden meanings in God’s words, which had apparently served only as introduction to the nonverbal message that came next.  Then, in a moment that would last less than a second but that would reverberate for a lifetime, God revealed an aspect of itself, and my own reaction to it cauterized my mind.  All that was left of it was a convulsing, screaming shell. 

After six hellish days I had become more terrified of the near-emptiness of the shell than of all the screaming and convulsing.  So, in a moment of panic, I had reached into the world of make-believe and dragged something out.  It was, as I would later write to a friend, like pulling something out of the latrine into which I had thrown it long before.  

The item was something tenuous, but I had been unable to think of anything more effective.  Eventually I would recognize that I had only recovered a noun, a quaint term with which to name the residue of myself, and that the full acceptance of its meaning would take years.  Nevertheless, that simple act would prove crucial, and I would revisit it less than a month down the road.  But for now I just sat in the field, shivering.   

What happened? 

This was only the most obvious question.  Others were cropping up that were equally simple and equally futile, like, What is this new way of seeing things?  

I was inside an emptiness of shape and colour that reproduced with hallucinating precision a world that had been mine, and that ought to still be mine, by birthright.  How had it been taken away? And why was it that whenever I tried to bring it back by sheer willpower, the effort threatened to displace me into non-existence?  

That old world—what had it been about?  Had it really existed in the way I seemed to remember?  Had I really been achild who had run and played on the hills of another land?  Had I had friends with whom I had confided as if they had been real?  Had I hated and loved as if such sentiments mattered? 

But those were still  relatively “big” questions, of the kind that can quickly become vague and slippery.  Painfully sharp, by contrast, was the recollection of the details, of the many disconnected facets that had supposedly formed a larger whole.  Had I really chopped down that particular tree behind the old house, kicked that soccer ball in a weed-covered field, caught that trout by hand in a drying pool of the river?  The miracle of the former reality had been replaced by the enigma of not having questioned even once the apparent normalcy of the picture.  

All of it had supposedly happened in the “past”, a stretch of time that I was struggling to recognize as my own.  This, on the other hand, was the present, whose absolute thinness was all that I could feel.  How was I managing to squeeze my whole awareness into it?  Pressing against one side of the infinitesimal membrane was my immediate future, so close that I had used to regard it simply as an extension of the present.  Now, the privilege of being sloppy and mindless about such concepts had unaccountably expired.

I needed to regain at least the old perception of time; but until it happened, denial would be the only palliative.  And so each morning I would pretend to commute to work, even if each time must now be unique, not at all routine, not simply part of the pattern of the day, or week, or month.  In early morning darkness a remotely‑operated door would again hiss open, vinyl seats would again stand out pure blue under fluorescent lighting, and I would again ignore the novelty of colour belonging only to itself.  All sight and sound were now reduced to their basic components, a scattering of perceptions that were no longer a part of a larger construction.  With that gone, what was replacing it?  And what was this I that still looked at what was left?  

A kind of automatic pilot had kicked in from the start, a fail-safe mechanism that perhaps resides dormant in all of us.  In the devastated aftermath, it had commandeered my preexisting knowledge and was now using it to govern all daily motion.  Under its control I appeared to function normally, but only as long as self-awareness did not interfere.  

To live in such fashion meant feeling a constant lack of depth, a frightening impression of having become a cartoon.  But to engage again in self-awareness required disengaging the autopilot, and where would that lead if not back to the abyss?  Besides, the autopilot tended to disengage on its own if ignored for too long, or if simply overwhelmed as it had happened at the edge of the parking lot. What had followed had been an almost exact replay of the first episode, at least in terms of impact, but it had been infinitely worse in one respect.  There had been no words from a mysterious source thistime, no hand over the face or other intimations of an arcane presence.  Those elements, frightening the first time around, had nevertheless constituted a degree of occult comfort, something that perhaps could be realized only after having received a harder blow.  But the unmitigated darkness of the second episode had shown that even my destroyer was gone.  I was truly alone.

Sitting on the grass I continued to scribble delusional notes.  They were an oblique effort to probe a catastrophic situation, and at the same time an attempt to minimize it.  It was basic but futile sandbagging work, like trying to shore up a structure that had already washed off.  An encouraging note here, a positive spin there; all ineffectual. 

I walked away at sunset feeling that I had been condemned to a macabre one‑man play set outside normal time.  Without the formality of having died or having taken a single voluntary step, I had apparently entered a kind of eternity.

Nowhere to Turn 

How does one function in an unreal world?  Existential discomforts aside, it is about as challenging as acting in a movie.  On the set there are no buildings but facades, and there are chalked boundaries that one must not cross.  Above all, one must know one’s part and play it well even in a crisis.  The difficulty is not so much in being a good actor as in being willing to act according to a perfectly pointless script.  So, with reality obliterated by two successive blows, I tried to maintain continuity by acting out an extension of my former life. 

But to put it that way is to imply that there had been a normal, “real” life before the previous week.  Now I was facing the prospect that such a reality had never actually existed.  

To confuse things further, I had previously considered, in an academic sort of way, just such a hypothesis.  Starting in my first undergraduate year I had entertained it in many discussions with friends and acquaintances, eventually learning that, far from being a novel philosophy, it was one of the oldest, with the appropriate name of Solipsism.  But Solipsism as philosophy was one thing; as direct experience it was quite another.  I was reluctantly reaching the conclusion that I could not make headway on my own, and that I needed help.  

This presented a dilemma: The idea of approaching someone else with a solipsistic problem seemed tragically humorous.  And yet, if the problem was simply one of misperception, talking to someone might actually help.  

Then again, if there was a problem with the perception it was clearly not of too much falsehood, but of too much truth.  I seemed to be the only one seeing a truth capable of tearing the world from one’s grasp.  What right did I have to infect otherswith that kind of truth, be they real or not?  

But I knew that I would eventually do it, even at the risk of damaging someone else’s mind.  I had no noble restraints left; I was drowning.  And so, sometime in the middle of the week, I invited Richard for lunch at one of the student cafeterias.   

Richard was of my age, with a professional background that included engineering, physics and a certificate in secondary education, plus a few extracurricular psychology courses taken along the way.  It was a toolbag that would serve him well as he eventually rose to become one of the university managers.  During the next few months he would also give generously of his time and experience to deal with a friend who had met with a rather sizeable career stopper.  

It took me a while to get to the point, and when I finally did it must have been a curious exchange from Richard’s point of view.  

“Richard,” I said, “I have an unusual story to tell, but first I need your permission because it may damage your mind permanently.”

Richard's sandwich stopped one inch from his mouth.  

“Sure,” he finally said, biting in.  “Shoot.”

I was wracked by guilt, but I made him repeat his assent several times even as I suspected that I was just trying to shift some of the responsibility unto his shoulders.  Eventually, I began.  

I told him that something had happened and that I did not see how I could possibly recover.  The event had been triggered by some work on our common theory.  Would he like to hear about it, and would he agree to stop me the moment he felt the first twinge of derangement?  

More assents from Richard, who was by now visibly intrigued.  I decided to proceed in stages, making my own assessments on his mental state while keeping a finger on the abort switch.  

I started by telling him that I had a novel representation of what Information Theory calls a message set, which I had encoded in a multidimensional representation space.  I illustrated this by scribbling on some sheets I had brought along (I still could not use, or even look at, the original notebook.)  I showed him how a whole perceptual universe could be represented by a single point in the space, and how I had managed to write an expression for Shannon entropy for any such universe.  Richard nodded with what seemed to be encouragement. 

“All this can be done fairly easily,” I continued. “But… potentially… potentially…” 

I braced.  My heartbeat was choking me because the next sentences would be fully loaded.  Not only was Richard liable to fall into the same abyss, but revisiting those thoughts might sink me as well, perhaps deeper than before.  

“Potentially,” I finally went on, “everything can be encoded in the space, and not just the physical parameters. I mean that it can be done with every possible aspect you could think of, even compounding the ensemble to account for any number of time intervals until a single point in the space describes a full-fledged perceptual universe fully evolved for all time!”  

I pushed back from the table.  That ought to do it.  Even my own panic was flaring up.  

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Fine,” said Richard, looking back as if he were concerned about me.

“You really are okay?”

“Yup.  You?”

I had to think before answering, because something amazing was happening.  Not only was Richard apparently still sane, but perhaps because of his reaction I was feeling something so unusual that at first I did not even recognize: a hint of calm.  For the first time in almost two weeks, and only for a moment, I had lost focus of the scream that nevertheless continued in the background.  

So, I concluded while facing my still-untouched sandwich, those sentences did not have the power to derange.  What, then?

I picked up the thread and went on to describe the novel aspect of the work, which was the application of Shannonentropy to the representation space and out of which the conservation laws tumbled naturally.  But by now a malaise was replacing the earlier hint of calm.  The thing I had thought had bit me apparently had no teeth, not for others and possibly not even for me, which left a rather large snake still hiding in the grass.  But whatever its exact nature, the snake was undoubtedly an aspect of my work.  What else could it possibly be?  

By the time we returned to the office, every trace of the momentary respite was gone.

---

There are a few secondary puzzles in this story, one of which relates to my conversation with Richard.  I had tried to get him involved in my predicament by describing the circumstances of my troubles, hopefully in a context made safer for him by my warnings and watchfulness.  Yet, in telling the tale, I had left out the central element.  

When I reexamine my state of mind at the time, I do not see my silence over God’s intervention as a case of polite regard between agnostics.  The strange fact was that, not even two weeks past the encounter, I had already set God aside as the probable cause of the incident.  True, God had been in my living room; no doubt, it had spoken; and, yes, it had struck my mind mortally; but it could not have been the causative factor.  And just as assuredly that factor could not have been the thought I had formulated just prior to God's intervention.  Someone with a religious bent might have regarded the thought as blasphemous; but, really, compared to other thoughts, words and even actions on my part with regards to religion, that particular thought would have only qualified as a harmless non-sequitur, a mildly overblown statement deserving, at most, self-censure.  I simply could not believe that what had happened had been the result of divine wrath over a passing thought.  And yet everything had occurred at that precise moment.  It was not a point to be set aside indefinitely, but I chose to save it for calmer times.  For now I wanted to understand what, exactly, had been the role of my work, even if it had apparently not included the unhinging of a mind. The luncheon with Richard had proven that.  But, at the very least, it seemed that my work was preventing me from returning to safer ground.  

With retreat cut off I had been unable to dodge the main message, and now I wondered how many times God might have tried to communicate with me in such a way.  Many, possibly.  Each time the communication would have been aborted at my end; every single time but one.  On that one time I apparently stepped over a line whose significance I had not recognized, not then nor in all the other unremembered approaches.  Each previous time I must have backed away at the last moment not even knowing why, after which I would have safely re-crossed the bridges leading back to conventional reality.  At times the whole round trip might have been a moment of idle reverie, at others a philosophical discussion with other self-styled intellectuals.  Even on that final time I must have attempted a retreat that had always been feasible, only to turn around and see bridges burning, torched on the way in by me.  A notebook still lay in a drawer like a damning witness, with my own handwriting on every page.  And a possibly long-delayed encounter had occurred at that moment, at a boundary that I could not cross either forward or back.  I remained stuck on it as if caught in an endless death moment.  Now I could not stop thinking that the blasphemy I had committed on holy ground, if it had been blasphemy, if the ground had indeed been holy, would have been survivable except for my own destruction of the bridges.  

This small kernel of organized thought became a basis from which to attempt further analysis.  But it was also a new source of despair, with each tentative answer unleashing a torrent of interlocked, self-canceling questions.  If my work had burned bridges, could more work rebuild them?  Maybe they were not even completely burned; maybe I had overlooked some important detail; maybe I had simply made a mistake.  If so, more work might repair them.

On the other hand, if the newly-burnt bridges were emblematic of a “truer” outlook, why restore them?  

But if they were not restored, what would happen to an essential feeling that was predicated upon them, the exquisite sweetness of belonging to the "real" world, a luxury that I had taken for granted and lost?   Now the foundations of my own work showed their unsuspected breadth.  Was I sure that what I had lost had ever existed even as illusion?  The old world had been consistent with the laws of Information Theory, but that was no assurance of actual existence because those laws held true even for fabricated memories, even for dreams.  

False Starts

Only weeks into this new life there was a trip to Montreal, right in the middle of the school term.  All I remember of it is a visit to a friend, a gathering at my old home and two hunting trips.  

Originally the short vacation had been intended as a hunting break.  Then the crisis struck, but by then the tickets had already been bought, and in the end I decided that the easiest thing to do was simply to carry on with the plans.  But the fact that I had scheduled the trip for the middle of a school term, with no regard for the obligations of my job, was the first hint that there had been something seriously wrong with my old attitudes. 

With each passing day that impression grew.  Whatever else my earlier version might have been, it had certainly been selfish and self-centered, and it had been so by deliberate intent.  I had only cared for my own needs, whether genuine or not.  I had even sought to escape the ordinary responsibilities of belonging to a community by hiding behind Solipsism. Now a grim karma would ensure that I would remain self-centered for all time, without recourse.  No matter what I thought, said, wrote or did from this point on, it would be exclusively about me, myself, I.  With a miserable snicker I considered that the silly autopilot was the only thing left of the old reality, the only personal aspect still pretending that nothing had changed.  Indeed, by the time I boarded the plane, the autopilot was on a mission.  

I had decided that I would take advantage of the trip to confide to someone, and that it would be a fuller and more candid disclosure than the one I had already given Richard.  I thought that this time I would mention the night visitor, and perhaps I would be explicit about its identity and spoken words.  Depending on my listener’s reaction up to that point, I might even attempt to describe the nature of the wordless message.  

My choice of first audience had come down to two old college friends, Guido and Carlos.  We had attended Loyola College together, Guido and I in Physics and Carlos in Biology.  Halfway through our programs, Sir George Williams University and Loyola College had merged to form Concordia University, whose seal would eventually grace our diplomas.  But our friendship had solidified only later, after each of us had joined graduate programs in different institutes.  From then on we had continued to meet at random intervals in pubs and brasseries for interminable discussions on philosophy and politics.  Our debates and beliefs would eventually make us cringe, but they were almost mainstream in the in university circles of the day.  Carlos had declared himself a Communist, with an attachment to the idea that was both fiery and grim.  I had prided myself in having surpassed even his radicalism by having become an Anarchist.  Carlos would counter that Anarchism was not a viable ideology but an impossible delusion, a chimera.  That topic would usually be good for a full evening. 

Guido professed to have no ideology at all.  His stated goal was to traverse life “along the path of least resistance”.  His, however, was no lackadaisical philosophy, and years later I would realize that much of his outlook coincided withBuddhism, a worldview with which none of us had been familiar at the time.  As for declared spiritual stances, Carlos and I, coherent with our respective ideologies, were atheists, while Guido appeared to be genuinely agnostic.

As with many other decisions taken around the time of the trip, the choice to disclose my story had been motivated, partly, by remorse.  I particularly regretted the way I had interacted with relatives, friends and acquaintances, constantly challenging any conventional beliefs they might have held.  If they happened to already hold “progressive” ideas, as had been the case with Carlos, then I would try to push them to greater extremes.  But now, like Guido before me, I saw ideologies in a different light, as phantasms conjured up to weaken and confuse their own supporters.  In my former life I had not questioned their presence in human affairs, nor the consequences that they invariably spawned.  Deep down, it was even possible that I had never taken my own Anarchism seriously.  Much of it had been a kind of social game anyway, a ruse that had partly kept me from being labeled "square".  Anarchism of the word, the only type I had ever practiced, had been sufficiently dark and strange as to shield me from the greatest sin of the age, conventionalism.

Now I felt huge regret at having played such charades, and I asked myself whether I had succeeded in convincing anyone.  I had definitely not convinced Guido and Carlos, but I had not helped them, either, with my continuous fanning of ideological talk.  And I knew that I had engaged them not only in specious political discussions, but also in a type of philosophical discourse that, in my case at least, had led to an abyss.  Were they in similar danger, even if only remotely?  Those were the reasons, more or less, for granting them the dubious privilege of hearing my tale.  But there would be no possibility of doing it in the usual way with the three of us sitting around a brasserie table, because one member of the trio was missing.  

If I had been forced to select a single listener, then Guido might have been my choice.  But he had moved, having secured a teaching job at a college in Ontario.  Carlos, on the other hand, was still around, newly married and living in one of Montreal’s better neighbourhoods.  So, Carlos it would be.

I looked forward to the meeting, but I also dreaded it.  How would I present the story, and how would it be received?  Personal pride was getting in the way even in the face of the enormity I was about to disclose.  How to delicately reveal that I no longer had an ideology, or ideals, or hope, or even a sense of self?  

Carlos answered the door and we embraced like long-lost comrades.  He looked well, with a settled air and a quiet sense of purpose that struck me as novel.  He said that he had the whole day off so we could chat at leisure.  We went to sit in his den and for a while we made small talk, catching up on trivial news along with more significant developments, like his wedding.  I had met his bride briefly while they were still dating, and I sincerely congratulated him.  

He told me about his work.  His doctoral research was going well and he was already gearing up for a career in biotechnology.  I immediately had a hunch that he was destined for professional success, and in the face of such prospects my concerns about past philosophical discussions were starting to look silly.  We talked about the old days for a while, and then we came around to my move to Victoria.  

Much sooner than I had planned, almost under compulsion, I found myself steering the conversation to the topic.  Not for the last time, I was feeling an urgency to reveal my trauma as if the salvation of my listener depended on it—which, to my mind, it did.  My presentation soon turned into a rambling monologue, and I could see that Carlos was becoming disturbed about my state of mind.  I tried to keep to a qualitative version of the same report I had given Richard, but I could tell that what was troubling Carlos was the apparent lack of proportionality between the topic as described and the amount of agitation it was causing the narrator.  I was making a hash of it.  It soon became a question of either backing off and resuming a neutral conversation, or going for broke.  What happened next remains vivid in both our memories, and it has become part of the lore of our friendship.  

“Carlos,” I said.  “You have known me for a while but I am sure that you have never seen me like this, and I assure you that what you see on the surface is nothing compared to what’s inside.  Something has happened that I still don’t understand, but maybe I can try to describe it.  I am planning to tell Guido as well. It is important that you both hear it for—” 

I halted in time. I had been about to say, for your own safety.  

Instead I concluded with, “I really don’t know how you are going to take the rest of it.  Are you ready to hear something unexpected?” 

Still looking concerned, Carlos nodded.

“It’s like this,” I said, and I went on to describe the turmoil of that night, dissecting it in fine time slices, but deferring any mention of messages or other signs of the interloping presence.  Instead I bridged the gap by referring to “an incomprehensible moment” that would forever separate my old life from the new.  

As I spoke, Carlos’s expression changed from one of concern to one of curiosity, perhaps even wonderment.  I thought that this was as good a time as any.  I said, “I don’t think I can even speculate on what this means unless I bring in a new element—a very uncomfortable one.”  I paused like a diver at the top of a cliff.  

“To go any further,” I finally blurted out, “I need to implicate God.”

Complete silence. 

Carlos averted his gaze and I decided to wait until he replied.  He looked pensive; then he got up and walked over to the fridge.  A moment later he returned with two bottles, and we refilled our glasses without saying a word.

“Did I ever tell you how I met Rosa?” He finally asked.

I felt relief, even though I had a hunch that the question was not quite as off-topic as it seemed.  He described the circumstance of their first meeting and how he had been struck by Rosa's looks, but especially by her fresh and unassuming air.  He had found the package quite attractive.

“You know how it is when you meet someone,” he continued.  “You try to guess their likes and dislikes, and you change your ways accordingly.  I guess Rosa was no exception.  It was only a few days later that she let her guard down and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.”

I was finding the topic calming.

“I watched her light up and I just could not believe it," he continued. "What did she think she was she doing?  True, those were her lungs, but possessive feelings are irrational, and at that moment it felt like they were my lungs.  What made her think that she could go ahead and damage them, just like that?  I felt a sense of—" he searched for the word carefully “—betrayal.  There is no better term for it.  And that,” he concluded, turning darkly in my direction, “is the way I feel when my friends, particularly those I used to respect, turn to religion.”

That was that.  There was a long, awkward silence.  

The conversation eventually resumed, managing to meander on safer ground for the rest of the afternoon.  Rosa, her lungs hopefully on the mend, came home from work and served us a very nice dinner.  They sat me at the head of the table.  Throughout the meal I looked at Carlos and Rosa through glass panes that only I could see.  They were accomplished hosts, interacting with natural ease, grace and humour, and showing only warmth and solicitude for their guest.   

The simple loveliness of the dinner was poignant.  It seemed a tragically happy flame that did not know the magnitude of the hovering dark, a blackness that could break through at any moment and devastate the gathering.  I wanted to reach through the glass to warn them, to save them.  I wanted to save everyone, in fact; but, as is often the case with messianic impulses, it was the self-appointed saviour who was drowning.  

He was drowning, melting, disintegrating, vanishing and reappearing, all at once, all the time.  Thankfully, the autopilot had accepted new orders (make pleasant small talk at all cost), and was dutifully carrying them out.  

At the end of the evening they sent me off with warm wishes and some sensible advice from Carlos: "Take a backseat view of that stuff, for a while."

Driving away I felt a new low.  No doubt Carlos's reaction would be repeated in different personal styles by everyone who would hear the tale.  Carlos had not even heard the core of it, and he had recoiled.  Why should it be different with others?  

It would be decades before I would try again.

More Losses

There were fewer complications when it came to reconnecting with my hunting friends.  I had had little in the way of philosophical discussion with them, and the few political topics we had debated had tended towards bread-and-butter issues in Provincial politics.  I had no reason to feel guilty toward these people, other than in a way that was new for me, and which I now felt towards almost everyone: that I had failed to fully appreciate their presence in my life.  Giorgio, Santin, Elia and Pieri, two pairs of brothers who were cousins to each other, had been my first friends in Canada.  Our families were from the same part of Italy, and when together we communicated in a comic mixture of Friulan, Italian, English and French.  We had fished and camped in the Laurentian hills for twelve consecutive years, and we had also hunted for small game each Fall, hardly missing a weekend.  It was this last activity that had defined our group, and my nostalgia for our hunting adventures had been the original reason for the trip.  We got together and quickly planned a couple of sorties.  

   A few days later we were in the forest, walking along a clearing that seemed to wander endlessly through taller growth.  Thick clumps of heather hampered my steps as I slogged along in the rightmost position, the one closest to the trees.  To the left, the rest of the group was struggling along with the same footing difficulties.  There would be no game in the bag that day; the weather was all wrong.  

We rounded a bend.  The clearing continued on, but the trees that hemmed it sank along a declining slope towards the horizon, a grey band of distant trees rising into the lighter grey of the overcast.  A breeze was sweeping through the clearing and it felt cold, a reminder that the ground, at the moment all yellows and browns, would soon be white.  The scene was of a melancholy kind I had always liked.  Winter was around the corner, the Quebec Winter so full of history, hope and pathos, towards which I had developed an affinity, the kind of nostalgic affection that I had previously granted only to my faraway Friuli.  I tried to savour the view and evoke old feelings, but those had always responded to a reality sharp to the senses and rooted in the immediacy of the surroundings.  Now, no matter how I tried, it was still like peering through multiple layers of glass.  I was incapable of feeling my presence in the scene, or of discerning any other connection to it.  There would always be those thick panes between the world and me.  Using the breeze as a cover, I finally stopped fighting the tears.

Later that evening we reconvened at my parents’ house for supper.  My mother served polenta, radicchio and portions of wild rabbit that my father had bagged on an earlier trip.  The food was just as I remembered, and the homemade wine accompanied it well.  My hunting friends sat around the table together with some of my father’s, and the improvised gathering had a feel of celebration, of welcoming back a prodigal son.  I found myself at the center of attention, and I let the autopilot run with it.

It acquitted itself well.  Under its control I joked, told stories and listened to the others as they brought me up to date on the two hunting seasons I had missed.  Then the older stories, those with connections to all of us, were retold.  It was a sort of ritual that retelling of hunting lore, and on that night I largely took it over.  I found myself recounting anecdotes that were detailed and funny, but also somewhat cruel since they amounted to laughs at someone else's expense.  That night it did not seem important to safeguard the dignity of others; it was one more swing in the alternation of bad habits and new aspirations that was going to buffet me for a while.  Since I was careful to skewer, mostly, hunters who were not present, the company laughed heartily and soon began supplying similar stories of their own.  By all appearance it was an evening full of companionship and good humour, and it would have gone on longer except that we had planned one more sortie for the next morning.  By eleven o’clock everyone had left.  

The autopilot, too, retired for the night, and I remained alone to stare at the dark in the silence of the bedroom I had once shared with my brother.  But it was not the same silence.  For the first time in that space, the scream raged.  

I did not handle change well, in my new state.  Even such a trip across the continent would have been out of the question had it not been arranged beforehand, and  now other changes were gathering.  Over supper my parents had talked of selling the house and rejoining my brother, who had by then moved back to Italy.  If they did, then this house, one of the tenuous links to my old reality, would no longer be part of my life.  That prospect would have been sad at any time, but in my present condition it induced panic.  The loss would have been both literal and symbolic, with the symbolical part being the hardest.  True, on coming to Canada we had rented at my uncle's house for three years, but it had been too short a time to form an attachment to a set of walls.  Nor did it seem right to fully consider home the one-bedroom apartment on Market Street, back in Victoria.  This house on Montreal's Laval Road had been the only Canadian residence I could call home, and if it were to be sold it would mean another piece of myself falling off.  

For the second time that day there were tears.  

Why was I so attached to this house?  I had lived in it for only eight years, and not even good ones by my own account.  It had been a time filled with pathological nostalgia for my Italian village, with struggles with the university curriculum and with growing stresses with my parents.  At the same time I had embarked on a journey that would one day lead to this.  Such considerations should have eased the feeling of impending loss, but they did not even seem relevant.  That was not the reason I was crying, anyway.  My tears were hot with remorse.  My parents had dedicated their adult life to the welfare of my brother and me, particularly me, their black sheep.  Why?  What made them so willing to sacrifice for others?  I may have been their son, but I was still other.  I tossed and turned.  It was hard to pursue a coherent line of thought while fighting off the madness of solipsism that came and went dozens of times a day, and which was playing with me at the moment.  At such times, regardless of my actual location, I would reenter a living room that contained a transfixed figure, and I would struggle not to blend with it.  The figure seemed to stare at all the time that had ever been and that was ever going to be, all of it at once, as if time itself, in its full extent, had taken its own snapshot.  

I turned away from the image and returned to the enigma of my parents’ sacrifice.  Of course, there was a quick way to accept it: those two people were illusion.  They were mere images of the holistic simulation that constituted my world.  They existed only in reference to me. That notion was simultaneously attractive and viscerally frightening, but it was also suspiciously easy and convenient.   A viable answer is rarely that simple.  I considered that in my old reality, now several weeks dead, the world had felt real regardless of sophistic ideas and discussions.  What’s more, I had proceeded on the assumption that I had a special personal destiny within it, a kind of high call to contribute to humanity’s progress.  The dream had waited impatiently in the wings, a naïve and romantic notion that had elevated me, in my own eyes at least, above “ordinary” people.  Without having achieved anything notable, by sheer virtue of untested potentialities, I had placed myself above the masses.  At the same time I had continued to view myself as just one of many, an ordinary human being among billions, because it allowed for a safe, cozy feeling.  

Two big episodes had crushed that convenient emotional arrangement.  No longer able to hold on to both views simultaneously, I had scrambled to decide which had been right.  But what if, in the end, neither had been exclusively correct?  What if “other people” were neither the limited, contented beings of my old perspective, nor the illusory images of the new?  What if they had started out as the former, and at some point in their lives had felt what I was feeling now?  And what if, unlike me, they had simply accepted the new perspective—this perspective?  It was possible.  It was also possible that this view might not bother them anymore.  They might no longer even be aware of it.  For them it might have simply become the basis for their new “reality”, accepted once and never again questioned.

The thoughts of that night were following an established pattern: first, simple questions that had no answer, and then increasingly complicated questions that were invariably followed by panic and despair.  

With nowhere to turn, a once‑proud atheist now wanted to speak with God.  I wanted to communicate with it in the way I had done as a child; simply, innocently, and without fear of terrifying responses.  I wanted the luxury of speaking in the complete trust of being heard.  I wanted to ask forgiveness for having been blind, for not having considered the possibility that others might have had to deal with this same thing that I was wrestling.  If those others had an actual existence of their own—which I would have to assume at least for the sake of argument—and they lived sane and constructive lives despite knowing what I knew, then they were heroes.  Superheroes, even.  My parents were superheroes, along with countless other parents, teachers, religious ministers and most ordinary people.  How did they manage it?  Where did they find the hope and the strength? More panic.  Morning was approaching, and I realized that my sleep patterns had become so poor that my health was probably being affected.  I had to take care of my health even if my body was illusion.  Better the illusion of a healthy body than that of a sick one.  I recalled how I had slept soundly the night of the first episode.  If I had managed it even then, why not now?  

The sleeping problems would continue for years.

In the Dark

It rained on the last hunting trip.  By mid-afternoon the rain had diminished to a drizzle, and patches of fog were drifting across the landscape.  In spite of the poor weather, our luck had been better.  I had two rabbits and a grouse in my rucksack, and I felt that the official purpose of the trip had been fulfilled.  I did not know it yet, but the three little lives I had just snuffed out would mark the end of my hunting career.  

By the time light began to fail we had worked our way back to a spot not far from the car.  Two of my companions did one last sweep away from the road while a third remained out of sight to the left, and this left me temporarily alone in a small clearing.  Ten yards ahead stood a forlorn-looking tree, barely taller than the rest.  Like others around it, it had already lost most of its leaves; but, unique among them, it had white streaks marking its trunk and branches.  It was early evening and the light was turning flat and dull. 

The sight of the streaked tree was disquieting.  There was something desolate about it, and it caused a rush of the same unanswerable questions.  Am I alone?  Am I really the only sentient entity?  It is, after all, the view favoured by Occam's Razor.  But how can such a thing be possible?  I could not even add: And why me? Because, who else could it be?  

But it cannot be that I am asking such questions and really mean them.  It’s true that I used to ask them in idle conversation, phrasing them so cleverly that they had not even sounded rhetorical.  But they had been rhetorical.  Why aren’t they now?

The metaphorical bridges still burned at my back, and under my feet the line I had stepped on one night now felt like a flimsy girder balancing over an unknown depth.  Ahead, where an overwhelming presence had once loomed, there was only a void.  

Once again despair began to strangle me.  In the past weeks I had attempted every stratagem, remedy and subterfuge I could devise.  I had invoked a silent God and sought out friends who could offer no real understanding, let alone counsel.  I had even experimented with strange rituals, all to no avail.  

Now I reached into the same grab bag of ineffective tricks and examined a previous attempt.  Superficially it was just one of many; just another pellet in a futile scattergun approach.  But looking at it in retrospect, it seemed to stand out.  It was a memory from the night of the parking lot.  

That evening I had returned to the apartment in an appalling state.  The autopilot had kicked in and was governing my actions, and only minutes earlier it had prevented me from checking into a mental hospital.  Reentering the apartment I had felt the urge to take a shower.  Perhaps recognizing something symbolical, the autopilot backed off just as I turned on the water, leaving my self-awareness unshielded.  This had the effect of making both the internal landscape and the visual space of the bathroom reel drunkenly.  I fell against the tiles.  The autopilot delayed intervening, which heightened the panic.  Then, I grasped at a straw.

"I am sorry," I groaned, "but I must accept that I have a soul."

Reexamining it in the darkened forest, it seemed a puzzling statement.  Why, and to whom, had I apologized?  It was hard to revisit the moment without reliving the terror in its fullness, but even without getting too close to the emotional memory it was fairly obvious that I had not apologized to God.  Why would anyone apologize to God about the possibility of one's soul?  

The alternative was that I had apologized to myself—my old self.  My agnosticism had been so deep that vestiges of it had incredibly survived two staggering blows, even one that had featured God's personal intervention.  It seemed that I had felt the need to apologize to my hard-dying agnosticism before choosing to believe in the existence of my soul.  The statement, I must accept that I have a soul, had been both a leap of faith and an implied commitment.  But if I had yearned for an approving response, there had been none.  God, if it even existed, had remained silent and perhaps even deaf.  

To doubt God’s existence after all that had happened may seem strange, but from the start I had been haunted by the possibility that I had participated in a harrowing farewell rite: God’s own adieu.  And if God had really departed on that night, had he taken leave of only me?  Maybe it was presumptuous to speculate on whether in abandoning me God had also taken leave of everyone else.  But the black notebook had already told me, and it was still telling me, that there was no one else!  The departure of God from the scene had coincided with the loss of my whole world and everyone in it.  Could it really have been such a monstrous, multiversed exit?  The disheartened tone of God’s words certainly supported the interpretation, and its silence since only reinforced it.  

I had so far managed to remain true to all that had been implied by the acknowledgement of my own soul, but in the face of God's continued silence that commitment felt both heavy and empty, and there had been times when I had come close to abandoning it altogether.  Now, in the clearing, I had an unexpected thought: Instead of reneging on the commitment, why not add to it?  

I had little time; there were rustlings that indicated that my friends were returning.  I looked up at a sky that had never seemed so gray or impenetrable.

"I will accept that other souls exist," I said.  "It is a leap of faith, just like the other one.  Please, reassure me that this is right."

But again there was no answer.

II

Colvere

Two years on and it was a daily surprise that I still existed and that the fiction of life continued.  Summer had returned and Elayne and I were driving through the Austrian Alps on our official honeymoon.  I was still under the same cloud, but I felt traces of an old excitement as we approached the Brenner Pass, beyond which I could see the first peaks of a land I had once called my own.  

And Italy never seemed sunnier from the moment we crossed the border and began a winding descent through the southern flank of the Alps.  The weather held bright as we finally reached my native village, a grouping of hamlets called Colvere within the Colvera Valley.  

Over the next few weeks we walked the old roads and trails, looking at hay fields that clung to hillsides in their well-remembered lushness for perhaps the last time.  The land had been fertile in the days when every family had kept cows to ensure sustenance and survival.  The manure, a precious byproduct that allowed a rich hay crop with which to feed the cows and keep the cycle going, used to be carried with special baskets on one’s back and then spread by rake over the hillsides.  It had been hard, unpleasant work, carried out mostly by women.  But no longer.  Soon the fields would deplete the last of that nutrient, and in the coming years most of them would succumb to the encroaching forest.  People had found easier ways to obtain milk and produce.  

But for now the valley looked similar to that of sixteen years earlier, when I had left it to presumably never return.  

I played tour guide to Elayne, introducing her to relatives and friends and showing her my old haunts.  My brother played tour guide to us both, taking us to places new even to me.  His home was perched on one of the most attractive bluffs in the valley, where at one time our family vineyard had produced enough grapes for a demijohn or two of red wine each year.  Throughout our holiday the atmosphere around us was unfailingly festive.  Old childhood friends were still sufficiently young to take the business of festivals, picnics and hikes — not to mention eating and drinking — seriously.  It was, by all external measures, a superb and thoroughly enjoyed holiday.  I don't know if any of my acquaintances, including those very close, ever suspected that they were conversing with an impostor, an autopilot that by this time had become quite adept at simulation and deception.  Did, for that matter, Elayne?  But it was a bright summer, and that seemed to help in some minor way.

At one time this valley had been my whole world.  Its physical shape was that of an elongated bowl run through by a body of water of indefinite character, somewhere between torrent and river, which would swell to the top of the banks in Spring and Fall and recede to a mostly dry bed in the other two seasons.  The first rim of hills rose and widened to finally superimpose over an even wider and taller semicircle of mountains, with the low peak to the south being the last of the Dolomites.  Beyond it, a wide plain extended uninterrupted to the Adriatic Sea.

The valley had been a world of saturated reality.  The cold of winters, filtering in through inadequate children's clothes and taking hold for months within the uninsulated stone houses, had been really cold.  The heat of summer, that drew sweat in the fields and tanned your arms and neck to a gritty brown, had been really hot.  The in-between seasons were perhaps the best ones, especially in the way they made you feel alive and energized with their sudden weather changes.  But it had been the memories of teenage summers that I had cherished the most, and that was why I had returned in this season.

Pleasures and pains had been intense and immediate in this little world, disproportionately uplifting and irritating in turn.  The place had always seemed overloaded with sensory and social awareness, something that an outsider, such as a tourist from a big city, would invariably overlook.  It had been a world that I had deeply loved, but towards which I had also felt a recurrent uneasiness.  Somewhere in its heightened reality and in the fantasies that I had spun to cope with it, an unknown seed had been planted.  It would lead me, one day, to deny all reality, only to recoil in horror and lunge for the symbol of what had been lost: Gravena. 

Gravena lay torpidly on the opposite side of Mount San Lorenzo, the low mountain to the south.  In spite of its towering presence, San Lorenzo was, in geological terms, barely more than a hill.  It was steep on the north face, the one facing Colvere.  The slope was marginally gentler on the south side, where at one point it partially flattened and jutted out to form an irregular promontory.  Laid over it in three separate locations were the farmhouses of Gravena.    

I gestured along an imaginary line that went through the bulk of San Lorenzo and unto the estimated location of Gravena on the other side.  

“It’s there,” I said.  

Elayne had already heard of the fabled place. 

“Will you take me to see it?” 

I promised that I would, but not right away.  Our holiday was just beginning, and I did not want to rush.  Instead, I took her to other familiar corners, and I soon discovered that childhood nostalgia does not transfer well.  Places that had significance for me drew only puzzled looks.  The charms of a shuttered school, of a gutted native home awaiting renovation, of fishing holes dry in summer and other such gems have limited general appeal.  She enjoyed the company of friends and relatives and she found the valley, as a whole, picturesque.  But this was Italy, for goodness’ sake. Where were the Coliseums, the Leaning Towers, the gondolas?

I promised Venice.  Although less than 150 km away, I had never visited it.  As far as I knew, few people in Colvere had.  Their opinions on the matter could be summed up in a sentence they often used: Who wants to see a sinking city? Nothing seemed more pointless.  Eventually we visited Venice with my brother, and I promised Elayne that we would return one more time, just the two of us. 

Back in the village, I would sometimes slip away at sunset for a climb up the closest hill.  Sitting on the grass I would watch the sun sparkle through the trees as it set behind another hill called Avois.  Afterwards, the stars would gradually emerge in a darkening blue.  Just as daylight could lift some of my cloud with its alpine brightness, evening brought its own ointment through a greater recognition of the place. The unwelcome new details in the landscape would fade, leaving behind the coarser features that had remained unchanged in decades, and perhaps centuries.  What had not changed at all was the scent, an aroma that was at once delicate and bracing, a blend of blossoms, cut grass and something indefinable that could have only come from the earth itself.  It was disorienting to be in a place that was at once exquisitely familiar and irreversibly alien.  

A god had dwelt in this place, first as the improbable see-through personification taught to children everywhere, and later as an increasingly abstract entity that yet maintained the loving concerns and stern sense of justice of the former version.  In a time before questions, I had felt its touch and heard its voice almost daily, without fear and without drama.  The touch had come from the land and its elements, and the voice had been the voice of the people, mostly of the old.  

In my first sixteen years there had hardly been a day without a word falling on me like a benediction, usually from a dark-clad woman.  Even dialectal words like "Nin, ce fais-tu?" amounted to more than their literal meaning of "What are you up to, child?"  

Typically, the woman would be over fifty and not of my extended family.  She would be wearing several layers of clothing ranging in color from dark gray to all-out black, topped by a kind of headscarf that was invariably black and unattractively arranged like a piratical bandanna.  The overall unattractiveness would be deliberate, contrived according to an unspoken tradition, and the resulting visual effect would be not of shabbiness or neglect, but rather of accommodation with the waning rhythms of life.  Whether married or not, around the age of fifty a woman would turn away from her former image and enter a new phase.  One could almost conclude that she was turning away from womanhood itself, but that would be an unfortunate judgment passed over a different time and a different way of understanding life.  Instead, in her new look the woman seemed to embrace a more fundamental womanhood, free from the concerns, urges and obligations of the previous turbulent chapters.  Outwardly dark and unadorned, she now shone with a different kind of light. 

Old people had been a mystery to me, particularly the women.  I used to wonder what kept them from despair.  Unlike men, who headed into old age one imperceptible step at a time, a woman would one day simply get up and decide it was time to put on the death-row uniform.  

"Nin, ce fais-tu?"  

The words would be such, but they translated differently in the hearts of both speaker and listener:  Here you are.  What a privilege it is to find you here.  What are you up to today?  How do things look on your path to fresh mysteries?  

She would be calling across to a time that had once been her own, and she would undoubtedly feel the poignancy of knowing that nothing repeats itself, that her own time would never be duplicated.  And her words and the tone of her voice would carry a balm across the rift.  

As for God's touch, which had been solace and nourishment, the opportunity had been as ever present as the surroundings.  Now, after sixteen years, I tried to find that same touch again.  

Watching the sunset from the slope behind the old house, I would hear the bells of the church of Saint Nicholas from the nearby town of Poffabro, muffled by the interposed hill of Avois.  There is not much that hasn’t been said already about the voice of church bells, inanimate entities that are regarded in some quarters as being almost human, and as such are even accorded the privilege of baptism.  All the other voices had aged, but the bells rang the same.  Their sound got clearer as one moved up the hill, but it remained evocatively distant.  

There was a brook, even further uphill, which was in the process of being smothered by the forest.  The thickening vegetation made it practically inaccessible, and nearly sucked it dry as well.  My cousin and friend, Paolo, described it in those terms.  But sixteen years earlier the brook had used to carry a modest stream of water along its full length, all one hundred yards of it.   

Emerging from a spring in an alcove a few feet deep, the brook would flow downhill for some twenty yards inside a narrow gulch before turning left into more open terrain and continuing on across the general slope of the hill.  After a few more gentle turns it would decidedly turn right again, proceeding straight down for another thirty yards or so through stands of alder and chestnut.  Then, just where you would have expected it to gather speed towards  the bottom of the valley, it simply percolated back into the earth.  

In its short course the stream would pass through pleasantly varied terrain, a microenvironment that included bush, mowed clearings, a couple of dwarf orchard trees and several evergreen conifers.  To Paolo and me it had been a place of adventure.  We appreciated that the brook, called Rurot, was unusual, and even looking back now, the peculiarities of its short course remain perplexing.

Our most persistent activity at the brook had been the trapping of songbirds.  It now seems inconceivable that we did this, because my heart had always been soft towards animals, even when I managed to override feelings for sanctioned activities, like slaughtering livestock, or hunting.  Our trapping had been a form of hunting, but it was definitely not sanctioned.  In fact, it was illegal, with the possibility of severe fines if caught doing it.  But still we trapped, season after season, following a local tradition that was older than the laws.  Starting in late summer we would arrive at random times to cover the length of the brook with branches, grass and leaves, leaving only a few spots where the water remained exposed.  Birds seeking to drink would have to set down at those points, and we provided them with sticks to perch on, covered in a glue-like substance that immobilized their wings and claws.  

It saddens me to admit that the sight of birds trapped this way always gave me, and everyone else who practiced the activity, a pleasurable rush.  The reaction seems reprehensible, but even someone who grew up outside the tradition could understand one of its aspects.  Gabrielle Roy touches upon it in a novella from her book Ces Enfants de ma Vie, where she tells of how a troubled adolescent takes his teacher, a young woman not much older than himself, on a hike to the source of a stream on high terrain.  He shows her how to entice trout by cupping her hands in a flowing pool until the trout snuggle up against her palms.  Roy then reflects on a human inclination that is not sufficiently acknowledged.  In the thoughts she ascribes to the young teacher, she says,

I discovered once more, and with the same deep surprise, that the first burgeoning of love, in adolescence, is for the small, free creatures of the earth and its waters.  I saw gliding over his face the joyous trembling he had felt holding in his hands, tame and consenting, the most timorous fish in the world.[1]

The creatures that Paolo and I held in our hands were neither tame nor consenting, yet we experienced the same trembling to which Roy alludes.  But we did not ascend to the raw high-mindedness of the boy in her story, who in the end declines to capture the trout.  For our part, we kept only a few birds, the luckier ones, alive as cage pets or as living decoys to attract more birds with their call.  The rest we killed for food, since they were considered a delicacy when cooked on a skewer with herbs and bacon.  And yet, while holding them still living in our hands, we admired their beauty.

Here was a manifestation, certainly a minor one, of a dark paradox: We can be attracted to the very thing we are about to destroy, and all too often the culture offers justification.  Our act seemed justified by traditions, rules and standards established in times when the taking of a life had often meant the preservation of another.  Still, when it came to actually doing the deed, it always seemed a dark moment, and we tried to make it quick.  Beyond that we would not admit to soft feelings, and in this way our little world of light and dark seemed to tragically reflect the larger world.

---

At the end of each trapping expedition we would collect the “sticky sticks” and make an honest attempt to restore the creek to its original state.  One such activity would provide a lasting memory.  

Early one evening I had been in the process of restoring the middle section of the creek while Paolo was out of sight tidying up the spring inside the alcove.  It was well past sunset and the residual light was becoming too weak to illuminate the scene.  Something was underway that felt quite normal then, but that sixteen years later would seem an irretrievable miracle.  

The bells were ringing.  They sounded like a private conversation, a self-contained rhythm that escaped its own boundary to overflow the hills and drift across the valley.  Its echo spoke of the space it had traversed, of contact with rock and slope, but also of an emergence from time.  For centuries that voice had helped to loop life's flow into manageable cycles, and to mark and hallow the passing of each.  Strangely, while co-mingling with space and time, the bells managed to erase both until only the sound remained.  

Above was a sky that I felt more than I saw.  Nearby, the last of the light was fading in the grass and the taller growth was reduced to its own outline and the shade it contained.  At my feet the brook gurgled sleepily in its short journey toward the shadows, and back to the earth. 

The moment was like a cup held by an unknown hand, from which I drank without ceremony.  

Such moments were not new.  I had experienced them before, when time seemed to depart leaving behind only existence.  And the strange thing was that those recurring moments, in all their indescribable quality, were not at all in the nature of a private epiphany: they could be shared.  People nearby would sense them.  Any exchange that would occur would then take on a flat, laconic tone that was unmistakable, indicating a wish to acknowledge the moment but also a fear to break it.  Paolo, from the alcove, had said: “The bells—” and left it truncated.  After an interval sufficiently long for the echo of the words to fade, almost like waiting for ripples to smooth out over a pond, I had acknowledged with “Yes—”.  No more would be said. 

Evidence that the mysterious essence was indeed shared is the fact that it is occasionally talked about.  It is a subject that comes up when I revisit the valley, but it is a difficult one to transact in words, because words, to a great extent, are its inhibitor.  There is a reluctance to enter into the topic, too; it still seems too subjective and self-indulgent, but it does come up in comparisons between the present and the past, between young people now and young people then.  There is a consensus that life today seems out of focus.  Is it the TV’s fault?  The Internet's?  Consumerism in general?  Or is just us, finally old and out of focus as per nature’s plan?  

These questions were hardly central on that summer holiday, but I did think about them, gingerly, at the end of a promised excursion.

---

Sunset in Venice was what Elayne had imagined it would be, but she does not forgive me, to this day, for not taking her on a gondola ride.  Instead, we sat at an outdoor restaurant finishing a pleasant meal and catching up on postcard writing. Our holiday was coming to a close and soon it would be time to repack the suitcases.

At the outset, our vacation had been like two separate holidays: a honeymoon trip for Elayne and the continuation of a blind tunnel for me.  Now, looking at the tranquil view of a canal flanked by two rows of Levantine buildings, I had to recognize that something was changing.  Although I remained depressed and in near constant panic, there had been several moments when I had almost become distracted from my problem.  That almost was a big development, but it was still just fleeting relief, often ending with a jolt back to the edge of a pit.  Then the scream would modulate into a lugubrious dirge. 

No boundary between mind and matter, inside and outside; volition fights a probability distribution with a steep slope and continuous first derivatives beyond which we say ‘body’ and a second steep slope with continuous first derivatives beyond which we say ‘world’ and an uneven, ever-diminishing probability profile described with ad-hoc terms—”  

One just wanted to curl up in a ball. 

But still I searched through the amorphous probability profiles for the site of that continuing personal presence, that concept of soul that had once seemed obvious and then obviously false, and which had now returned to demand its definite place in the scheme of things.  So, what was its natural site?  In the so-called here-and-now?  In an afterlife? 

It was puzzling that many wondered about an afterlife but few about a pre-life.  Both possibilities were absurd to the non-believer, but the views of a typical believer were not so symmetric.  A believer tended to look only “forward”, in anticipation of the day when he or she would reach eternity and time would cease to have meaning.  

Whether approached forwards or backwards, eternity was easy to understand.  Time, on the other hand, was tricky.  If the hypothesis on which I had worked had produced anything of potential interest, it had been the description of the flow of time in terms of the flow of knowledge.  The definition of knowledge, of the ways in which it came into being and the means by which it supported and propagated itself, had taken a little over a year, fourteen months of continuous, obsessive work.  The naiveté that I had sensed in my own effort had not bothered me, at least not initially; in fact, I had worn my lack of scholarship as a badge of integrity.  To a friend who had urged me to check on the work of others before possibly reinventing the steam engine, I had replied that as long as I didn’t check I had the chance of inventing a new and better type of steam engine. 

My trust in approaching the problem free from existing bias of had been sincere, and it had guided my work with only a few exceptions.  But the quantitative aspects had been accompanied from the start by an emotional counterpoint that had been as unexpected as it would be devastating.  Two years on, and I still had not uncovered the reason, but I had come to search for clues in this valley. 

---

There was a spot, not far from my old house, where a branch of the valley came to a sudden end, and a small hill rose from the two seasonal creeks that joined at its base.  Long ago someone had cut steps into the spine of the hill and lined them with river slabs, forming a path that was almost a stepladder.  For this reason the hill was known locally as La Scala dal Paradis: the Ladder to Heaven.  The hill used to be mowed for fodder each year, and in a breeze the smooth re-growth would turn to grass waves that crawled up along the slope.    

I had been standing at the foot of the hill one day when I was seven or eight years old.  The grass waves, the rippling sounds of aspen and the sight of small clouds moving fast against the blue had conspired with the hill's name to evoke an arcane feeling.  At that moment the world became a presence that connected with the viewer directly and benevolently, almost like a smile.  The scene was alive with something that could not be captured in words. 

It was not the first time that I had experienced the feeling, but on that day I felt more strongly the frustration of not being able to name it.  I had no term for it, and no one else ever spoke of such things.  

Fascino, I thought.  

I liked the name.  It was a pre-existing noun with a meaning somewhere between 'fascination' and 'attraction'.  It went some way towards serving the intended purpose, while still missing the mark.  With a private modification of meaning, I adopted it.  I would go on to identify for myself two more degrees of the feeling.  The medium degree I called vardalo, and the deepest degree I called gugnolo, both invented nouns.  I based the progression from fascino to gugnolo on intensity of feeling, but also on a perceived proximity to the mysterious source of the feeling. 

Soon I would discover how difficult it would be to talk about such topics.  Grown-ups would dismiss them as personal indulgences, mere wanderings of the mind that must be outgrown and then, preferably, forgotten altogether.  At the very least they were to be put aside like all childish things, yielding to the ways of the adult world where exact verbalcommunication is what mattered.  And for that there would be school.

---

Revisiting the old elementary school would have been hard not to do, standing as it did beside the alley that led to my native hamlet.  Looking at it in that summer of 1983 I was reminded of one more reason why I am attracted to the writings of Gabrielle Roy.  Roy had been a teacher before becoming a writer, and something about her style had struck a familiarity chord at my first reading of La Petite Poule d’Eau.  

It was a novel about a large family of sharecroppers living on an island in the wilds of Manitoba.  In the story, the parents decide that there are enough children in the household to warrant a school of their own.  Somewhat unexpectedly, the Ministry of Education agrees.  Thus, the school of the district of the Petite Poule d’Eau, named after the local river, comes into being.  Roy then leads the reader into a world suffused with the special light that primary education can give when delivered by a caring educator.  The figure of Mademoiselle Cốté, the young teacher in the story, or, perhaps, that of the author herself, whose teacher’s heart can be sensed between the lines, would evoke the image of my own grade school teacher, Manuelita Fasan.

---

Maestra Ita, as she was called, not by the last name after the title, nor even by her first name, but by the diminutive of the latter, Ita, looms luminous in memory.  For five years she stood as an open door between the old of the valley and the new of the outside world.  And what my friends and I learned through her teachings would ready us for that new world that was rising like a shimmering tide beyond the hills.  Maestra Ita's greatest accomplishment was that she prepared us for it while enhancing in our eyes the world in which we still lived.  In fact, decades later, some of the love for our birth place could still be traced to what we learned in that one-room elementary school, which twenty years later would stand shuttered by the side of the road.  

The maestra's teachings were complemented twice a week by a one hour of religious instruction delivered by the parish priest.  While the teacher took the opportunity to catch up on her marking, the priest would sit down at the front of the class on an empty desk, which he would turn around in order to face the class. 

Fr. Ernesto did not, on the surface, appear naturally suited for his religious calling.  He was in his early middle age, and his looks and demeanour seemed to conform more to his rural background than to his vocational training.  Yet, perhaps against his true inclinations, he carried out his duties faultlessly, if perhaps a little grimly.  It was a task that must have weighed heavier each year while presiding over a church attendance that was steadily dwindling.  He could only watch as Church influence over town life, which had been considerable in previous generations, rapidly declined in a secular age.  But in the elementary school, at least, he had a captive audience.

As well as delivering standard catechistic fare, Fr. Ernesto told riveting stories and challenged the pupils with moral dilemmas:

"Must we always tell the truth?"

(All in unison): "Yes!"

"No matter what?"

"No matter what!"  We had been taught that lesson often enough, especially by the priest.

"Do your parents ever tell you war stories?"

They did, and we kids ejoyed them immensely.  They were always recounted with a mixture of disbelief, fatalism and gallows humour.  The priest began one of his own, set in a small town in Germany and concerning a Jewish family who had been sheltered in a neighbour’s house.

"You are the owners of that house," he said suddenly, pointing to a group of four pupils that included me.  

"And you," he said, pointing to another four, "are the Jewish family in the attic."

"What about us?" Protested the rest of the class.

"You will judge what happens."

With that satisfactorily settled the priest added sinisterly: "And I am the Gestapo."  

This was getting interesting.

Knock, knock, rapped his knuckles on the desk.

"Don't open!" Said my desk mate.

"We must," I said while making a door-opening gesture.

"Are there any Jews hiding in your house?"

"No!"

"You know what will happen if you lie to the Gestapo.  Do you want to change your answer?"

(A little more hesitantly): "No."

A co-conspirator leaned over to whisper in my ear: "Tell him that they are in the chicken house."

"Why?" I was feeling pressure from both sides.

He whispered back that we could spirit the family somewhere else while the Gestapo raided the chicken house.

Not wanting the scenario to deviate too much from the intended direction, the priest stepped out of character. 

"What do you think?" He asked the judges.

"Search the attic!" said a boy who did not like one of the refugee girls.  Fr. Ernesto silenced him with a glance.  Then he pointed at me while still addressing the judges.  

"Was he right in protecting his guests?"

"Yes!" Said all the judges.

"Would you have done the same?"

"Yes!"

"At the risk of your own lives?"

"Yes!"

"But what about telling the truth at all times?"

Ah.

Thus began for the young pupils a difficult soul search.  Pupils too young for that, some might object.  But it did not matter; we were riveted.  This was really interesting stuff.  The priest’s teachings touched on aspects of being human that naturally intrigue children.  Adults forget too quickly the big questions they used to ask themselves: Where did I come from?  How could I not have been before coming into being?  How will I accept the ending of my own life?  And how would it feel to suddenly be arbiter and decider over someone else's? 

Fr. Ernesto led us through long discussions that never bored us, awakening us to aspects of ourselves of which we had been only vaguely aware.  In the process, he equipped us with a vocabulary that made those aspects amenable to contemplation and dialogue.  And so we concluded that truth can be a tool for good or, alternatively, for its very opposite.  In itself, truth is only a way of describing things as they are or have been, but it becomes a tool for good when used by a present and educated conscience.  But what is conscience, and how should it be educated?

A primitive human would also have a conscience, speculated Fr. Ernesto.  Yet, without guidance from divinely inspired teachings, his conscience would remain just as primitive.  A cave dweller probably would not protect an unrelated family from those who could harm him as well.  But, he continued, a well-educated conscience can step in in times of moral confusion to offer guidance to the soul.  At such times the truth, as well as a lie, will be judged against the soul’s intentions. 

Fr. Ernesto would always come back to the soul as the pivot about which human life was meant to revolve, and he would buttress this point with examples from the lives of various saints.  To an overwhelming extent, the existence of one's soul seemed natural to us pupils, since we felt something at our core that could not have been flesh alone.  But we remained curious about this mysterious thing.  What was it?  What shape did it have?  Why could we not see it as it left the body at death?

The soul, would explain Fr. Ernesto, is invisible and intangible.  He would use the big words without apology, but making sure that we learned their meaning.  The soul is like a small fragment of another world, he would continue; a wisp of heaven upon which God imprints our individual identity.  It can be beautiful and luminous; too shining, even, because its bright innocence soon attracts the attention of the Great Foe.  And a lifelong tug of war commences between the forces of light and those of darkness for access to the soul.  Here, Fr. Ernesto, in complete concordance with his brethren, would fiercely assert a point:  Our will is free.  It is the main aspect of being human.  And yet, he would add, it is possible to be put in a situation where all the available choices are bad.  

Do I tell the truth to the Gestapo?  It would certainly doom the guests.  

Do I lie to the Gestapo?  It may doom my family and me.

Fr. Ernesto would become pensive.  There are times, he would say, when you cannot be held responsible for the consequences of your actions, since no good choice is available.  Martyrdom may be commendable but no one expects it of you, not even God.  Yet God knows how sincere you are when you assess your situation.  Do you really have no choice or are you just taking the easy way out?

We puzzled through moral dilemmas and tried to absorb what felt like timeless teachings, often delivered in allegory and interspersed with references to Nature, the lowly but essential part of creation.  Using exactly the same angle exploited by the character of the Capuchin in La Petite Poule d’Eau, the Nature to which Fr. Ernesto referred was the nature we knew, that of the hills surrounding our valley, of the soil kept fertile through so much humiliating effort, of the flows of air and water, both perfectly transparent in those days, a natural aid for visualizing the unblemished state of the soul.

Forty years later the Church that had been represented so ably by Fr. Ernesto lay damned in the court of public opinion, and often in the legal courts as well, its reputation destroyed by a litany of sordid revelations.  A patrimony of teachings foundered with a ship that had been steered so badly.  Along with perhaps many others, I would be left to wonder whether it was possible that I had actually lived at a time and place where a priest was trusted implicitly.  

No longer a member of that faith, I would one day reread old literature and leaf through yellowed catechism texts, urged on by a curious kind of desperation.  And it would feel as if I was entering a command bunker that had been used in an old war and then abandoned in place.  On the dusty situation table, so to speak, the ancient texts still lay scattered about.  Long ago, this outfit had arrogated itself the role of supreme defender of humanity.  It had tracked the movements of the Malignant step by step as it stalked the world, charting its course with split-hair precision.  But there is danger in studying Evil so closely.  Apparently, it puts you within range.  

And as I read the the old pages, the texts seemed lifeless now that nobody was tending to them, and  no one shouting that our soul matters, that our will is free.

---

All too soon we left the one-room grade school.  We moved on to other schools, or entered the work force.  In other words we grew up, and not always for the better.  But for a time at least the sense of our own soul remained present to us.  For most, it briefly survived even the onset of adolescence, to which Italians refer as gli anni difficili, the testing years.

There would be other memorable teachers to help us through that passage.  Professor Carlo Serena would stand out as an inspiring figure throughout middle school[2], and he would remain beloved in the memory of his students long afterwards.  In his late twenties, he seemed the synthesis of the secular and, after his own fashion, spiritual, teacher.  His official duty was the teaching of Italian, Latin, Geography and History, which he carried out with dedication.  But he also found ways of enriching us with his life experience, which he delivered in tales that were both humorous and reflective.  He was, unashamedly, an intellectual man of faith in a world that was valuing the kind less and less. 

Outside the classroom other teachers waited.  My three living grandparents were an inexhaustible source of lore and living examples to what is essential.  My father, with his natural curiosity and frustrated academic bent, tried to encourage me to outgrow my own boundaries.  My aunt Vanda, more of a friend than a relative, taught me the value of ignoring the generation gap and finding common ground in earthy humour and homespun wisdom.  Her husband, Gigi, was an inspiration simply by being the coolest guy I knew, as well as being one of three people with whom I shared a passionate interest in space exploration.  The other two were my brother and our common friend Brunetto, and the three of us became the founding members of Colvere’s first and only rocket club.  Gigi, a man of means, provided us with the best available literature on the subject and with the use of his quality TV set with which to watch American space missions.  

Life’s possibilities seemed boundless.  My teachers and the books I read made me feel fortunate to be living in times that were exciting and relatively safe, and in a naïve way I grew to appreciate those who had made contributions to human progress, to the point of feeling that I owed them personally.  I could not pay them back directly, of course, but perhaps I could do as they had done for the sake of future generations.  I would attempt to live an extraordinary life and make extraordinary contributions to the human journey, and thus repay my social debt.  

Dreaming of becoming an astronaut and striving to view the quest as a way of repaying the debt, I spent my last two years in Italy in the liceo scientifico, a pre-university science program. 

But there was a problem, a happy one of too many riches:  In the pursuit of the larger dream I remained steeped in the nourishing reality of the valley.  The problem was that I had known no other life and so I assumed that this was the baseline, the humble platform from which one could rise to even greater bounties.  But life was already rich by all the standards that mattered, even if I did not know it.  

Like Gigi, many enriched the lives of others by simply being who they were.  This was a big factor in a place where everyone knew everybody else, and the list of such “teachers” would probably include most who lived in Colvere, plus several more in the surrounding towns.  I will select only one among them to represent the rest.

Picture a man in his middle age but looking perhaps a little older, and imagine him walking along a valley road.  Never having owned a motor vehicle, he traveled on foot or bicycle.  He would invariably attract your attention whenever he appeared because he had enormous presence.  Without making a show of it, he projected calmness, kindliness and strength.  You would be drawn to him regardless of your age and situation, feeling a need to tell him your stories and to hear his.  His small family shared his aura, and I used to feel that they were what humanity should be.  His name was Rico, and I leave his sketch incomplete.  Hopefully a description of Gravena, on whose ground Rico had been born and had lived for the first part of his life, will fill the gap.

Gravena

Walking south along the road that courses the Colvera Valley, a traveler would eventually reach a junction at the foot of Mount San Lorenzo, where a secondary road split from the main to begin a climb along a gully.  At lower left would be the creek that had carved the gully.  To the right would be the bulk of the mountain rising steep under a cover of deciduous trees.

After a series of switchbacks hidden by overarching branches, this secondary road would reach open terrain, and the traveler would find himself at the crest of a saddle called The Claupa.  He would now be standing on a high vantage point with glimpses of a wide plain below, mostly patterned farmland punctuated by the lighter patches of distant towns.  A right turn at the crest would take him towards the west, putting a good part of San Lorenzo between him and the Colvera Valley.  Soon the road would become just a groove cut into the mountainside, with the panoramic views temporarily cut off by more vaulting trees.  Finally the traveler would exit the green tunnel to find himself at the edge of an open promontory, and Gravena would unfold before his eyes as if laid out on a green undulating shelf.  At least, that is the way it used to be, and it was still somewhat that way in the summer of 1983. 

To describe that scene today is to face the fact that much of Gravena is no more.  To glimpse a trace of what there used to be one has to peer through overlapping layers of vegetation made unruly by human abandonment and by the stubborn fertility of the land.  Trees and bushes have grown taller on the level stretches of the terrain, blending with the shorter growth on the inclines to form a nearly uniform slant against the sky.  This creates the illusion that the land has lost even the modest flatness it maintains in places.  Stealthily, the growth strangles old barn walls and disaggregates them stone by stone. 

In the eyes of the earlier traveler, however, three groups of well-tended farmhouses would emerge at quarter mile intervals, nestled over the smoother portions of the land.  The wide plain would spread out below, once again an open view, and the traveler might feel a lively breeze rising from it.  The air would carry from the plain the sounds of the small commercial town of Maniago, a far-off buzz of activity punctuated by echoes of metal presses and the occasional beep from a motor vehicle.  Muted by a distance that made them almost soothing, the sounds seemed to better shape Gravena’s own silence. 

The traveler would proceed through a patchwork of hay fields, fruit trees and vegetable gardens, bypassing the first farmhouse compound barely visible below and to the left.  Because of its relatively low position, this place was called Gravena di Sot, which in the Friulan dialect means "Gravena Down Under".  The traveler would then reach the second complex, a cluster of barns connected by common walls with a single day unit at the far end.  The simple beam and stone construction had warped out of true over the years following the subtle shifts of the land.  This group, the first to be actually reached along the main trail, had no definite name, but some referred to it as Gravena di Miec, or “Middle Gravena”.  If the traveler chose to continue on, he would eventually reach an irregular cobblestone path leading to the final group of farmhouses called Gravena di La, or "Far Gravena".  These appellatives, whimsical to modern ears, reflected a no-nonsense attitude to naming places that had been typical of the region.  

Local distinctions of place implied by those three separate names had meaning only when actually standing on the promontory.  From a distance there was only Gravena, a single name with a single magical aura.  Now, forty years later, I pace a room trying to identify the essence of that magic while knowing full well that I can’t.  Gone are the days when I thought that I could weigh that kind of feeling on a scale (an actual numeric gauge!)  No question, at least, that the place had beauty.  It possessed an earthy allure of the kind that has become fashionable today, in the age of agritourism.  But Gravena was the real thing, not some affectation for profit.  

Beauty was certainly part of Gravena's spell, but it was not what defined it.  By the mid nineteen-sixties only a few inhabitants were left to tend its land, and even those were beginning to look for the economic opportunities of larger towns.  They, and those who had preceded them, had not actually owned the land, which belonged to the Count of Maniago.  Although Italian nobility had officially lost all honour and title with the advent of the Republic, many of its members retained a residue of their former prestige and ancestral possessions.  The Count was one of these, but he kept a discreet profile in the lands he rented out.  As a result, Gravena's inhabitants had the kind of contented air that usually goes with land ownership.  Perhaps not actually owning the land may have saved them from the long-term worries, personal envies and the occasional land dispute that too often divide small farm communities.  This may have been just a side aspect, but it contributed to the attraction that everyone felt towards these people.  

To the children and teenagers of Colvere, just the prospect of visiting Gravena had a pleasant touch of the exotic.  Even the expression "going to Gravena" was imbued with it.  Setting out along the ancient road, each inhabitant of Colvere would, sooner or later, embark on a trip from daily reality toward something that always seemed a little more: ideal reality, perhaps.

Along the way they would meet the occasional Gravenar busy at some task: a woman working her vegetable garden, a man tending his vineyard, a husband and wife team working with scythe and rake in the hay fields.  From all, regardless of how busy they were, there would be a warm greeting.  With Gravena so isolated it would have been forgivable if its few inhabitants sought news and gossip, but they showed little such inclination.  Instead, they would attend to the newcomer with the type of genuine attention, warmth and reserve that indicates a kind of nobility.  For as long as the traveler wished it, their time would be his.  And the time would be pleasant, warm almost in a physical sense, and this metaphorical association may be the reason why I remember mostly the Gravena of summertime. 

Gravena hosted the occasional dance in one of its communal courtyards, usually a modest but lively affair.  On benches and rustic tables, fresh fruit and wine as nouveau as it gets would be sampled amid choruses of crickets and flickering swarms of fireflies.  At the peak of the evening, the accordion music, the laughter of the young and the chatter of the old could be heard across the promontory.  There was no electricity in the hamlets, so the only real lighting was provided by kerosene lamps hanging from pergolas.  They would create an attractive play of light and shadow among the grapevines, and sometimes I would retreat to a spot from where I could see, almost at a glance, the lit scene and the deep shade that surrounded it, as well as the changing view of Maniago down in the plain.  The layout of the town would fade as the evening progressed, and a sparse constellation would emerge in its place, growing with each distant lamplight, window and doorway blinking on.  The stars would respond from above with an even more impressive display.  

How could adolescent feelings not be stirred?  I flirted clumsily with some of the girls at the gathering, but the inexperienced heart was set on another one who lived among those lower lights.  She was a city girl, definitely not the type who would show up at a rustic event.  Perhaps it would never even occur to her that up here, perched on the side of the mountain, was a setting fit for a princess’s ball.  But that was my modest fantasy, to see her appear at the edge of the courtyard, to walk up to her and draw her by the hand into the dance, a prelude to something ardent but still indefinite.  

For that matter, could there be a better way to cap a future space mission? A dash back from Houston to a hero’s welcome for Colvere’s favourite son, with the night celebrations culminating right here, in Gravena.  Surely she would show up for that.  And then there would be a slow dance under the hanging grapevines, and the breeze would ruffle the princess’s hair, and the hero would gaze into dark adoring eyes reflecting the glow of the storm lamps.

---

So much tied up in such a small place!  

One evening during my last September in Italy, my best friend Quinto and I approached Rico with an idea: Would he go with us to Gravena to watch the yearly fireworks show about to take place in Maniago?  We explained that the high vantage point might add a new dimension to the spectacle.  We had never seen fireworks from above, before.

Rico, busy like most adults in Colvere, unexpectedly agreed.  It may have been out of an enduring love for his birthplace, or simply to indulge our request.  The latter would have been entirely in keeping with his character.

It got dark by the time we reached the Claupa saddle, and it became pitch black once inside the tree tunnel leading to Gravena.  We asked Rico for a scary story.  He thought about it, and then he reminded us that to our left was Il Bosc di Siora Betta, or Lady Beth’s Woods.  

Ah, we anticipated, this is going to be good.  We had heard of Lady Beth’s Woods.  Although the property was not far from the road, I had never actually visited it, but I had heard that a small manor stood in a clearing, a stone construction with observation turret attached.  The manor had been uninhabited for some time, but a figure in flowing white was rumored to haunt the grounds, presumably the ghost of Lady Beth herself.  It had supposedly been spotted more than once drifting across the courtyard with candle in hand.

Neither Rico nor we boys believed in such things, but that was beside the point.  It was dark and we were walking along a deserted road near a haunted spot: scary story, please.

Rico began, in his usual calm manner. 

Early one morning many years ago, he said, he had gotten up before dawn to go hunting.  He had wanted to be at post before daybreak in order to catch the first flight of migratory woodcock.  It was still dark when he reached the vicinity of Lady Beth’s Manor, and the weather was cold and soggy.  He had keys to the building, so he decided to wait for dawn in more comfortable surroundings.  He got inside and settled down.  

After a few minutes he heard the sound of a step.  It seemed to come from the turret.  Trying not to make a noise himself, he felt his way to the connecting door.  He managed to open it without a creak, just wide enough to get through edgewise.

Quinto and I had not counted on Rico’s delivery style, which had remained calm and even.  His manner lent an unexpected immediacy to the tale, and it was already starting to freak us out.  

“Then, what?”  We urged him.

Inside the turret, he said, it was even darker than in the main hall.  He crept forward until he heard the step again, quite clear and only a few feet ahead.  More forward creep.  Again the sound, at the same relative distance, but, disconcertingly, at a different height, as if the walker were climbing.  Rico remembered the spiral staircase leading to the top.  He advanced quietly until his foot met the bottom rung.  Then he, too, began to climb, with the mysterious footfall in the lead by a rung or two.  

“At that point,” said Rico, calmly as if he were describing a stroll through his vegetable garden, “I spread my left arm outwards until it brushed the wall, and the right one in the other direction until it grazed the railing, and I kept climbing.”  

“Why?” one of us croaked.  “Why did you spread your arms?”

Rico seemed surprised by the question.  “So he couldn’t sneak past me if he decided to turn around.” 

What an answer!  I felt proud of Rico, proud of his story and proud of the fact that he had accepted to come along with us, like an old friend.  

He resumed the tale.  

Step by step, he said, he followed the sound upwards.  Then he noticed that the top windows were getting imperceptibly lighter.  Dawn was nearing.  

But the source of the sound was gradually coming in line with one of the windows; the still invisible figure should have been blocking the light with its head or shoulder, but it was not happening.  Rico was apparently following disembodied steps.

Only a few rungs remained.  Then, with the sound finally halting on the top landing, Rico let his hands converge forward.  One of them brushed against something sheer, like an infinitely delicate fold of fabric.  Instantly, two glowing buttons materialized in front of his face.

“What?” I yelled.

“What?” Yelled Quinto.

“A big owl,” said Rico.  “It turned and flew out of the window.”

Those two glowing eyes that I had never actually seen would continue to haunt my imagination.  They would come to symbolize all that is mysterious, but also the exact converse, the promise that a rational explanation could be found the end of every tale.  They were like the eyes of the unknown, but also like the bright eyes of Athena’s owl. 

We exited the tree tunnel, which would have been dark-green in daytime but which was now just dark.  We walked past a fork in the trail whose descending arm led to Gravena di Sot, Rico's former home, and we continued on until we reached Gravena di Miec.  We walked over one last fold in the land, and once again the darkened plain spread out below us, made visible by a sparse web of streetlights gathering in the direction of Maniago.  We knew that at the center of the web, hidden by some trees in the foreground, a triangular piazza would be blazing in the lights of a festival.  

On previous night visits Gravena had been lively and Maniago quiet, but tonight the reverse was true.  The hidden square was pleasantly noisy.  A band was playing and the notes rose and fell with the breeze, mixing in with the echoes of people calling out, joking and laughing, the sounds of an optimistic age.

Gravena was still.  Even our presence did not seem to stir it.  We entered what Rico called “the Little House”, the small room attached to the row of barns.  His family had kept it immaculate through frequent visits, and its modest space maintained a peculiar welcoming feel.  Just inside the door and to the left was a wooden bench set below a windowsill. By one of the side walls was a small table with three chairs, and, against the far wall, a pantry.  Placed against the remaining wall was a wood stove, which Rico loaded with kindling while Quinto and I trimmed the wick of a kerosene lamp.  

There was still an hour to go before the fireworks, so we sat down to wait.  Eventually Rico got up and walked over to the pantry, from which he took a bottle of wine and three glasses.  He filled them and distributed them with measured motions, and we accepted them with barely audible salute’s.  

Gradually, almost predictably, time began to leave the scene.  The stove gave off its heat, making soft pops and hisses.  The lamp flickered, making the shadows shift.  The need to talk faded.  

Once again there was the feeling that the night was reclaiming its domain and that we were barely sheltered against it.  At one time my own house in Colvere had been inadequate in fending off the night, but then electricity had arrived and the night had receded.  Radio had come next, then TV, then public lighting, and the night had kept on retreating.  Soon I would move to a large city that never slept, and then distinctions between day and night would become just a matter of convention.  But here, in the empty hamlet of Middle Gravena, the night still dealt with trespassers on its own terms.   

There was a glossy magazine, some two years old, left on the table from a previous season.  The pages had become loose, and Quinto and I took different sections and began to leaf through them.  I soon became engrossed in an article about a new theory on the Kennedy assassination.

This reading business may seem antisocial, with two youngsters ignoring their elder who was also their host.  But the particulars of our activities were not important, because we were following the only protocol that mattered: Do not disturb the moment that has come to envelop this place.  It had seemingly risen out of the ground and all the things that the ground sustained, and it kept everything suspended in a stillness that had its own idea of time.  It was easy and natural to accept its arrival and conform to it.    

Quinto finally broke the spell. 

“Listen to this,” he said, reading from the Comics page.  “An earthworm pokes his head out of the dirt and sees another worm doing the same.  ‘How pretty you are,’ says the first worm, ‘Would you like to marry me?’  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ says the other.  'I am not another worm; I am your tail.’”  

We all laughed loudly, out of proportion to the tiny joke.  Then we got up and began to put things back in their place.  Time had resumed.

We left Gravena di Miec and plodded in the dark towards our chosen destination, a bluff past Far Gravena with a clear view of Maniago’s square.  We had carried split wood from the farmhouse, and now we lit a fire at the edge of the bluff, on a patch of bare ground by a boundary rush.

The appointed time for the fireworks came and went.  The town lights, which had been dimmed in anticipation, came back on accompanied by distant groans of disappointment.  We added more wood to the fire.

I moved to a spot from where I could see Quinto and Rico’s faces against the dark bulk of San Lorenzo, and they seemed to represent all the people I was about to leave.  Rico stood on land that belonged to him without actual ownership.  Sort-of mystically it also belonged to Quinto and me, who had never even worked that earth.  It was dubious ownership all around, but at that moment I felt that the converse, which is often used to describe the relationship of Italians to their land, did not hold true in any sense.  No one belongs to the land, no matter how seductive and comforting the notion.  And yet there was a like a painful tug, a hint that there might be losses ahead.

Aside from that vague premonition, there would have been no way of guessing that the coming journey would indeed involve a dark stretch, or that one day Gravena would come to symbolize a lost paradise, the vanished Eden of an idea called Reality.  In a more distant future I would even wonder whether even the tale of Genesis might not have originated with a similar loss for its author, a loss of innocence and a loss of mind.  He had written about a tree of knowledge, and of the price paid for its violation.   Knowledge!

That speculation would take place in a waking nightmare, but tonight there was only the dreamy reality of Gravena. Sensing that the images might outlast the setting, I tried to commit Gravena to memory just as it looked, a magical place suspended above a light-studded plain, a shaded balcony stealing the limelight from the celebrations in town. 

As it had done in nearly all my previous visits, a breeze rose from the plain to ripple the grass along the inclines of San Lorenzo.  The waves set off into the dark, climbing towards a summit where an ancient chapel stood nestled in the slope.  Soon the breeze would brush against the pane of the single recessed window through which, in daytime, light fell on a sculpted effigy of Saint Lawrence Martyr.  Then the stirring would sweep past, and the chapel would resume thesilent vigil that had already lasted nearly a thousand years.  

That continuity now seemed remarkable, but a different time was already around the corner.  It would be of lives separating and moving on, of surroundings forsaken and replaced in an unanchored world that would keep changing at a moment’s notice.   A grand certainty wavered, and was replaced by a question:  If so much could change in such a short a time, was there anything that stayed constant? 

Maybe there wasn’t.  Maybe nothing stayed the same except for this awareness.  

It was like a curtain lifting and instantly dropping back, cutting off a glimpse that had been too brief to decipher but too alluring to forget.  What is this about?  

Three more months would pass before we would leave for Milan’s airport, but they would leave no trace.  The last memory of Italy is of that night on the bluff, with the lights of the town below, the mountain looming behind, and that odd new question hanging in the air.  I had entertained it a little too long and now it would follow me like a stray dog, sometimes trailing and almost forgotten, and at other times standing in front to block the path.

The fireworks eventually came.  They were small and distant, not at all what we had expected, but they still managed to thrill those in the piazza, who hooted and clapped as they had always done at this, Maniago’s yearly farewell to the season.  There was a crescendo of flashes and bursting noise that ended with a brighter flash and a loud thud, and then darkness.  

The echoes rolled off the cliffs and dispersed along the plain, and when they died only the sounds of Gravena remained, the soft and changeless whisperings of a land stirring in its sleep. 

III

Things did not start out well in the new land.  

Perhaps it was to be expected, since these were no longer the years when emigration had been a dire necessity, and while Italy was still less prosperous than Canada, it was not so to the extent that all other considerations vanished.  And there were uncomfortable differences that were not about nation compared to nation, but about differing environments, starting with the physical.  In the space of a day, a familiar landscape of hills, rocky peaks and tumbling streams had beenreplaced by an urban expanse spreading out monotonously under an indifferent sky.  Naturally, this would have happened even if I had moved to, say, Milan or Turin, and therefore much of what would follow could be just the classic case of a country boy losing his way in the big city. 

In the years since, I would come across similar stories, often of students coming to my labs from small colleges in the interior of British Columbia.  Many would arrive with wide-eyed expectations. This was University they had come to, a place where wonderful things would be learned, and love of subject would be matched by love of teaching it, all in a lofty place dedicated to learning.

Almost invariably such students did not do well.  Forgetting my own early difficulties, very much in the past by then, I would impute their failures on their inability to adapt, and I would grow short with their various naivités.  

But a chance meeting on a nearby island would change that view.  

Mayne Island has a picturesque lighthouse, which is a reference point for the few tourists who visit by ferry each summer.   Occasionally I would also go there with my family, and during one such stroll on the grounds a girl approached us.  She said she was the daughter of the lighthouse keeper, and told us of how her family had come to this particular location from a more remote lighthouse in the north.  She seemed to be about fourteen, well-spoken and genuine. Without prompting, she described an idyllic childhood spent in a world of wild beauty of which she and her brother had had free run.  

We asked whether she had ever gotten bored.  

Not at all, she said.  She told us of how her father had taught her to scuba-dive, and she painted vivid descriptions of their dives beneath long festoons of kelp, which swayed like aquatic dancers in shafts of sunlight.

But, for all that, had she ever felt lonely?

That brought out a hesitation.  

Yes and no, she finally said.  But her family recognized that she had to join the larger world sooner or later, and this move to Mayne Island was only a transition to her eventual destination, which was the University of Victoria.  It was part of a planned, gradual acclimation towards her ultimate goal of a degree in marine biology, in order for her to gain a better understanding of the world she had already enjoyed.

When she took leave of us with a wave that was as unaffected as her speech, I turned to Elayne and said that the world was simply not ready for her.  I had too many memories of similar students who had floundered in an environment where high marks and a go-get attitude counted far more than love of learning.  To survive she would have to compromise and change in unfortunately predictable ways, and what else would she lose along the way? Because of that kind of thinking, what should have been a pleasant and hopeful encounter became a bit of a downer.  Why had we created a system that devalued bright innocence?   

I wish I had known on that day that that particular girl would indeed go through the academic wringer and receive the mental bruises that go with the territory, but that in the end she would come out a success both academically and professionally; and, best of all, in her personal life as well.  

So, some made it and some didn’t, and sometimes it felt like a toss of the coin.  My coin stood on edge from the moment we landed in Canada. 

---

We arrived in Montreal in early December, and we spent the first weeks mostly indoors because of cold weather.  January started out clear and even colder, but eventually I began to poke about out of doors.

But, instead of hitting the ground running as I had fantasized, I soon found myself struggling and stumbling, especially in school.  I was almost seventeen and I had effectively become deaf and dumb at an age when status and popularity count, in any culture.  

I also found myself in grade nine instead of the expected eleven.  In some ways it seemed reasonable, since I could write little English, speak it even less and grasp the meaning of spoken sentence not at all.  But I was told through a school secretary who spoke some Italian that I would soon catch up.  

My first day in school was in early January, on a morning when the thermometer hovered around –40º.  The school principal walked me to my first class where I was assigned a desk at the very back.  I took out a miniscule Italian-English and English-Italian dictionary and prepared for a steep climb.  The classroom did not have the futuristic look that I had naively expected, and the students, all male, looked a little rough around the edges.  All around was the gibberish of the language I was supposed to learn, but I could not even tell where a word ended and the next one began.  It was all a little discouraging.  Then I heard a whisper coming from the desk at my immediate right. 

"Sei italiano?"

Whoa, what a stroke of luck: There was another Italian in the class, and his desk just happened to be next to mine! Prospects were looking better already.  He seemed a sociable type and I hoped that I could associate with him at recess.

The recess bell rang, and the classroom erupted in a cacophony—of Italian dialects!  Students were calling out to each other by the name of hometowns. 

"Oh, Palermo!"  

"Shut up, Campobasso!" 

Sometimes they even used the names of regional dishes for the purpose (“Baccala`!”), all at an acoustic level worthy of the back streets of Naples.  

It was bewildering.  I turned to my new friend, Giuseppe, for an explanation. 

"Didn't you know?" he said.  He informed me that Saint Pius X was one of two high schools that catered mainly to children of Italian immigrants.  He then pointed out the only three native English speakers in the class.  He said that most of the teachers were Jesuit Brothers and that they were generally good at teaching.

This was not at all what I had expected.  Where was the vaunted technological environment I had longed for?  Andfriars?  For teachers?  In North America?  It seemed a joke, but I would have been less amused if had I realized that I had been registered, along with Giuseppe who had preceded me by a few months, in one of the “lower” classes.  Pius had a system that blatantly emphasized academic status by the letter it appended to a class number, 'A' being the highest.  Our classroom was 2F.  Having come from a system where academic streaming within a given school was unknown, I never caught on until long out of high school.

Giuseppe took it upon himself to educate me about the larger picture.  He described himself as a lady's man, which I promptly disbelieved.  He claimed that Montreal was bursting with frustrated young women and that it was the lot of a burdened few, like him, to alleviate their situation.  Sincere or not, the talk was amusing, but soon I began to suspect that there was some substance to it, and I was getting confirmation from other students. 

The more I came to believe what they were saying, the less sense it made.  It was completely at odds with what I had expected.  Canada was an advanced country, and surely that had to apply to the relations between the sexes.  How could young men talk so cynically about young women?  Admittedly, the young women themselves did not seem to mind; in fact, they almost seemed to encourage the attitude.  This irked me because I did not simply like girls: I worshipped them, usually from a distance.  In Italy the girls had played hard-to-get, leading me to conclude that it was a natural feminine trait.  Now it seemed that I had to rethink the whole approach.

In the meantime the weeks went by until winter suddenly just ended, with an abrupt change in temperature and a quick thaw that exposed the previous year’s grass, already greening, and a number of rubber overshoes that had been lost during past snowstorms.  With spring came fishing season and the first chance to see the forests of which I had heard so much, and again there was an initial disappointment.  The outdoors, too, did not turn out as expected.  Quebec was short on the kind of whitecap mountains and sparkly blue streams that geography books abroad show as typical of Canada.  But I learned to appreciate what there was, starting with the sheer vastness of it.  And although most streams from the Laurentian hills had a ubiquitous mud color, they contained lively trout.  What these lacked in size they made up for in numbers and willingness to bite.  Soon I began to fall in love with the land, especially with its almost mystical sense of solitude, something that seemed to be at the base of its relationship with its people.  I felt a special healing from this aspect as I struggled to set down roots in new soil.

Giorgio, Pieri, Elia and Santin, all of them my senior and already integrated in Canadian life, took me under their wing, and I shared with them what fishing knowledge I had learned in Italy.  We fished, camped, and cooked our catch by the fire, complementing the meal with cheese, salami and generous quantities of homemade wine.  On such wings the talk invariably soared into the night.  Canadian and Italian anecdotes, mostly comedic, flew back and forth over the campfire.  At such times I could forget my difficulties in starting anew, and the slate would again look attractive for being blank.  Once again all things seemed possible, a sentiment no doubt encouraged by the wine.  In the timeless environment life seemed whole once more, with past and future connecting over what was essentially neutral territory, neither old world nor new.  

The land was elemental, and it stirred elemental thoughts.  How clichéd that a moon rising over an expanse of raw wilderness should reawaken a longing for dark eyes, likely closed at this time, in the last minutes before dawn six thousand kilometers away.  

But, also, how strange: The distance, with all the unattainabilities it implied, added something positive to the dream.  The young woman who slept not suspecting that someone was pining for her while fighting off a cloud of mosquitoes,would, in all likelihood, already be seeing someone else.  But the distance kept the dreamer from knowing for sure, and so it preserved the dream.  

Such fantasies were earthy, but also imbued with an innocent kind of poetry about two individuals who understood the nature of their own humanity, stretched as it was between the generating earth and the sky that beaconed, and who felt and acknowledged the same attraction for each other.  It was still the night sky of Gravena that framed their imagined secret meetings, through which a passionate longing would become a commitment and then a permanent union.  Naturally, the union would be blessed within the hallowed simplicity of a stone chapel, high on the slopes of San Lorenzo.  

But, back in the city, Giuseppe had a rude awakening in store.  

One day we went for a stroll through a park by the waters of the Saint Lawrence.  It was Spring and the place looked bright and breezy, with several girls lounging about in short skirts.  Giuseppe had been trying to convince me that his stories were true, and that, in any case, the whole business of picking up girls was no big deal.  I was getting a little tired of the talk, so I interrupted him.  

"Prove that,” I said. “Show me that it is not such a big deal."

He immediately stopped and looked around.  "Point to a girl,” he said, “any girl.  She’ll be in my arms in three minutes."

I gave him a skeptical grin.  Sitting on a nearby bench was a blond girl of 18 or 19, reading a book.  She was pretty and serious-looking.

"That one," I said.

"Time me," he replied, and promptly walked toward her.

I walked past trying not to be obvious, and sat down at a different bench.  Within a minute he had found out her language (English) and obtained permission to sit next to her.  He asked for her name, and she gave it to him.  Then, using the remainder of the one-hundred-or-so words he knew, he proceeded to dazzle her in ways that were beyond me.  It would have made little difference if she had spoken French, because he was armed with a hundred words of that language as well.  

He plainly intrigued her.  He made her smile and giggle.  At the two-and-a-half minute mark he tried to slip his arm over her shoulder.  She pushed it away, but she did not seem too upset about the attempt.  When he persisted, she extricated herself, got up and walked off.

My sense of vindication was short lived.  As she walked past me, having sensed that I had come with Giuseppe, she gave a backwards nod, with a half smile that seemed to say: “Quite a guy, that friend of yours!”

Giuseppe rejoined me full of explanations and excuses.  He had not known how much time had elapsed; he could not operate effectively while constantly checking his watch; had he known that he still had thirty seconds, he could have paced himself better; in any case, if he had had five minutes instead of three, she would have been in the bag.

I barely listened.  His self-justifications were completely misplaced: He had won handily as far as I was concerned.  The three-minute limit had been absurd to begin with, so I was flummoxed by what he had been able to do in even less than that.  I had selected that particular girl because she had looked serious and absorbed in her book, not just pretending to read while casting her eye about.  I had also thought that her prettiness would serve my purpose, because someone with her looks would not need to go to a park to meet guys.

Giuseppe had been telling the truth all along.

---

That episode marked the start of an unsettling period of discovery.  A completely unexpected world was unfolding, and not just for me, the newcomer, but for almost everyone in the western hemisphere.  It was the spring of 1968, and the social trends that had exploded on the California campuses the previous year were flaring out across the continent.  Old values were being discredited, social commitments were being torn up and battle lines were drawn between the generations.  Above the turmoil there seemed to be only one agreement: old rules no longer applied.  

It was bewildering.  My coming to Canada had been like walking out the door one fine morning only to trip and fall in the midst of a revolution.

Like many others before and after, that revolution would deliver on very few of its promises, and in some cases it would lead to their very antithesis.  That a war was stopped by popular demand was certainly a genuine achievement, but probably the only one.  The same generation that was about to successfully oppose the fighting in Vietnam would grow up to support equally dubious wars.  Former calls for kindness, understanding and love among all people would turn to cries for national revenge over manipulated perceptions of wrongs received.  The very same people who, in their youth, had decried the evils of materialism would later embrace a savagely exploitative form of capitalism that would have made their reviled fathers wince. 

No one could have foreseen such a future in 1968.  As for myself, I had found the zeitgeist hard to embrace for other reasons.  

There had been a vague awkwardness about the whole movement from the start, perhaps most easily perceived by someone coming in sideways, in mid scene.   That promise of a new golden age seemed too easy and too sweeping, with the modalities deliberately kept vague and poorly articulated.  Yet, as a young person, you did not dare question any of it. If you had to ask for clarification, then obviously you just did not get it, and no one under twenty-five wanted to carry that mark. 

I moped around the apartment after the episode in the park while trying to understand what it all meant for me.  The dream of becoming an astronaut was fading fast, and I recognized some rightness in that.  Fantasy is fantasy, and relinquishing some of it could be construed as a sign of growing up.  But how many more dreams and fantasies would I have to abandon in order to be accepted by my new peers?  Old rules were out, it seemed, but I was full of old rules.  Were they really so untenable?

I forced myself to imagine what my old self would look like, living an alternate reality in the old village, in ignorance of all this.  

The image was that of an innocent youth alternating in character between seriousness and good-natured craziness, full of hopes and dreams, and willing to follow rules laid out by others in order to reap a greater prize in the future.  Was I still that? 

I was no longer sure.  In many ways I was, but in others I had already changed to suit the new environment, and the sum total put me in a kind of no-man's land where I could find neither peace with myself nor a sense of belonging with others.

What was about to happen ranks in significance with the events of another night in another city, a decade and more in the future.  Despite the comparison, this time there would be no terror, no mystery, nothing even vaguely supernatural.  To the extent that any change would result, it would be initially mild, hardly noticeable.  But change it would be, and one that too many have been willing to undergo in their own time.  When faced with a choice between what feels right and what is dictated by the current flavor of the collective, it is often the fear of being left out that decides.  In the late 1960’s, the felt pressure did not come only from one’s own age group.  Incitement to cynicism was heard from all quarters, particularly from institutions that had always constituted society’s public face. Some political leaders, most intellectuals and virtually the whole entertainment world repeated and amplified one message: There is nothing sacred about you.  In fact, there is nothing sacred about anything.  The best thing you can do is to desecrate what is left and move on.  Enjoy your new freedom.  

I was alone, sitting on my brother’s bed and looking across to mine as if my old values and beliefs were laid out over it for examination.

First, my old guiding light, religion.  I had gone to several Sunday masses at a neighbourhood church that was shaped in the fashionably abstract architecture of the day.  The language of the service had been different but the rite had seemed the same—yet not quite the same.  The first time I had entered the church I had been struck by the sight of the Vatican flag by the altar.  Opposite to it had been the Canadian flag.  I had found the display of national symbols in a sacred place disturbing.  

The homily had consisted of the priest pointing to a huge chart on a tripod and talking about the state of the church finances, which apparently were not good.  Later on, when my English improved, I grasped that many solutions to the church's problems seemed to involve bingo games and dances in the hall beneath the floor of the church proper.  It was hard not to compare this state of affairs to the simple, pious struggles of poor Fr. Ernesto!  It was not, however, an entirely fair comparison.  Until the 1980’s, Italian clergy had benefited from being on state payroll and had not needed to worry excessively about funding.  Nevertheless, I felt a lessening of the emotional ties that had bound me to my Church.  In my mind, the Catholic Church was still synonymous with religion in general; I had simply not considered other sources.  Consequently, the accumulating disappointments were feeding a sense of spiritual loss, and I felt it strongly on that evening.  

Second, my future.  What would it be like, now that the prospects offered by the new land seemed so mixed?  Few of my fellow students seemed to put much stock in the kind of future I had expected.  To them, it smacked of science fiction.  For most, high school was just something to be endured until a real job could be found.  A "real job" was expected to be blue collar or perhaps something ill-defined with a vague assumption of high pay.  Not realizing that those were the aspirations of students relegated to the classroom of low academic standing, I formed a false opinion of Canadian education.

Third, social relations.  In emigrating I had lost my place in a pecking order that, back in Colvere and in the liceo, had been fair.  But now, with my primitive English and total cluelessness about North American society, I did not stand a chance.  One could always try to pull a Giuseppe, but I was beginning to suspect that you either are a Giuseppe or you are not.  In any case, I saw a price for social acceptance that seemed too high, which was the abandonment of ingrained beliefs and principles, those same ones that, at present, were relegating me to the margins.  Yet, if I did not jettison at least some of them, what would be the alternative?  A life of solitude? 

A personal view had been hanging in the balance—a coin on edge—but the episode in the park had tipped it.  Sitting cross-armed on my brother’s bed, I reached a decision: I would change my outlook and ways, even if it should take time.  Something, however, had to go immediately.  The figure I visualized sitting on the other bed could no longer stand as the image of myself.  

"I am sorry," I said to a shadow that seemed to look back in puzzlement, "but I have to bury you."  And with that, in another evocation of a future day, I fell to my knees. Then, slumping forward, I planted my face on the comforter as tears welled up.  I had never cried for no reason before, but the tears flowed easily, of their own accord and without the accompaniment of corresponding feelings  The night of the fireworks had been only a prequel; this abstract and unforced decision was the real goodbye. 

---

I gradually found my Canadian legs.  Little by little, what had been unusual, even disconcerting, became ordinary.  Finally there came a magic moment when I began to spontaneously think in English.  Not yet routinely, but to a sufficient degree as to be able to speak without mental translation, something that had made my speech stilted as well as heavily accented.  

As for the accent, Giuseppe left me some advice before moving on to another school.  "Forget about losing your accent," he had said.  "You are stuck with it for life, so you may as well enjoy the advantages." 

Aside from English, the classes were not teaching me anything new.  But high school gave me resources that I had not enjoyed at the liceo, such as the unfettered access to a library.  The liceo's library had been a monumental affair, built in marble and semidetached from the main building in a way that intimated separateness and lack of welcome.  One look at the interior, with its rows of catalog-card boxes and a marble counter where one would go to request a book (no browsing allowed among the stacks) and I had felt discouraged from ever using it.

By contrast, the high school library was an integral part of the building; it had a welcoming environment with a book selection that was probably smaller than the liceo's, but vastly more used.  The high library usage may have been due to an additional factor.   The librarian, Miss Malone, was in her late twenties and one of the few female presences in the all-male half of the school.  Many of the shyer boys had a crush on her, and I was no exception.  But what really made me return to the library on a regular basis were the three volumes of the Feynman's Lectures on Physics.  A love for that subject, largely unrequited, began on those reading tables in a warmly lit space surrounded by shelves and a few central book stacks.  It was a cozy place, especially in winter when it felt like a warm refuge in many ways. 

As the senior year started, my post-secondary plans remained unsettled.  The High School experience had been largely disappointing, and I was considering returning to Italy on my own.  Then a friend talked me into applying for college. She convinced me that all alternatives would remain open and that I had nothing to lose except for a small application fee.  I finally went along with her suggestion, and somehow I was accepted in the Science Program at Loyola College, another Jesuit institution that was on its way to becoming fully secular.  It was miraculous that I had made it that far, considering I had not yet taken any serious math, or even a single science course.  Besides my parents' unbelievable patience and support, financial and otherwise, I owe my university degree to that girl who insisted on it, and also to my English teacher, Brother Alan White, who wrote a reference letter that probably tipped the scales.

---

My first day at Loyola was an eye opener.  The paved path leading to the Administration Building was flanked by a couple of shade trees, and hanging upside down from one of the branches was a student in coattails and top hat playing a flute.  Another stood by the entrance in a Dracula outfit.  The lawns were dotted with groups of young people reclining back languidly, each group listening to a longhaired man playing an instrument, almost always a guitar.  The atmosphere was sunny and relaxed, and it felt like I had just joined a society of traveling minstrels.  Later in the day I ran into three high school acquaintances, and we went to have lunch together under a tree.  Unlike the richer students we had brought our own lunches in brown bags, and we laughed when we realized we had all been packed the same items by our respective mothers or grandmothers: butter-and-jam sandwiches on white bread.  We exchanged our first impressions of college life, and we found ourselves in complete agreement: so far, so good.  I looked over the quadrangle with great satisfaction:  This, then, was the way it was going to be.

Well, not quite.  Classes commenced and I was immediately in trouble.  Too late I realized that this was not high school; at least, not the kind of high school I had known.  I was overwhelmed.  To make me feel even worse, almost no other student seemed to share my predicament.  How had everyone managed to become so smart during the summer holidays?  I was still clueless about having been in the wrong high school stream.

I barely passed my first term courses.  All too quickly winter had returned, my fourth in Canada.  The three months of the first term had flown; how had that happened?  My friends agreed:  Time was speeding up; life was becoming an unforgiving hurtle race.

The second term began.  I had thought that, strong with the bitter experience of the first, I could do better in the second, but the middle of the term was approaching and things were again looking grim.  

I woke up on a Sunday morning to the usual cold and snow.  It was Valentine’s day, which was also my brother's birthday.  The rest of the family was already in the kitchen where my mother was baking the birthday cake, and  I was about to join them when the phone rang.  I picked it up, and I was startled to hear the voice of an Italian operator announcing a call from Italy.  Intercontinental calls were inconvenient and expensive in those days, and this was the first such call for us.  It had to be bad news, likely to have befallen my mother's side of the family, the one with most members at risk due to age.  

But it was not about someone old.  My aunt Vanda had died, suddenly, at the age of 42.  That night my mother flew to Italy to be with her parents, and my paternal grandmother took over temporary care of our household.

I went to classes the next day, but my mind was not on school.  During breaks I mentioned my loss to some of my new friends, and they looked at me as if wondering why I was bringing it up.  I decided to go home early, and I boarded a bus to the subway station. 

That Which Persists

While waiting for the train, I kept thinking about what had happened.  I looked below the opposite platform, to the third rail carrying 750V.  One touch of that and I would be in the same place as my aunt's.  How could such a thing be possible?  How, for that matter, could a person who had been so vibrant and sparkling with life suddenly not be?  At one moment she would have been experiencing her existence as I was experiencing mine, and the next moment… What?  

It made no sense.  The whole “life thing” seemed suddenly peculiar.  I looked away from the third rail and focused on my hands.  My hands. I considered not only them, but also my arms, my head, my brain.  If they were all mine, how could they be taken away, just like that, at a whim?  And at whose whim, anyway?  Fate's?  I did not believe in fate.  God's?  I still believed in God, but not in the way I used to. 

My religious beliefs had by then become abstract, more becoming of a man of science.  For some time I had been fashionably claiming that my religion was like Einstein’s, who had professed an affinity for Spinoza's God.  I had been parroting that claim in spite of knowing next to nothing about either Spinoza or his god—or Einstein, for that matter. Nevertheless my own beliefs, whatever their exact form, had become so deprived of specifics as to be almost meaningless.  I was paying the price on that day, because my faith in its new form could not provide any kind of comfort.  In fact, it had even taken away some of my capacity to mourn, because my sense of disbelief was greater than my grief.

It is not possible, I thought, that something as essential as self-awareness can just disappear.  It must either move to another place or be transformed into something else.  Mass-energy is transformed in various ways but remains conserved.  How can self-awareness, something that is even more fundamental, simply vanish?

I was struck by my own thought.  Could self-awareness really be more fundamental than mass-energy, more basic than any aspect of the material world?  What if…?  I started pacing back and forth along the platform.  What if self-awareness were at the base of all things?  It seemed like an upside-down way of looking at the issue, and it certainly did not provide specifics as to what happens when we die, but it did rephrase the question in an interesting way: What happens to the world when self-awareness leaves it? 

Looking at the problem from that angle, it was no longer the persistence of awareness at the moment of death that was in question, but the continuity of the world.  From an existential standpoint, if continuity of self-awareness could be assured, it seemed that there was no remaining problem that truly mattered.   After all, once death lowers the curtain, who really cares about what happens to the world?  The ‘curtain’ imagery was intriguing in itself.  A theater curtain is lowered to separate one space from another; it is not dropped to smother the actors—or the audience.  Perhaps this business of dying had been misrepresented.

It became hard to focus on schoolwork from that point on.  I maintained an interest in Physics, but only for its more esoteric aspects.  Glancing at the curriculum of the coming years I could see that the courses would not quench the new thirst.  I began to haunt the Vanier Library, a cubic structure with a covered central atrium.  I found the section on Science and Philosophy in the basement stacks and began to speed-read through books by Eddington, Whitehead and Jeans, among others.  Their contents gripped me, providing a metaphysical outlook that complemented that of conventional Physics.  But it never seemed enough.  Strangely, I do not remember coming across the term ‘Solipsism’ at the time, but it is just as likely that I did, and simply overlooked it at the rate I was reading.  In any case, I was about to arrive at the same concept through a back door.  

Several of the sources, as well as Feynman's Lectures on Physics, had mentioned Einstein's Equivalence Principle, which had been at the base of the general theory of relativity.  The principle asserted an equivalence between a uniform gravitational field and a uniformly accelerated reference frame.  What struck me was not so much the physics behind the principle, but a possible generalization: If two putatively different phenomena are empirically indistinguishable, then they are the same phenomenon.

I had been reviewing the Equivalence Principle at a time when I had also been puzzling over another kind of problem.  Since that sad Valentine's Day I had not stopped wondering about the nature of awareness.  More recently, I had reshaped the issue into a mental game that I played in my spare time, usually on the bus.  It went like this: Say that my brain were disconnected from my body without my knowing.  Say also that the nerve endings, which normally connected the brain to the various sense receptors and muscles, were reconnected instead to a computerized simulation system.  

Waking up from the surreptitious operation, I would start to get up.  At least, I would think that I was in the process of getting up.  In reality, the simulator would detect the nerve signals directed to where my legs had been, and would respond by sending pulses to the nerves that normally would carry sensory feedback to the brain.  The perceptual result would be:  The legs are moving.  Simultaneously, the image of the room, which would have been fed to the optic nerves by the simulation system, would be modified so as to create the visual illusion of motion.  Nerves normally monitoring the vestibular system would be fed pulses indicating a change in body posture.  By applying the proper inputs to as many nerves as necessary, the illusion would be complete: I am getting out of bed and walking to the window.  What a beautiful day.  I think I'll go outside.  

All the while my brain would be floating in a jar with wires sticking out[3].

My “dilemma game” had consisted of trying to devise a way of breaking the illusion created by the arrangement, or of otherwise proving that the experience was, in fact, just a simulation.  There seemed to be no way of doing so, yet I had kept on trying as a way of passing the time while commuting to and from school.  But now the modified equivalence principle was providing an interesting perspective:  If there existed no empirical way of determining whether a given aware experience originated in conventional reality or in a simulation, was there any point to treating the concepts of “real experience” and “simulated experience” as distinct? [4]  

As Einstein, so I: One cannot distinguish between them, so their nature must be the same.  Besides, "reality" could ultimately be experienced only subjectively.  "Objective verification” of any given experience was a self-contradictory concept. 

In view of these simple considerations it seemed that reality was merely a selected illusion promoted to objective status by general consensus.  That conclusion, once arrived at, seemed self-evident.  But it also raised a flag: Where does that 'general consensus' come from?  Other people?  Empirical scientists and philosophers?  But their presence, too, could only be experienced subjectively, and the same went for their data and conclusions. 

No use beating around the bush.  The only thing I could “really” experience was my own awareness.  All else—other people, the Earth, the universe—was simply a collection of subjective constructs artificially promoted to objective status.

Where did that leave me?  In a stronger and freer position, of course.  If ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’ were merely two words expressing an artificial distinction, I was free to label my experiences with either.  Calling my life ‘illusion’ had considerable advantages, including the freedom to do away with a lot of moral overhead.  After all, how much weight could moral considerations, or even just ethical ones, carry in a world of illusion? 

I declared it out loud to all who would listen: If one could not objectively distinguish between the real and the illusory, how could one talk of right and wrong as if they were distinct concepts, or, even more absurdly, as if their distinction were absolute?  Moral relativism, too, now seemed self-evident.  

And so, one by one and in rapid succession, the various supports of an old way of understanding life, which had somehow survived the burial of my first persona, fell. 

It took very little to push them over.  Up until that time I had been politically and socially conservative, almost too far to the right.  That came to an end during my second summer job at a small cabinet-making outfit.  The owner would often drive the truck for the deliveries, and he would take me along to help with the unloading and to ensure that he stayed awake on the longer trips.  On one of those runs he started to nod off, so I tried to keep up the chatter by commenting on the state of the economy, which had been weak of late.  

“If unemployment keeps rising,” I said, “we will be in trouble.”

“Not at all,” he replied, instantly revived.  “Some unemployment is healthy—a rate between seven and ten percent is ideal.”

This was news to me.  “Why?”

“It keeps a lid on wages,” he said, obviously forgetting that he was talking to an employee. “If unemployment is too low the workers begin to make unreasonable demands.”

I was flabbergasted.  He had just validated a clumsy piece of Communist propaganda, one that held that private businesses would always seek to weaken and exploit their workers.  And he had confirmed it very casually, as if stating the most natural thing in the world!  Until that moment I had subscribed to the idea that businesses did what they did, at least in part, with the best interests of their workers in mind.  The propaganda from the right (and how could I call it differently now?) had assured me that this had always been the case, and I had believed it.  

Nothing works more effectively in turning a person than a feeling of betrayal.  I instantly converted to Communism.  It was not a blind conversion, either, since I was familiar with the ideology from current events and from many debates I had sustained with articulate Italian Communists.  

But perhaps I knew those beliefs a little too well.  Once the anger of betrayal simmered down, I had to recognize anew that Communism was not something that one could seriously embrace.  

The Right had betrayed me; the Left was no good.  Was there anything else?

Less than two weeks after my first hasty conversion, I reneged it for something that was neither Right nor Left: Anarchism.  As a result, I lost en passant what little religion I had left.  

There was no room for God in Anarchism.  Perhaps the “doctrine” meant to exclude only the co-opted, conveniently shaped God with which the churches bamboozled their congregations, but a residual anger left me in no mood to split hairs.  Out went every trace of tolerance towards any form of religion.

The transformation from the upbeat, innocently idealistic, spiritually inclined boy from the Italian hills was now complete.  For the few who cared, I was now intellectually independent, freethinking in all areas, a logical positivist in the starkest sense of the word, an anarchist and an atheist.  Most importantly, I knew what I thought no one else did, that reality and illusion were the same.  When logical positivism proved irreconcilable with this last realization, the latter, too, went out the window.

I sought others to confront them with all these insights, but first I needed to name the most significant one.  Not knowing that it already had a name, I called it “Subjectivity”, borrowing the term, I think, from Whitehead.  And thus began the most regrettable period of my life.

---

Over the next few years, every acquaintance became a target for conversion to my new way of thinking, and some were easier than others.  My closest friend at Loyola had been struggling with his academic program, and I offered him a deadly way out:  Why worry? It's all illusion.  

I said it in many more words than that and in a way that seemed to make all the sense in the world.  It worked.  Within months he had dropped out of college, and years later he would "credit" me for his decision.

I went after other acquaintances, presumably to dispatch them in a similar way.  By this time I had met Guido, and he stood out because of his philosophical bent.  But he turned out to be a much tougher bone than I had anticipated.  He never disputed the logic of my arguments, but he always found some wiggle room in them.   His sophistry was legendary, as he would demonstrate years later during a discussion with Carlos.  To make a point about human overpopulation, Carlos had told us that a brilliant new study had shown that locusts were motivated to swarm not by a lack of food at their existing location, but by a critical level of overcrowding.

"I don't think so," said Guido.  

Guido had been contradicting Carlos all evening, and apparently this was the last straw.  Carlos blew up.

"Guido, I've got to tell you that sometimes you argue just for the sake of arguing, and not because you know anything about the subject!"

Guido did not lose his composure.  "Well," he said, "if overcrowding is what makes them migrate, how come they swarm to a new location together?"

By applying such tactics Guido managed to slow me down in what had become a weird and vicious quest.  In this way, and perhaps unknowingly, he spared many others from being pestered.

---

Since I was making no progress with Guido on the Subjectivity front, I decided to enlist his help and that of another student in a series of harebrained scientific schemes for profit.  (Apparently, the appeal of getting rich quick could coexist even with the claim of being an Anarchist in a subjective world.)  

The first scheme involved a novel method of image transmission.  I forget how I got the idea, but I figured that an image could be conveniently mapped for transmission by tagging each element with a unique color and a unique polarization angle, after which the light would be transmitted by optical fiber to an optical decoder.  The decoder would be essentially a transmitter working in reverse.  The reconstructed image would have been unattractive even in own estimation, since it would have varied in hue from left to right and in polarization angle from top to bottom. 

The polarization, at least, would have posed no perceptual problem since it would not have been noticeable to the naked eye, and the unwanted color variation could have been filtered out from the reconstructed image.  Even so, the impracticalities were daunting, and I expected the final image to remain blurred in the vertical sense and extremely faint overall.  But it did seem a novel approach, possibly worth a grant for further study.  We quickly obtained permission to use the undergraduate Optics lab to carry out proof-of-concept trials.

After a few stints of intermittent work it all came to nothing.  The failure could be blamed squarely on my own poor sense of organization, which caused the other two to lose interest.  But it did make me think about the subject in increasingly abstract ways, and this was to have consequences.  

It all started with an innocent enough question:  What is the fundamental principle of image transmission?

I considered a 4´4 array as a simple working example, with black and white as the only intensity levels.  Transmitting such an image pixel-by-pixel would require 16 Bits for any of the 65536 different possible images that the array could accommodate.  That consideration, when extended to arbitrary arrays using an analytical formula, seemed fundamental enough.  Then I had a new thought:  If each whole picture were tagged with a serial number from 1 to 65536 and only the serial numbers were transmitted, would transmission be more efficient?  Surely this method should require less bandwidth.  The inevitable drawback would be the necessity to preload both transmitter and receiver with all the possible pictures tagged numerically in a common sequence, but it did not seem an unreasonable tradeoff.

A bandwidth calculation for the new method yielded a surprising result: 16 Bits per image: the same amount!  I recalculated for different-size arrays and for different intensity ranges, and in each case the pixel-by-pixel and serial-number methods remained equivalent.  An analytical formula showed that in fact this would be always the case.  How strange:  How could the transmission of a serial number be equivalent to scanning and transmitting a picture physically, pixel by pixel?

School pressures forced me to set this puzzle aside, relegating it to a mental repository already full of half-baked schemes and unfinished projects.  The collection included, among others, the faded delusion of becoming an astronaut and the still‑strong dream of one day revolutionizing Physics.  It also contained an on-again, off-again interest in artificial intelligence, which was a lively topic of computer engineering at the time.  Although near the bottom of the list, this topic, too, would resurface.

---

Through a succession of seasons that remained disturbingly quick, time continued to be wasted on philosophical debates with anyone unfortunate enough to run into me.  But every discussion, no matter how lengthy, comes to an end, and on the commute home I would engage in an evasion game of my own against an invisible adversary.  It was as if an indistinct presence were waiting to catch me alone when conversation with others could not be used as shield or distraction.  The presence always asked the same questions:  Why are you doing this?  You are sabotaging yourself and others.  Why?

The exchanges were always in the form of “ordinary” mental dialog, with questions and answers arising from the same awareness; but, even so, I wondered who, or what, was behind the uncomfortable questions.  Was it just "me"?  What I had once called conscience, perhaps?  Or, even, something I had buried?  Regardless of origin, the questions were sensible.  The lengthy and, by most measures, pointless discussions were depriving my listeners and myself of study time.  Since I had more than one listener I was the one who was most affected.

I began answering the questions with cold anger.  The world had not turned out as promised, and this was true even without invoking Subjectivity.  I had once espoused “good” values and outlooks just as I had been taught by my majors, and what had that earned me?  Compassion; maybe even ridicule.  Everything in which I had believed had turned out to be a lie.  Well, perhaps not a lie exactly, but certainly not something that would be rewarded in this brave new world. Having shed the scoriae of an archaic worldview, I was trying to help others to do the same.  Was that so bad?  Should I have felt remorse over it?  We all needed liberation from a baggage that had been arbitrarily imposed.  Who was it that had managed to suffocate whole generations under such a load?  Anarchism had been right all along; the greatest enemies of humanity were the Church, the State and the Family.  Humanity’s enemies were my enemies and I would fight them with all the tools I had, including the most powerful one, Subjectivity.  The die was cast.  The case was closed.  Cross-armed snit.  End of story.

And yet, under a dome that tilted with the seasons, a supposedly unreal Earth still moved in its illusory orbit.  Each year the seasons advanced until the green leaves of summer began to turn yellow, and summer jobs ended and school terms began.  In each of my five undergraduate years the start of September was my New Year’s Season, the time when things were made new again, and not just academically.

Within a week or two, usually on a weekend before dawn, a car would be loaded with shotguns, rucksacks and rustic lunches that included a couple of bottles of wine.  Then four or five of us would pile in and drive off towards the foothills to the Northeast.  Beyond an expanse of cultivated land, past the towns of Saint Gabriel de Brandon and Saint Charles de Mandeville a shallow valley pushed through the first rises.  At the bottom, mostly hidden from view, a river meandered in a series of bow turns.  Bushes and stands of alder and maple in autumn foliage crowded the banks.  Sloping up gently from the near shore a meadow extended across the road to the base of a hill.  The varied environment was home to rabbit and grouse, and was also a stopover for woodcock in their fall migration, a fact that we tried to keep from other hunters.  

Once, while surveying the view, I recalled three words from what already felt like a distant past: fascino, vardalo, gugnolo.  Something about the landscape had triggered them.  How did this valley fare, on that scale?  

In early autumn, with hunting confined to the valley floor where the alders and birches stirred in the breeze, it was fascino, definitely.  Later, usually by late October when the game would thin out and we would start ranging further uphill, there would be a hint of vardalo.  The game was not really more plentiful higher up, but the longer excursions provided a welcome change from the more cramped searches below.  Near the top of the rise the terrain opened up on an expanse of maple and birch that struggled to grow over thin topsoil, and the sun would push through the stands casting a thicket of shadows over the yellowing grass and leaves.  We would be in the primal forest, with the road invisible on the valley floor.  A succession of hillocks, all similar, would extend uninterrupted as far as one could see.  This terrain was poor habitat for wildlife, and I would quickly forget the gun balancing in the crook of my arm.  I would instead fight a temptation to keep walking straight on, gradually leaving my companions behind until there would be only the forest and me, for days and weeks, until the hills would eventually flatten down into the tundra.  Gugnolo might be found in the boreal half-light.

That fantasy would end in the activities of setting up camp.  Daylight faded early near the end of the season, and we would settle down by the fire to watch its flame compete with the approaching dusk.  The silences in the conversation would lengthen.  One by one, each hunter would retreat to some private corner of the mind until there would be only the crackling sounds and shifting glow of the fire.  At times I almost expected to hear the bells of Poffabro.  At another location there were actual bells, ringing at matins and compline as we hunkered down at post along a duck stream that descended from the abbey of Oka.  

The hill, the creek and the bells: almost the same, and yet very different.  There was a tectonic fault between the old sensitivities and the new.  I was by then living a self-serving life, based on a lot of taking and very little giving, an existence that could have been called hedonistic except for the lack of some classic traits.  I yearned for those as well, but I felt that there satisfactory alternatives.  Life at college was idyllic, and hunting and fishing days were gold.  There were moments that echoed those of long ago by Rurot's gurgling stream, but I no longer felt an obligation towards the world from which they sprang.  Now, having drunk of the moment, I could turn my back on the reality that had produced it.  I was having my cake and eating it, too; life was illusory when convenient and real and substantial when in the mood for it.  

But it was inevitable that I would pay a price for having it both ways.  Ten years on and many emotional references were still tied up with Gravena, a state of mind relating to a place that was no longer guaranteed to be one hundred percent real; at least, not one hundred percent of the time.  To say that it was not one hundred percent real was like admitting that it was not real at all, and that hurt.  It spoiled a certain emotional comfort, a reassurance that reality could always be enjoyed in a form that was both ideal and substantial.  In the course of daily life this ought to have been no more than a vague irritant, but the thought tended to insinuate itself at the most inopportune times, like a diligent creditor.

I bounced back and forth from one half-reality to the next until the mental vagaries started to become noticeable. Relatives and friends were becoming worried, and they were passing along their concerns about my future.  I shrugged them off.  What future?  It was all illusion.  So was the past; so was the present, for that matter, except for the part that concerned me, and me alone.  

Finally, it was graduation time.  Convocation day came and I pointedly ignored it.  I told myself and others that I had better things to do.  Those things apparently did not include finding a job, and after nearly a year of fruitless searches I followed Carlos's example and applied for graduate studies.  

Concordia, again, miraculously accepted me.  It was the same university, but a completely different campus situated in a lively downtown area.  For the first time since leaving Italy things started out well.  I felt integrated in the system, no longer scrambling to catch up.  My marks became respectable, and in this new environment I was generally accepted as an equal.  I had almost forgotten the feeling.  

Among the students in the undergraduate lab that I was supervising was a woman of almost my age.  Women were still rare in the hard sciences, but those few came with a commonality of outlooks that I valued. This particular student seemed to reciprocate the feeling.

I completed my course load and began to work on my thesis, but by then my teaching assistantship had run out, and I was running out of savings as well.  I considered the possibility of a temporary job out of province, just a short break to restore my finances before wrapping up my Master’s degree.  My thesis supervisor was naturally against it, but I ignored both his advice and that of others who were counseling me to finish my program before moving on.  Practically broke and having diligently stacked the deck against myself, even to the point of changing provinces before securing a job, I went to say goodbye to my university friends who had gathered at our regular bistro.  Next, I said goodbye to my older friends, promising that I would return for more hunting adventures.  Finally, I said goodbye to my family.  The next day Elayne and I boarded a flight for Victoria.

IV

It may have been simply the beauty of our new Province, or perhaps the relaxed character of her people, but a pointless anger that had followed me for over ten years soon began to fade.  

We had landed in a place that looked like the Canada of my old geography books, with whitecap mountains visible even from downtown, rising beyond a body of water to the south.  The cone of a dormant volcano, also shrouded in white, rose to the east on the far shore of a strait, and between the shores the little archipelago of the Southern Gulf Islands sprang from the water in colours of sandstone and evergreen.  The vistas were both dramatic and serene, and although I felt no need to invoke a creator for what I saw, there was a twinge of gratitude that almost begged for a recipient.  Much later I would wonder if so small a thing could possibly suffice to mark someone for salvage.  Such questions are idle, but if life had continued uneventfully from that point on it would have been enough to satisfy all my needs, except for one.  The urge to contribute something to the human journey still gnawed.  At one point it had been a genuine aspiration; now it was just an old dream with a stubborn life of its own; a frustrated vainglory.  I was approaching thirty, which is an ominous age for those who want to achieve something in Physics, and I had nothing to show for it.  Against all common sense I had cut myself off from research facilities and from the support of a thesis supervisor, and now the old dream seemed to drop further out of reach each day.  And yet the creeping loss seemed tolerable, offset as it was by the new environment and the fresh opportunities it promised.  

Then, like a sudden pouring into a cup that had already been filling on its own, there came a fantastic development. 

That Which Seeks to Survive

One day during my first summer at UVic, Richard and I were in the middle of an easy work period.  Another colleague had dropped by and was passing along some news about a purchase of microcomputers for the labs.  It was not easy to talk to both of us simultaneously because our desks were separated by metal stacks loaded with equipment, but that was not the only difficulty he was having.  He was facing two skeptical listeners who were opposed on principle to automated aids in the teaching labs.  (We did not know yet that we were shoveling against an unstoppable tide.) 

Remembering something from the Loyola days, I told the visitor that the only use of computers of interest to me was in the field of artificial intelligence, and the conversation diverted to this topic.  After some back-and-forth, during which I started undermining my own argument, I pointed to what had to be the major obstacle in the field, namely the lack of a precise definition of intelligence.  “Without it,” I added, “how would we even know that a machine has become intelligent?"

Richard, still working away at some task, said, "By applying the Turing Test."

The what?  Apparently my interest in the field had been so superficial that I had not even heard of the term.

Richard explained.  Alan Turing had stated that if a human communicating by remote terminal with a machine could not decide whether he was interacting with a machine or with another human being, then the machine could be called, for all intents and purposes, intelligent.

I thought that the concept was brilliant in the way it neatly circumvented the need to predefine intelligence; but, almost simultaneously, I saw a problem with it, a loophole.  

"It's not an airtight test," I said.  "What if we rigged up a primitive system that retrieves catalog cards with appropriate answers?  The system could be hard-wired according to a simple scheme, but iterated and extended to mimic actual intelligence.”

I tried to explain.  Say that we typed the question: How do you feel?  

To answer, the sorting process would go through a series of test steps, such as 

If the first letter is ‘H’ and the second letter is ‘o’ and the third letter is ‘w’ and [...] then fetch card 13570123.

This would be just one in a nearly infinite series of test statements mapping onto a nearly infinite set of responses.  Eventually the message would fit one of the test descriptions, and in response a mechanical sub-unit would retrieve the corresponding answer from the appropriate location.  Card 13570123 might read: Just fine.  Thus, the whole system’s “intelligence” could be contrived—and amplified at will—by simply expanding the number and length of the test statements and pre‑prepared answers.  One could even add an apparent sensitivity to context by qualifying a test statement with conditional references to earlier statements.  Such a primitive system, while obviously not at all intelligent, could nevertheless produce human-grade verbal responses.  The needed storage and test structures would of course be of prohibitive size even for a rudimentary mimicking of intelligent speech.  Nevertheless, a loophole—even if just theoretical—existed in the Turing test.  

We went quiet for a while.  The visitor seemed to lose interest and left. 

"What if it is not a loophole at all?” I mused. “What if we humans were wired just like a catalog-card retriever?"

Richard grabbed a pile of sheets on his desk.  "Hold it right there," he said.  "I'll drop this off on Don's desk and I'll be right back." 

But I could not stop thinking about it. 

"We cannot possibly hold all those cards in our heads at the same time," said Richard when he returned.  "How many 'cue cards' would we need just to face the eventualities of an ordinary day?"

"Maybe it is not necessary to have cards for all possible eventualities," I said.  "Most of them are unlikely to occur, anyway.  Once you exclude the improbable scenarios, you are left with a much smaller subset of probable questions that may need to be addressed."

We were electrified.

Now it was my turn to ask questions.  "If we have only a limited number of cards in our heads, why those particular ones?  How did they get there in the first place?"

"Education," said Richard.  "Education and parental teachings."

"The cards that are transmitted must be those that help the child to survive," I said.  "The parents and teachers pass the cards along to the child—"

"—and the child grows up and passes them along in turn."

"The cards replicate themselves through us!"

"The cards seek to survive!"

"The process seeks to survive!"

"It's a simple process—an algorithm."

"An algorithm that safeguards and propagates knowledge!"

"The Knowledge Algorithm!" concluded Richard, coining a term that we would use for the remainder of our informal collaboration and that I would carry through much of my work.

It was a head rush.  We scrambled for pencils and paper and then for a tape recorder.  I thought, This is it!  This is the project that will repay the social debt.  We are going to sketch the process at humanity's core!  

A series of hectic days followed with ordinary work pushed into the background.  The initial breakthrough had been like a crack in a dam, freeing a torrent of ideas at the rate of several per day, and in almost no time we assembled a set of working assumptions and tentative conclusions.  

The first major assumption was that humans were a modified version of the simplistic sorting system.  This assumption had the incidental advantage of restoring full authority to the Turing Test.  More importantly, it allowed “the human question” to be approached from a manageable angle, the study of the “catalog cards” that presumably resided in the human brain.

The second point concerned the origin of the cards.  Richard had pointed out how inconceivable it seemed that a human memory could contain ready-made responses for a lifetime of interactions.  Obviously, only a minor subset of such responses could be carried, and the study of those cards might open a back door for a view of the general foundation of society.  We reasoned that there had to be something special about the catalog cards inside present-day humans simply because they were there, a very limited set that was the end product of millions of years of evolution.  Perhaps most exciting was the proposed mechanism of transmission of those cards: parental and societal education.  We felt that there was something promising about this “handle”. 

We began to generalize the approach.  It was apparent that we were dealing with a process that was not exclusive to humans.  Most advanced animals educated their young, and even unicellular life transmitted biochemical information down the generations.  At the other end of the scale, one day computers might replace humans at the tip of the hierarchy of custodians and creators of knowledge.  Looking for common elements within such different levels, we began to use the term "carrier" to indicate any entity that receives, safeguards and transmits knowledge.  As for "knowledge", we envisioned it as bundles of categories ("catalogue cards") in transmittable form.  We hypothesized a prototypal bundle consisting of two categories, "good" and "bad".  For an early human, the "good" category might contain such items as "food", "shelter", "cave" etc., while the "bad" category might contain "sabre-tooth tiger", "sickness", "sleeping outside in the cold", etc.  These and more complex bundles, together with a process not yet formulated that assembled, stocked and transmitted the bundles, and that would come itself as part of a bundle, would be treated as a single process, of which the human striving would be only the most visible and evolved part.  The construct we called The Knowledge Algorithm could be envisioned as the overarching structure of this process.

So far our analysis had been more fast than rigorous, but we reasoned that rigour could come later.  For now we felt that it was important to document the flow of intuition before it dried up.  

We quickly reached two major conclusions.

The first was the definition of a basic aspect of intelligence.  We phrased it as

Intelligence is not an entity.  It is not even a quality.  It is a process.

The second was a bit of a leap; but, right or wrong, it provided the energy that would sustain much of my early work.

There is an entity that seeks to survive.  It is not the individual.  It is not even the species.  It is the knowledge associated with a particular species that in turn allows the individual to survive.

We were facing an embarrassment of riches.  Having endowed knowledge with an instinct of survival, we had the opportunity to examine all the major fields of knowledge in this new light.  We felt that we could embark on the analysis from a secure basis, with knowledge's “survival instinct” established on historical evidence.  This was backed by the almost self-evident existence of a process that ensured the rise of just such an instinct: a Darwinian selection process operating on the catalogue cards.  One had only to examine some of the “primary cards” in our memory, those passed on to us by parents and teachers, to see evidence of the selection process.  Take the card that says “Respect your neighbours”:  If survival of the individual were paramount, that card would contain qualifiers, such as “Respect your stronger neighbours and take advantage of the others.”  In its simpler form, the injunction spoke of a concern for something wider than the well-being of a mere card carrier: it promoted the general welfare of the carrier’s society.  A society that preserved and used the shorter injunction would tend to thrive as a whole—and the orderly transfer of knowledge, of which the injunction would itself be a part, would be correspondingly enhanced.  

The image of Knowledge and Carrier as uneasy partners in survival, with the former being smarter, more manipulative and more self-aware than the latter was seductive.  And yet it also seemed that 'partnership' was too strong a term. 

In some ways, knowledge appeared to treat its human carriers no better than a virus treats a cell when it invades it with the single purpose of using the cell’s genetic factory for its own replication.  The fact that the virus usually kills the cell weakened the analogy, but did not invalidate it completely.  True, the cell would be killed, but not by a deliberate act of the virus.  Rather, it would die because of an incidental consequence of the preprogrammed escape pattern of the virus.

So, if the relationship between knowledge and carrier was a partnership of some kind, it was definitely not between equals.  Even though knowledge did help the individual in many obvious ways (a large portion of the transmitted knowledge dealt specifically with norms of individual survival), it seemed that humans lived just long enough to procreate, raise and educate their children before the first signs of physical and mental decay appeared.  Knowledge might not kill its carriers as it left them; but, whether or not by design, a carrier did not significantly outlive its capacity to procreate and transmit primary knowledge.

---

As the first wave of enthusiasm eased, we began to redimension knowledge’s “survival instinct” by reconsidering its supposed sense of self-awareness.  We eventually decided that knowledge probably survived the same way that fire did. Fire appeared to plot for its own survival and propagation by “following” a trail of combustible objects, readying an item for combustion with its heat even as it consumed the one before it.  But, in spite of superficial appearances, a fire’s survival “instinct” remained a mechanistic pattern.  In the end we concluded that if the Knowledge Algorithm experienced awareness at all, it probably did so only through the awareness of its carriers.  And yet this conceptual entity, limited with respect to its carriers by its lack of direct self-awareness, still managed to regularly outlive the carriers, a fact that was easy to verify.  Today, for example, we are acquainted with a fair amount of knowledge about Ancient Rome, but not with a single living Ancient Roman.

The joint work with Richard was peaking.  It had been an exhilarating number weeks, and in the end we added two more general statements to our list.  The first was a mandate to explore the Knowledge Algorithm by finding and analyzing its manifestations in various fields.

If a law is found that works well in one field of knowledge, then, in general form, it must work equally well in other disciplines.

The second was of lesser generality, but it exercised a powerful fascination.

Civilizations are cultures dedicated to the acquisition, preservation and propagation of knowledge.  All civilizations obey common rules.

Yet, the most powerful concept from those weeks was something that we did not even bother to write down, but to which we often referred in passing, as if it was an obvious idea: 

The means of survival and propagation of the Knowledge Algorithm is the generation of order from chaos.

Education did just that.  By virtue of the knowledge it imparted, the world was made more predictable, more understandable, more ordered.  Parental teaching played a similar role at a more elemental level.  Parental "cue cards" did explain basic aspects of the world, but with particular focus on the child's ability to survive.  Thus, the child survived, the cards survived, and the algorithm survived.  In the process, the world was made more orderly.  The more orderly the world, the higher the chances of survival of the carriers; hence, of knowledge.  It all dovetailed.

---

Something had started and now it was hard to sit still.  

The building in which we worked had easy access to the roof, three stories up, and I made it a habit to climb to it at least once a day.  Then I would reach the parapet and lean over the false crenellations to gaze at what might well have been a prototypal representation of the world in all its major manifestations. 

Immediately below was the campus, laid out in geometric lines that were frequently interrupted by large clumps of greenery.  This part of the view, alone, was thrilling, because now I understood those lines in a new way.  They formed a layout that made the environment predictable.  Aside from their utilitarian purpose, the ordering effect was paramount.  In a forest one did not know for certain what one's foot would be stepping on next, but the same foot would find no surprise along a sidewalk.  Similarly, the buildings would offer the certainty of an environment built and maintained for constancy and predictability.  Rooms, floors and staircases did not ordinarily change position or appearance, and their location and function would always be clearly indicated and labeled.  The activities that occurred in such environments would be scheduled and regulated; they would be ordered.

These were unusual musings and I felt their strangeness sharply.  Only a year back, and I would have been outraged at the idea of working on a theory that indirectly glorified social order.  Yet here I was, standing on the top of a building solely for the purpose of contemplating an aspect of human progress outlined in asphalt and concrete. 

But the scene was also rich with other elements.  Looking east, the campus sloped down to a forested area that hid a built up zone, creating the impression that the trees continued uninterrupted to the shores of a bay two thirds of a mile away.  Outwards from the bay was the restful view of the Gulf Islands, and beyond it, on clear days, one could make out the ghostly cone of Mount Baker.  And I thought: How proper it is to view the works of humanity against such a backdrop.  It is the kind of scenery from which we have come.  We have been taming the world ever since, perhaps not always in the best of ways.  How many of humanity's mistakes—social, political, environmental—were due to a profound ignorance of humanity's fundamental nature?  How many people knew that we were carriers of something more enduring and "greater" than ourselves?  

Actually, in a perverse way, it seemed that most of humanity's problems had occurred precisely because we had been only too ready to embrace ideas greater than ourselves.  We had devastated much of the environment for the grandiose but vague notion of Man Triumphant Over Nature.  We had also waged countless wars against each other for all sorts of grand causes, riding into battle for one flag or another, for this king or that, for this or that god.

It seemed that we humans had a great hunger for something that we sensed hovering “above us”, something that we dimly perceived as being more meaningful than our individual lives.  In the absence of definite knowledge about this "something", we were capable of identifying with anything that simply claimed to be it.  The hunger was genuine.  The object of the hunger was genuine as well, but its nature had remained obscure.  How great this hunger for supra-identification, how monstrously strong if it could command, as it often did, even the willing sacrifice of one’s own life!  And how repetitively mistaken each choice of allegiance had been, for one deluded generation to another in a bloody line stretching back to Neolithic times, and across a dark curtain into prehistory!

The view from the rooftop was a daily touchstone, but it was hardly needed.  Even sitting at my desk, surrounded by old equipment and by the various distractions of the job, I could envision what might have been like for our distant progenitors to emerge from the last ice age and take the first steps towards the world we know.  

I could easily visualize a group of fur-clad humans clearing some brush before setting up camp.  I was naturally drawn to this kind of imagery.  I had experienced echoes of the feelings that must have guided our forebears in their activities, as have most people who have camped at least once in their lives.  

Camping in the forest brings on an initial sense of unease, and the newcomer feels surrounded by uncomfortable unknowns.  They colour his impression and one of the first impulses is to retreat to more familiar ground.  Then, after just a short time in a new spot, the gloominess begins to recede.  A walk around the site is even more effective in relieving the unease, and soon the appeal of nature begins to reemerge.  The spot is now relatively known.

If not fear, then simple curiosity often leads us through the same actions in the face of the unknown.  We are tempted to conclude that we must abhor the unknown since we try to dispel it as soon as we become aware of it.  But 'abhor' or any other exclusively negative word misses an important aspect.  We are both repelled and allured by the unknown, sometimes simultaneously.  The unknown frightens yet it also attracts, and one is usually conscious of both aspects in the wild.

Exploration seemed the obvious primary tool of the Knowledge Algorithm, but there was a second one, just as effective, but with a slightly sinister hue.

Those who have worked clearing a patch of land, claiming it from the forest in order to establish a dwelling or even a simple campsite, will be familiar with the feeling of gazing over a newly-cleared area.  The sight usually causes a sense of wellbeing—almost of quiet euphoria.  The comfort associated with man-made clearings has no doubt contributed to village‑building throughout humanity’s early history.  The positive gut-level feeling about clearing a patch of forest (regardless of more elaborate intellectual considerations) seems to fall into a class of drives and emotions that we, vaguely and arguably, associate with progress.  To this day we no sooner escape the regulated city environment than we immediately set about “regulating” the patch of forest that is to be our base.  In no time we hack or stomp out a clearing, and often we clear more space than strictly needed for a campsite.

There is a difference of degree but not of quality in envisioning a city rising over cleared land.  It is a significant point, because civilizations rise out of cities. After the construction of cities replaces the clearings, the local environment never returns to the complexity of a forest, because even a sprawling city contains patterns of order and predictability that render it more navigable than the natural wilderness.  

My family has often lamented my tendency to make speeches, and now I addressed a rather exalted one to the imaginary Paleolithic band clearing a patch of ground.  

I know why you do it.  It's not simply to intimidate the saber-tooth tiger with an unfamiliar environment, as some might maintain.  On that patch of ground you are creating new order.  Admittedly, the tiger might be spooked by its strangeness; the clearing might even make the tiger conveniently visible as it stalks you.  But those are just particulars of a very general benefit.  You, the carriers, are improving your situation simply by imposing order on your environment.  Yet, this larger reason is hidden from you, and so is the main beneficiary.  The process that is directing you has all the information, but the great irony is that it, too, is not aware of what it does because it is not conscious.  The only conscious entities are you, who do its bidding.  You and your unknown master help each other survive, yet each of you remains unaware of the other.  You, the carriers, are born in ignorance of your true master, you receive its directives from the lips of your parents, you pass them on to your children and you finally die, never having known what it was that you served. 

But, I thought, feeling goose bumps, now we have caught a glimpse of the process.  And the strange thing was that just knowing something about it made a hugely troubled world seem more forgivable.  In spite of all the suffering that had occurred, it was apparent that the Knowledge Algorithm was neither malicious nor callous.  It was incapable of such sentiments, or of their opposites.  

Fear, pain and loss, or, conversely, hope, pleasure and gain—these were for its carriers to experience in their individual dramas.  And here again was that peculiar irony: propensity for these emotions had likely been implanted into the carriers by the algorithm itself, aided by the Darwinian process of selection with which it seemed to be entwined.  Implanted emotions could be used to make the transmission of knowledge easier and more effective.  Disregard the information passed along by the Algorithm and likely there would be fear, pain and loss.  Conversely, accept the Algorithm’s precepts and there would be hope, pleasure and gain.  Those who accept survive and prosper, and live to reproduce and teach.

The Algorithm was capable of great good, its presence being most easily detectable in those human enterprises that areinstinctively thought of as positive.  History had several inspiring examples of the Knowledge Algorithm at its best.  Almost invariably, they were about societies that had embarked, often for unclear reasons, on the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake.  

Classical Greece stood out in this respect, and I developed a new interest for its history and culture.  Perhaps it was more like a rediscovery, a reappraisal of an incomplete and by now largely forgotten piece of academic teaching.  Like all topics learned in secondary school, it had felt at the time like an unavoidable pain to be endured.  But now it seemed lively and relevant, and among other half-baked conclusions, I became convinced that Plato and Aristotle had come particularly close, each in his own way, to formulating an early description of the Knowledge Algorithm.  Plato’s celebrated allegory of the cave would haunt much of my later work, while the work of Aristotle, with its emphasis on categorization, was already haunting the joint work with Richard.

Eventually I found a frivolous way of paying homage to the achievements of Classical Greece.  Elayne and I had discovered a Greek restaurant on Hillside Avenue that served excellent pizza.  The ambiance was a little dark, with only a weak reddish glow diffusing down from a few recessed lamps.  On the wall hung photographs of Greek scenes, usually ruins from the Classical Period with a modern peasant or two in the foreground.  

Any advance in what Richard and I had presumptuously dubbed “Knowledge Theory” (‘hypothesis’ would have been more appropriate) became an excuse for Elayne and me to visit the restaurant, sometimes right after work.  

The routine never changed.  Elayne would start with a Spanish Coffee while I ordered a Cuba Libre in solemn remembrance of my two weeks as a Communist[5].  Then I would start gazing at the photographs on the wall.  Above the kitchen was an oversize photograph of the Parthenon towering over a sprawling Athens.  By the time the pizza would arrive accompanied by my second Cuba Libre, I would be focusing almost exclusively on that photograph while mentally addressing the Knowledge Algorithm.  

Right there, two-and-a-half millennia ago, you almost became conscious!  

Even our own caveats about that kind of conclusion (“…if knowledge benefited of an awareness it probably does so only through the awareness and consciousness of its carriers…”) did not diminish the stirring feeling of anticipation.  I would soon meet this thing and study its structure.  

Put that way, the thought lacked reverence.  A more proper metaphor might have been the tracking down of an anonymous benefactor for a first face-to-face meeting.  Lost in the reverie I would manage in split attention to continue conversing with Elayne.  I kept recounting the wonders of the past few weeks, telling her how the work I was doing with Richard would one day be recognized, and then she and I would travel, and one of the first places we would visit would be that, the Acropolis.  

And Elayne would chuckle, seemingly entertained.

---

One day it seemed as if the weight of ten pointless years, which had been lifting gradually on its own, simply vanished.  With it went a veil that had blocked the benign light of the world. 

See? Something about the very air seemed to say, it is all still here.

And it was. The world looked bright again, almost literally so, as if perception had been enhanced, or perhaps simply restored to an earlier state.  How far back had that been?  

I mentally returned to an afternoon in Montreal and to an eerie funeral I had carried out in my own room.  I had buried someone, that day, with deliberate intent.  I ran my mind over the descent that had followed, counting the things lost along the way.  I could only shake my head: too many.  Most grievous had been the loss of innocence; and not in the usual, facile sense of the expression.  I had lost—repudiated, in fact—the ability to make decisions based on free will, independently of ideology and conventional wisdom.  I could still recall the original reasons, and I could even add some more in hindsight; nevertheless, it had been a disconcerting choice. 

Now it felt like I had returned to the same height from which I had started the descent, looking back across a chasm that was over a decade wide.  Beyond its far edge the old life was once again visible, certainly dimmed by the passing of the years, but with all the sense of reality that a remembered past can have.  I felt a visceral thrill: Gravena, too, was there, with her florid green, the memories of her incomparable people and the implied reassurance that such a world would always be possible.  How strange; I had given it all up.  Closer in there seemed to be no bottom to the chasm, with its walls sinking indefinitely into the radiating blackness of Solipsism.  

I had espoused that?  Why?

It had been a wasteful detour.  But I could finally back away from it, now that the Knowledge Hypothesis was restoringreality as a shared good, and therefore a verified good, a gift from the Algorithm to its carriers.  Best of all, flush withforgiving feelings I could finally forgive myself for my unproductive wanderings.  

I took one last look at the darkness.  Then, with the naïveté of someone taking leave of a Mafia boss from whom he has accepted favours, I began to move away from the edge, riding the natural flow of time.  In a matter of weeks the chasm’s opposing margins seemed to merge, and the image became again that of the uninterrupted plane over which meander the paths of our lives. 

---

In the light of the work we were doing it seemed that there really was something to the archaic and discredited notions of Absolute Right and Absolute Wrong.  I had had quite a struggle with that conclusion at first, but, in finally accepting it, I had felt a relief similar to stretching limbs that had been long immobilized.  

Replacing Right with right direction and Wrong with wrong direction resolved a lot of confusion, softening what would otherwise have been a harsh take on human affairs.  

Place a human carrier in any situation and there would always be an "up" (towards more order) and a "down" (towards more chaos.)  We reasoned that human beings, no matter what their circumstances, face in every waking moment the same decision: up or down?  To choose up, the path towards greater order, meant aligning oneself with the precepts of the Knowledge Algorithm.  Personal gain would likely follow, and the Algorithm's wider agenda would also be served.  The Algorithm would exploit emotional pathways implanted through evolution to reward the individual, to make him or her "feel good" about the decision. 

In view of this, the initial position of the individual on the social or moral scale would be irrelevant. It was the direction from that point on that counted.  Thus, similar positive feelings would be experienced by the millionaire granting generous scholarships, by the graduate student using them to research life in tidal pools, and by the homeless person moving off the street in an attempt to ameliorate his life.  All would be sharing in Algorithmic glory.

This simple realization renewed and strengthened the existing feelings of forgiveness.  It was hard to tell whom or what it was that I was forgiving, and it was certainly not forgiveness in the religious sense, because I was far from being religious at that point.  Still, it was probably around this time that I began to regard Atheism as just another ideology.  

---

The fall term began.  

A busy schedule slowed our project, but we kept filling pages of notes in our spare time.  Over the next weeks, however, a hairline crack began to appear in the way Richard and I were approaching the project.

Richard was in favour of tying up loose ends and then preparing the material for publication.  I insisted that we could make a much bigger splash if we formulated a quantitative description of the algorithm.  I was still thinking of artificial intelligence. The way I saw it was: We already had a rudimentary qualitative description of the process; why not write it down in mathematical form?  It would amount to the formulation of a process that would automatically generate order out of chaos.  What would that be if not intelligence?  And its mathematical formulation could be encoded in program form to produce visible results on a computer.

Richard assented with some hesitation, and his hesitation grew when he saw the new tack in detail.

To someone in physics, disorder is synonymous with entropy, and entropy is, by default, the entropy of thermodynamics.  I raided the library for Thermodynamics texts while attempting to devise a process that could effectively apply the directive: Reduce the entropy of the environment.

The equation for entropy was well known, and writing simple programs to evaluate it was no problem. But I was bedeviled by the difficulty of finding a correspondence between the thermodynamic variables on the one hand and elements of ordinary life on the other.  How does one quantify the entropy reduction of tidying up a room?  

My frustration would have promptly ended if I had simply walked over to the stacks that held the books on Information Theory.  I had heard of the discipline, but I kept assuming that its entropy was the same as that of Thermodynamics.  Entropy is entropy, after all, so why should I study a different field just to use the equations I already knew?  I stubbornly kept trying to shoehorn the thermodynamics formalism into the project, eventually producing a series of diagrams that were meant to illustrate the approach.  I forget the details, but I do remember that the carriers were symbolized by magnet-like shapes meant to represent refrigeration cycles, which were in turn connected to a similar but larger shape representing the Knowledge Algorithm.  The refrigeration cycles were a dubious association with entropy reduction.

Richard looked at the diagrams and made an unenthusiastic comment.  He was polite about it, but it was clear that he was not impressed.  

Well, I thought, he will change his mind as soon as I have it all down in program form.

---

The term ended and we prepared for Christmas.  

Richard and Debbie invited us to their new house for Christmas dinner.  Elayne and I wondered how they could possibly equal the evening of the previous Christmas, when Debbie had served a fabulous meal accompanied by the right number of drinks to put us in good spirits but not over the edge.  The evening had ended with a midnight stroll on the beach, an exhilarating novelty for people used to arctic weather at that time of the year.  

This time, too, they pulled it off.  One year on, and we were still enjoying the camaraderie of expatriates.

In passing, and only briefly, I mentioned to Richard that soon I would have some results to show.  But deep down I was also beginning to have doubts, and now there was even a noticeable awkwardness whenever the subject came up.   It almost felt as if we were keeping up an uncomfortable pretense.  But the holiday mood and a residual emotional momentum helped to maintain the expectations alive, at least for me.  A week later, with the four of us enjoying a New Year’s Eve celebration at our apartment, we crossed over into 1981.

That which is Communicated

January did not bring immediate progress.  For one, my gedanken refrigerators still had no clear connection to everyday life.  Given a chance they could cool a gas and thus impose some order on its overactive molecules, but that was hardly novel and certainly not of much use to the present task.  It was finally beginning to look like a blind alley.

Finally, almost in a what have I got to lose kind of way, I picked up an introductory textbook in Information Theory.  I flipped a few pages, and almost immediately an equation jumped out.

.

It was Shannon’s expression for information entropy.  As expected, it was structured similarly to the corresponding equation in Statistical Thermodynamics, but there were differences.  Missing was a quantity in front of the summation sign, the Boltzmann Constant, whose specialized meaning had been a real thorn.  Just as significantly, all the variables were pure probabilities.  Together, these two aspects meant that H was free of physical units.  

I jumped up and punched the air, fortunately in a nearly deserted section of the library.  

All major difficulties had dissolved. The equation put no restrictions on the nature of the elements it could consider other than requiring that their analysis follow basic probability rules, and the probabilities could stand for the statistical properties of anything at all!  

It was the very thing for which I had been looking.  I returned the other books and kissed the recalcitrant Thermodynamics equations goodbye.

By this time Richard had become wary of my twists and turns, and he took the latest with more than just a pinch of salt.  Yes, he granted, this formulation looked more general.  But it was easy to hear the unasked questions: What will the next direction be? And the one after?  

I could not blame him.  I had decided beforehand that I would continue on this track regardless, but to proceed on my own had drawbacks, the biggest being a recurrent difficulty to complete projects because of some new tangent I always seemed to find.  In this respect Richard was both smarter and more practical, and he had an established record of finishing what he started.  

But it soon became apparent that we had indeed parted company on project.  It was not a good feeling, even if it did not seem to affect our friendship overall.

---

Just as suspected, working on my own had its challenges, but the new approach was definitely providing fresh momentum.  I had been thinking about the pretend Paleolithic tribe again, and I decided to test the Shannon formula on them.  I visualized them, furs and all, as they selected a patch of forest for a new place of residence.  As instructed by their inherited cue cards, they would hack and stomp out a clearing.  Lean-to's would soon be raised, and then, generations later, mud huts.  Eventually the original patch of pristine forest would become a village.  

The hypothesis I wanted to test was that H, the entropy level of the environment, was higher in the forest than in the village, and that it was possible to quantify the difference.  If this were to be confirmed, then I would postulate that an instinct to reduce H would be sufficient to “blindly” drive humans from sheer forest survival to village life and eventually to even greater progress.  That “instinct” would be identified with the emotional component of the Knowledge Algorithm, a “feel-good” response whenever entropy reduction was served.

To test the hypothesis I would have to first assign probabilities to the various elements of the before and afterenvironments.  The elements had to be common to both, because Shannon had stated that “the significant aspect [of communication] is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages”[6].  This implied that to calculate H one had first to establish a definite set of such messages.  

It soon became apparent that the term ‘message’ was flexible.  As with most aspects of Shannon’s original paper, flexibility did not amount to vagueness.  If anything, Shannon’s rigour was exemplary, and yet his paper seemed to be structured so that others could quickly adapt its contents to their own particular needs.  For my purpose, I found that the term message could be validly substituted with event, element, or category, just to name a few.  I decided that element and category were particularly well suited—we had even used them in the earlier part of the work.  In trying to keep things as general as possible, I tentatively assigned category the status of fundamental quantity, with element being the special “category of one” case. 

With the preliminaries out of the way, I looked again at the imagined journey from forest to village.  How many elements did it encompass? 

It was discouraging: too many to enumerate, let alone characterize and tabulate.  Even a single square inch of ground, be it in the forest or in the village, would, at sufficient resolution, overwhelm a cataloguing system with its innumerable features.  I puzzled over this, and then decided to take a short cut.  For now I would only consider a very restricted set of categories, four in all.  That particular number would also allow for quick off-the-top calculations in binary units.  Now the question became: Which four categories would best represent the environments of forest and village?

I first considered ‘trees’, and concluded that it was a suitable category.  Even a village would have some trees.

How about ‘smooth ground’?  Again, both environments would conceivably have sections of smooth ground, only in different proportions.

It seemed easier to draw common categories starting from the village because it was challenging to find forest elements that existed also in the village.  ‘Hut’, for instance, would feature prominently only in the village.  To go around this difficulty I generalized once again.  Instead of ‘hut’ I used the phrase ‘place of safety’, which to a hut inhabitant would likely amount to the same thing.  And the pristine forest would also have its own places of safety, such as a hollow stump, a sheltering bush, or even the occasional cave.

So far I had listed two neutral categories ("trees" and "smooth ground"), and a positive one ("places of safety").  Even though it was not mandatory to do so, I balanced the spectrum by adding a negative one: “dangerous animals”.  

The next task was to assign probabilities to the four categories, one set of probabilities for the forest and another for the village.  Having already cut corners in major ways, I was trying to keep arbitrariness within bounds.  I finally thought that it was acceptable to let the example go to extremes since I was only working on a proof of concept.  So, for the forest case I would assign equal probabilities to all categories—a "flat" probability distribution.  Counterintuitively, a flat, or uniform, distribution implied a chaotic environment.  It could be understood this way: If one walked backwards in a forest, one would have a hard time predicting what he would stumble upon next.  It could be a tree, a patch of smooth ground, a place of refuge, or a poisonous snake.  In the absence of more definite information, such events should be deemed equally probable.  And for the Shannon expression to be valid the sum of all the probabilities had to be 1 (that is, 100%, ensuring that the next event would belong to a category from the set.)  So, the probability set for the forest became ¼, ¼, ¼, ¼.

I was forced to use a greater degree of subjective judgment for the village, where a carrier walking backwards would reasonably expect a greater chance of stepping on smooth ground than, say, on a poisonous snake, or against a tree.  In the relatively ordered environment of the village the probability distribution would obviously be skewed, and I assigned equally low values for dangerous animals and trees, a higher value for places of safety (huts), and a still-higher value for smooth ground, in rough idealization of their frequency of occurrence.  I selected values of ⅛, ⅛, ¼, ½, respectively, making sure that they added up to the required 1.

I felt like jumping up and punching the air again.  There was no need to actually crunch the numbers, because it was obvious that these distributions would give a lower H for the village.  What really made me want to jump up was the ease with which probabilities could be assigned, at least in principle.  But I grabbed a calculator anyway, and keyed in the values.  The results were H=2 Bits for the forest and H=1.75 Bits for the village.

---

Pizza never tasted as good as on that night, nor did the Cuba Libre ever go down more smoothly.  All evening I talked and grinned, and grinned and talked.  The red penumbra of the restaurant seemed a metaphor for the state of bloody ignorance endured by humanity for far too long, and the pictures along the wall were like bright windows on a time when a glorious culture, confined to a region a few miles wide and a couple of centuries deep, had sensed the master’s presence across the curtain.  And tonight the master was here, scribbled on a paper napkin and beheld by two carriers, unconscious no more.  I had written a character at the center of the napkin with a single verb in front, and as I talked I kept trying out new text and symbols in an attempt to add some aesthetics, or at least some volume, to a directive that seemed too lacking in complexity, too easy and too short:

Minimize H.

And yet, in just those two words, there it was: the Knowledge Algorithm.

How long ago had it begun?

Had it started with humans? Advanced animals? With the first traces of life, perhaps?  It seemed strange that an entity that had traveled so long in time, certainly for millions of years and possibly billions, should find its first mirror in a sauce-stained napkin.  The sense of recognition did not diminish even after facing the fact that I had certainly not been the first to envision a special role for entropy minimization.  A library search revealed that there had been a sizeable body of work done on the modalities and significance of minimizing entropy for various purposes.  A whole branch of the field of Pattern Recognition had grown around entropy minimization, only to inexplicably fade, rather abruptly, in the second half of the 1960’s.  Not long after its inception, the “Gestalt Method of Pattern Recognition”, as it had been called, would turn into a topic of mild intellectual embarrassment, then a source of gentle jokes among Information Theorists, and finally an unofficially-declared blind alley fading fast from academic memory.

Did the earlier researchers abandon the path because of something I did not know?  Or had they simply approached the problem from a more practical angle, eventually discarding the Gestalt method for other approaches that were faster and more efficient in uncovering patterns?  After all, that was the driving goal for most researchers in the field. 

For my part I was not interested in efficiency per se.  Rather, I wanted to formulate a process, even a clumsy one, which would generate order out of chaos and which, once set in motion, would become self-sustaining.  In my view, the minimization of H would do just that.  Once programmed in a viable carrier, it would begin its fateful march forward.  It would first gather data in order to compute the original probability distributions of its environment, then it would simulate various courses of action, evaluating each possible outcome in terms of H, and finally it would choose the course of action leading to the largest drop in H.

I was now visiting the Paleolithic tribe almost daily.  I imagined them turning one of their babies loose over cleared ground for the first time.  Initially the baby’s brain would be overwhelmed by a flood of uncategorized inputs, thousands of neural pulses per second, all equivalent and all confusing: a nearly flat probability distribution.  Chaos is all around, and the baby, responding to implanted feedback loops so designed, feels discomfort.  She is edgy and starts to cry.  

It is not long, however, before she begins to notice patterns in response to a primal instinct directing her to do so. (Minimize H!).  Eventually she works out that colour seems to correlate by location.  Under her hands and knees everything is the gray of campsite dirt.  At the periphery there is green.  That is, the probability of gray underfoot appears to be nearly 100%, and the probability of other colours in the same area is nearly 0%.  The colours at the periphery, although different, are similarly skewed.  With this simple realization the baby succeeds in dropping the colour entropy of the immediate surroundings to nearly zero.  This is a desirable result, and the little explorer emits a gurgling laugh.  An endocrine response implanted by the biological component of the Knowledge Algorithm has just rewarded her with a pleasurable thrill.

A doting parent walks over and drops coloured pebbles in front of the baby.  She freezes, perplexed.  The probabilities of certain colours that had previously been zero are no longer so.  The new probability distribution reflects fresh ambiguity, showing new spikes above the 0% baseline.  These spikes are at the expense of the “gray” spike, previously at nearly 100% and now noticeably lower.    

Naturally, a baby’s conscious mind does not work with symbolic graphs.  But somewhere in her brain a process is unconsciously calculating the entropy of the new distribution, and reports through emotional channels that it has increased.  The change does not represent a return to the original global chaos, but it is enough to cause the baby to stop and wonder.  

Two alternative routines now compete for her attention.  One says: Explore!  It worked before when she succeeded in discovering the color distribution of the nearby ground and its periphery, and it may work again.  Indeed, it often does.  The baby may work out correlations between the colours of the new objects and their new position, or perhaps between the appearance of pebbles and the arrival of a parent, and all the while her algorithmic structure would continue to build an increasingly sophisticated representation of her world.

But another routine says: Intervene!  

Her hand reaches out and swats the pebbles.  The close-in space has suddenly returned to uniform gray, with the local H back to nearly zero.  Good! 

But now there is a new smattering of colours a little further off.  As some entropy was lost, a new amount has sprouted up somewhere else.  Not so good.  Can that amount, too, eventually be conquered? 

In her struggle to tame the random inputs, simple associations of colour perception will combine with others involving touch and the rest of the senses to form the notion of permanent objects.  And then, at the age of one, complex sounds coming from her parents will become correlated with those same objects; and, through the strange power of a name, even with her own sense of self.  

In fits and starts, experiencing in turn the emotional rewards of success and the aggravation of failure, the baby comes to know a significant part of her world.  By the time the baby becomes a young adult she will have arranged much of her perceptual world into skewed distributions of categories, some of which will be of her own devising while others will have come as a bundle inherited from parents, village elders, and the like.  The algorithm will keep working on the bundles through her powers to explore and intervene, streamlining and adding to them, ever lowering H.  

Eventually babies will be born of the young woman to inherit the best of her bundles, augment them, and pass them on.  At each step, innumerable calculations of H would be carried out and, on the basis of those, comparisons would be made and decisions would be taken.

The Algorithm in human form would develop and grow, from prehistory to history and into the present time, hopefully to leap into an even brighter future, sped along at last by self-knowledge.  It seemed incredible to be at such a privileged point in time, both as observer and participant.

---

Sometime in the middle of winter, or what passes for one in Victoria, there came a long period of rain.  I would walk from my office to the bus terminal without an umbrella, and I would look for signs of the Algorithm along the way.  Indications of its presence in buildings and sidewalks were already old hat, but I was discerning them in other manifestations as well.  In landscaped terrain, for instance.

The landscapers had smoothed the slopes of various knolls and hummocks and had planted a single tree near the top of many of them.  Then they had mowed the grass to a pleasantly uniform turf that stayed green even in Winter. 

“Uniform grass height,” I would think, “gives zero entropy in the context of grass height; that is why I find it attractive.”  

I would scan the view upwards starting at the base of one of the knolls, at the same time pretending not to know or see what was at the top.  “I see the base of a knoll,” I would say.  “Given that I am dealing with a knoll, the probability of a single tree at the top is high.  If a tree is confirmed, the conditional entropy of this context will remain low.” 

Up a few degrees, and then:  There is the tree!  Conditional entropy remains low.  The world is still orderly.

Conditional entropy was something that I had been incorporating into the work.  Most probabilities, even those that initially seemed “free standing” were actually conditional.  For example, “the probability of a single tree at the top of a knoll is nearly 100%” was an incomplete statement.  A more definite form would be “the probability of a single tree at the top of a knoll, given that the location is the UVic campus, is nearly 100%.”  Everywhere else, knolls might have more than one tree, or none at all.  Even the second, more complete form was insufficiently defined.  After all, there had been a time when the campus had not been landscaped.  Conditional statements would have to be added regarding time periods and other factors in an increasing number of nested sets.  A practical formulation for the algorithm would have to include modalities for structuring those sets to advantage; that is, for defining the sets so that H could be easily minimized in the overall representation of a carrier's world.

It was during one of those walks in the rain that I met Albert.  

I saw him standing on one of the few knolls still without a tree, thumping his feet on the wet grass.  Thumping is perhaps too strong a word, because his webbed feet barely stroked the grass as they pattered over it with a funny wet sound.  Then he would periodically stop to grab an annoyed worm as it emerged from the ground to escape the vibrations.  All around the other seagulls kept hunting for worms in the usual way, in plodding resignation to an old routine.  They were finding one worm to Albert’s three.

I watched in amazement.  Albert stood as erect and perky as a seagull could be, his feet stepping rhythmically in place.  When no more worms would come out, he would move off to a new spot and work over it for a while.  What is the probability of finding a worm by tapping my feet? Quite high.  Of finding it by just walking around?  Much lower.  Two possible outcomes with a skewed probability distribution.  Low entropy!

Albert had stumbled on a representation that yielded predictable results.  To achieve it, he had undoubtedly employed both exploration and intervention, and lots of trial and error.  It was algorithmic progress at its best.

I got drenched while waiting to see if other seagulls would catch on.  Come on,  learn from him; he’s your Einstein!

It would have been great to witness the transfer of a new algorithmic bundle of the seagull kind, but it never happened.  At least I did not witness it that day, nor have I seen other seagulls practicing the technique since.

Albert seemed too busy to care.

--- 

The episode of Albert brought some insight into a troublesome paradox: In the attempt to decrease H, the carriers sometimes increased it.

It seemed that there could be more than one valid answer when it came to reducing entropy, and that some answers might well contradict some others.  The core directive might be simply to minimize H, but what would actually happen might depend on the time available, the number of steps involved, and context.  Especially context. 

Albert’s intelligence was evidently of high order among seagulls, and in its case it did what it was expected to do: reduce H by exploring and by finding and implementing new patterns.  But it also enabled the destruction of worms and the decomposition of their physiological structure, thus increasing their entropy.  A much more advanced species might use this kind of process to reduce a city to rubble, with the resulting increase in H brought about by some advanced weapon system, like a nuclear device.

At times it seemed that only the position on the timeline determined the evaluation of H-change.  Over the time span needed to design and build an atomic bomb, for instance, the Knowledge Algorithm would remain in command in a natural and predictable way, and one could argue that H would decrease in the process.  But sooner or later someone in ultimate authority would look at the world and make a different calculation: What will be the change in H if we were to use this weapon?

A lot of simulation would take place in the leader’s head, but the outcome would ultimately depend on context.  Would the leader regard obliterating an enemy city as an effective means of achieving a more ordered world?  If so, he might well order the bomb to be dropped.  

Having received the order, the general in charge would pass it down the chain of command (again a very orderly process), at the end of which a bombardier would press a button.  Chaos would instantly engulf an area of several square kilometres, and both information and thermodynamic entropy would spike.  But that increase in H might be of no concern to the leader, since the increase would refer to a context different from that contemplated.  The leader’s gambit would have been based entirely on considerations of social and geopolitical order, not on those relating to the physical kind. Unfortunately, the H reduction principle could operate on even such absurd probability fields.

Then, again, a different leader might value a different kind of order—optimal ecological balance, perhaps.  Such a leader might never opt for a nuclear strike in the first place.  At worst, he might direct it towards a less sensitive target.

And so on.  It seemed a little discouraging that a unique prime directive could lead to so many different kinds of decisions and outcomes. 

But the seed of the solution to this paradox was already in place by the time of that walk in the rain.  From that day on, issues of conditional entropy would become increasingly important.  Albert had helped with the realization that entropy was relative to a question of interest, and that a question had meaning only within a specific context.  Still not firm was the understanding that every perceived event was an answer to a question, and that a question did not derive its meaning just from the immediate context, but from a nearly-infinite set of nested contexts.  

---

The days had become too rainy for regular rooftop visits.  The second term was coming to an end, and I was looking forward to a break from both my official job and an unofficial project that was taking up more and more of my time.  

I thought that a weekend drive through the BC interior might do the trick. 

“Why BC again?” Asked Richard.  He was used to seeing Elayne and I take off on short notice and with no planning for a weekend of marathon driving, and he knew that we were running out of places to see.  

“Why not Banff?”  He insisted.  “At least you will be able to say that you have been to Alberta.”

I did not think it would be possible, but I checked the map and it seemed that a return trip might be just doable in three days, provided that we started that very night.  I called Elayne using our practiced telegraphic format. 

“Banff?”

“Yes!”

She packed supplies while I went to the car rental office, and a couple of hours later we were headed for the ferries. 

Soon we were stuck in a long line of cars outside the terminal gates.  This was the long Easter weekend, and there was a lot of traffic to and from Vancouver.  All the ferries were running late, and judging by the length of the lineup, we were going to miss the next sailing and possibly even the one after that.  People were already getting out of their cars to have a smoke and chat with other travelers.

Ever prevident, Elayne had packed a full-size chess set to pass the time on the ferry, and now she unfolded it on the hood.  A crowd immediately formed, all men and all on Elayne’s side.  Everyone was an expert, some genuinely.  All my moves were met with stony silence while Elayne’s were interrupted by desperate cries of “No! Not there!”  “Move the bishop!”  “Watch his rook!”

In no time I got wiped off the board. 

Again.  

And again.

There seemed to be little sport in it, so they changed the object to that of winning within a set number of moves.  That, too, soon got boring, so they tried to win using only unorthodox moves.  I refused offers of handicap, which frustrated everyone. 

When the lineup began to move there were actual groans of disappointment. Halfway to the gate the queue halted.  We had missed the current ferry, but that had been expected.  Out came the chess set again, and the slaughter resumed.

More forward creep, this time with the board open in mid game on the hood.  New stop, with everyone re-gathering.  In two hours I was defeated more times than I thought would be humanly possible.

Again we missed the ferry, this time only by a couple of cars, and so we lost a number of experts who were ahead of us.  Elayne and I let the remaining ones battle it out among themselves as we watched their game from our ringside seats in the car.

We easily made the last sailing.  Once on board some of the old crowd re-gathered, and with them there was a newcomer who had been watching the games with unusual interest.  He told us that he was from Hong Kong and that he was on his way to Prince George to take on a new job.  He had played chess a couple of times as a kid and it looked to him like a good way to pass the time while “away from civilization.”  Would we teach him?

I gladly volunteered.  I had noticed the consternation that his request had caused among the experts.  I exacted exquisite revenge on them by patiently playing with the newcomer, occasionally reminding him of the basic rules and encouraging him to take all the time he needed.  I also allowed him to get into all kinds of impossible situations with impunity just for the pleasure of watching the others grind their teeth.  One expert, in particular, could not sit still with such abominations spreading over the board.  At one point he stormed off, not without first barking that I was not teaching the newbie "to take responsibility for his mistakes!”

Soon the announcement came that we were approaching the Tswwassen terminal.  We shook hands all around, agreeing that it had been a fun crossing.  “Goodbye, gang,” said Elayne, “and thank you.”  

We drove off the ramp around midnight.  We had planned to spend the night somewhere near Vancouver, but the night was already half gone and so we decided to just press on.  We would not be able to see any scenery until the sun came up, but that would be no loss because we had done that part of the trip before.

Darkness reduced familiar towns to luminous names on road signs: White Rock, Mission, Chilliwack, Hope.  Exiting Hope's city limits we indulged in the old joke that we were now beyond Hope.

Dawn greeted us with the sight of a huge smokestack rising out of the hills, indicating that we were already near Kamloops.  We reached the town minutes later and stopped at a McDonald’s for breakfast.  Then we continued on through the various valleys of a lake region, heading for the Rockies proper.

We drove all day, stopping periodically to enjoy the view.  Late in the afternoon we approached the BC - Alberta border and territory that was new to us.  So far it had been a good trip, even if a little rushed and with unexpectedly cold weather.  We had already forgotten what early April could be like in places east of Vancouver. 

We reached Lake Louise at dusk, and we strolled in the snow by the landmark hotel at the edge of the lake.  We had crossed into Banff National Park, but we were running out of time, and we finally decided that we could not reach Banff itself.  Earlier, while driving through the town of Revelstoke, we had passed a rest area consisting of a gas station and lodging that seemed more hostel than motel.  I was by then tired of driving and I suggested we backtrack and stop there for the night.  We had a quick supper at the lodge, and then retired. 

We had a hard time waking up the next day.  Once up we dawdled away another hour at the rest stop, and at that point we elected to head back along a different route for variety.  

On this day we were to continue through more spectacular mountainscapes, but that is not the reason why that day stands out, even thirty years later.  For all its lack of dramatics, I would come to regard it as the high water mark of a previous life.  We were surrounded by wondrous formations that were twisting and heaving on an epochal scale, with each movement countered by relentless erosional forces.  And yet, as if by a cinematographic trick, the scene had settled to a virtual halt so we could walk in tranquil awe over land frozen in mid-motion.  In a geological split second, wind, sun, snow and rain took on the character familiar to us, human carriers of a process as old as the mountains.  Against such a scale a carrier’s life was only a spark, but even in a spark's time there was apparently much that could be learned.  To think like that was exalting, but also genuinely humbling.  Most of all it evoked gratitude, deep and heartfelt.  I wanted to give thanks out loud, still not knowing to whom or what.

Sometime in late morning we stopped at the cusp of a mountain pass, almost at the tree line.  A large sign at the side of the road proclaimed that we were standing on the continental divide, and to underline the point a narrow swath had been cut among the trees leading straight up the spine of a ridge.  I resisted the temptation to pee on either side of it.  

The trees lining the gap got shorter with altitude, eventually giving way to bare snow and rock.  Visual details repeatedthemselves in strokes of dark green, cerulean gray and luminous white, all set in a wash of translucent blue.  Everything was silent except for a whisper of cool air spilling across the pass.  

In an unforgettable moment, all was agnostic blessing: beauty without comparison, understanding without effort. Gravena's old promise that reality was possible in ideal form and available to all at any time again rang true.  It was on all sides, now, with its brilliant magic unbelievably defined and quantified, and with poetry and beauty at last recognizable as proper attributes for the mathematical handiwork of the Algorithm.  

Evening caught us near Kerameos, and it became completely dark by the time we started climbing back over the Coastal Range.  It was getting hard to keep eyes open on this, our second sleepless night out of three, and Elayne suggested that we stop and rest.  I parked the car in a clearing by the side of the road and got out to visit a bush.  The silence was overwhelming; there seemed to be no one on the road for dozens of miles in either direction.  Then, looking up, I lost my breath.  

I did not remember ever seeing such a sky.  The first impression was of a luminous snowfall that descended to a certain point and stopped, blocked by the invisible landscape.  The suspended blizzard was all one could see, with its frayed edges seemingly at eye level.  I stared until my neck began to hurt, and then I felt my way back to the car and asked Elayne to come out. 

We leaned back against the hood, side by side, with fingers overlapping.  The stars were all around, the brightest ones looking so low that our heads seemed to be amongst them.  Giddy with fatigue, it was easy to imagine that we had entered their realm, or perhaps that they had descended to ours, like a mysterious greeting. 

But the simple reality was more mind-blowing than any fancy.  We really were at a high point on a sphere that bulged into the star domain, and we were kept alive only by a tenuous layer whose protection faded four or five kilometers above our heads.  We were gazing out from it while hurtling through a void that would have meant an instantaneous and silent death.  

And this we called ‘ordinary’.

---

It should have ended there.  

What had been uncovered, whether valid or not valid, useful or inconsequential, was an optimal balance between knowns and unknowns, and both are needed for life to have meaning.  To ask for more had to indicate a kind of addiction, a malformed gluttony to possess and devour the mystery rather than to merely comprehend a beautiful part of it.   And in the background there appeared be the added prospect of gains—monetary gains.  So, it would be Gluttony plus Greed.  

And glory.  Glory above all.  Gluttony plus Greed plus Pride.  

The list kept growing towards the sum-total of all seven capital vices, all bundled into a single quest.  I would view it in those terms in a dark aftermath, seeking some understanding within the context of an archaic catechism.  

But, at the same time, I would not be able to escape the thought that if I had just stopped on that day, perhaps another and possibly worse kind of evil might have been set in concrete.

In any case, if there had ever been at all a chance for the project to proceed conventionally, with library searches, consulting authorities in the field, etc., it vanished within days.  In its place came the urge to do it all in isolation and with blinders on, because even a simple background check might have meant confronting the ugly possibility that someone else had preceded me on the trail.  What would I have done if it had proven to be the case?  At best, I would have risked being diverted along the lines of someone else’s work.  At worst, I might have simply become disillusioned and given up, leaving who-knows-what still undiscovered.  That simply would not do.  I would do it all on my own, or not at all.  

From this point on the pace would be manic.  The last leg of the journey would be as unique as any personal misadventure is bound to be, and yet it would echo with the experiences of others who followed their  trail too far, likely with less than pure intent, of whom only a few would bother to tell the tale.  Such stories tend to have little in common except for the central moment into which one enters and from which one exits—if at all—at one’s own peculiar angle. 

---

A couple of weeks had passed since the excursion through the Rockies.  The laboratory sessions were over for the term, so there was more time to work on the project.  Using the lab computers after hours, I began to carry out software testswhile at the same time continuing to elaborate the philosophical context. 

But something new was creeping into the work, gradually and insidiously. At first the troublesome aspect seemed secondary, with so much else to explore.  But the intrusion kept coming back, and it was becoming a distraction. You haven't forgotten about me, have you?

It was still possible to disregard the taunt.  I knew what was calling, and perhaps I had been foolish to assume that it would simply fade away.  At times it sounded like a Mafia boss; at others like a jilted wife who still had access to all the bank accounts.  

But recently the whisperings had taken on a snake-like tone.  Why do you hesitate?

The voice, which of course was no voice at all but a way of personalizing a temptation, was poking at an aspect of the work that seemed too asymmetrical.

As it stood, the Knowledge Hypothesis could explain much.  To my satisfaction at least, it dealt with intelligence, culture and civilization quantitatively, with the imminent prospect of decoding underlying nature of all carriers in greater detail the.  

Aren't you forgetting something? The temptation invariably objected.  Not all carriers are the same.

This cat-and-mouse game was being played with increasing frequency, and eventually I began to argue back.  You can’t tempt me; I have been there already.  Ten years had been a long-enough waste of time, and I was not going to be swayed by a temptation that sounded like a mellifluous snake.  Or, even, a disgruntled wife.  Consorting with a Mafia boss.  To whom I owed favours.

But I had to admit that there was something bothersome in the grand picture. Discounting differences between species, and allowing for individual differences within a species, the Knowledge Hypothesis treated all carriers as fundamentally alike.

But you are different, would insist the voice.  You are different fundamentally.  You have verifiable self-awareness, and the rest do not.

Eventually I had to ask myself what it was that I seemed so afraid of.  Surely there would be no harm in taking a good look at what the temptation was suggesting, just to dispose of a useless possibility and shut the voice up once and for all.  

The thought that required attention was this: There were two kinds of human carriers.  One was endowed with intelligence and other ancillary processes, and capable of protestations of self-awareness that were usually taken at face value.  This was the "other people" kind, by far the more numerous.  

The remaining kind was a set containing a single carrier, possessing all the attributes of the other kind plus direct awareness (and hence incontrovertible evidence) of its own existence.  The others might assert to possess the same thing, but it was not a verifiable claim.  (I noted in passing that the resulting distribution with respect to directly-verifiable awareness was highly skewed.)

I had met such dichotomies before, as had most people I knew.  As children we had been told the story of Adam and Eve.  Later, in regular school, we had been taught about Evolution.  In order to hold on to both views simultaneously, at least for a time, we would compartmentalize our minds so that one set of teachings could be contemplated separately from the other.  This business of Solipsism in contraposition to a more objective worldview seemed to fall into the same class of problems.  Sometimes mental barriers were erected simply to prevent inner contradictions.  

Ah, would intrude the voice, But there is no need for barriers with the Knowledge Hypothesis.  

A queasy doubt:  Could it be…? 

Solipsism still carried the clout of Occam’s Razor, since it could account for all that was observed without involving complicated laws of nature—which were still vastly unknown, anyway.  Yet, for all its self-consistency, Solipsism had remained a sterile philosophy, a ‘so what?’ kind of idea.  It possessed ultimate simplicity, but one could not do or learn much with it—until now.

The unexpected thing about the Knowledge Hypothesis was that it imposed structure, quantitative and mathematical, even on Solipsism.  The perceptions one experienced, regardless of their ultimate origin, arose from a process of categorization that turned unrelated perceptual elements into consistent features.  The process could operate on dreams and illusions as well as conventional reality, so long as the dreams and illusions involved perceptual elements—which they always did.  So, it was not a question of competing perception models.  Dreams, illusions and conventional reality were naturally harmonized; they were children of the same father.  

One can go far with this, said an inner voice that was finally acknowledged as simply my own.  Take the work so farand apply it to the inner landscape, which is all that you can be sure of.   

There was only the barest hesitation: my inner landscape, which was all that I could be sure of.  

It was that quick.  A seduction that had played out for weeks was consummated in the space of a few short thoughts. 

Much later, when making sense of that decision and of the material on which it had been based seemed again important, notes would be retrieved from cardboard boxes and they would be edited and rewritten, trying to improve on the text with the benefit of hindsight.  Even that later effort is now personal ancient history. The newer work would be carried out under calmer circumstances as an attempt to cast a wide net on the irrefutable aspects of the Knowledge Hypothesis.  

It opened unpromisingly with a rather laboured paragraph.

It is desirable to seek a quantitative formulation of knowledge, intelligence and purpose.  Such a formulation would allow novel and efficient ways to gather knowledge using automated means, give unambiguous standards by which to appraise the relative merits of different intelligent processes, and remove classical existential uncertainties by clearly describing the purpose at the base of intelligent processes. 

After a few more paragraphs similar in tone, the work attempted to face the issue of Solipsism head on.  It seemed that I had to give Solipsism its due even while still struggling to break free from it, and I titled the first chapter Out of Solipsism.  Like many that followed, that chapter was intended as a formal, accurate and sober piece of writing.  It succeeded only in part, but I still consider it valid in the main.

For the privileged self to believe in the existence of other self-aware entities requires a leap of faith similar to that of believing in a deity.  The term self-aware is crucial to pre-empt the objection that fellow humans, unlike gods, can at least be detected empirically.  The objection is refuted out of hand by the impossibility to detect self-awareness outside the privileged self.  Furthermore, the existence of fellow humans at any intrinsic level can never be proven.  Yet we will do this to the extent allowed by the rules of information by describing what actually constitutes empirical detection of intelligence and corporeal properties of other entities, as well as of matter in general.

But the fact remains that the privileged self believes, often most strongly, in the existence of others.  It does so not only in reference to the physical and intellective properties of the inferred entities, to which at least the contrivances of empirical methods apply, but also in reference to their self-awareness.  It is encouraged to do so by an apparent reflection of its own beliefs in the words and actions of the inferred entities. 

In historical times, particularly in the past 2600 years, the intellectual element has received increasing attention.  The intellect manifests itself in shared processes that are recognizably the same from mind to mind, or that at least clearly follow the same rules regardless of which mind contains them.  Inferred observers can share the processes among themselves and/or with the privileged self in any permutation of exchange.  Intelligent processes, or simply intelligence, became by the Age of Enlightenment the implied definition of what makes one human, and the fundamental distinction between privileged and inferred observers has since faded.

Intelligence spawns the practical improvements that makes human life generally easier for each succeeding generation, but also, and more importantly, it continues to develop academic disciplines and whole fields of thought that seem to have lives and directions of their own.  In their diversity one senses a common element, a kind of major motivator that is as strong and pervasive as it is currently ill-defined.  In describing it, we obtain the quantitative rules of the intellect.

The solipsist view is set aside when the focus is exclusively on the intellect.  Then the privileged self can analyze the intellect without wondering whether it is indulging in a self-referential exercise.  It is not self-referential, as we will show.  Intelligence displayed by an inferred entity is "real" intelligence, obeying the same rules as those of the privileged self's own intelligence.  Therefore, understanding the rules of intelligence in one mind, whether privileged or not, is to understand the rules of anything that simply appears to be a mind.  We will formally show that, although the privileged self can never be sure of the existence of self-awareness in other entities, it can at least feel confident of the existence of other intellects. This conclusion, probably the highest implicit achievement of Classical Greek thought, has relieved us from the horrors of the solipsist view.  It does not, however, free us from the view itself, which persists once acquired; but it does assure us that we can interact with someone else's intelligence knowing that it exists to the extent that ours exists. 

The writing then moves on to the quantitative aspects of the hypothesis, summarizing it and developing it further, as well as cleaning up its math.  Around this time I would arrive at a more evolved equation for H, in a form that would include nested context explicitly.  It is reproduced below, extemporaneously and perhaps with a degree of exhibitionism.  It represents Shannon Entropy in the most general form I could devise.

_,

where

.,

with the final probabilities being of a complex form not shown.

Effective and inexpensive word processors had become available by this time, and the writing would become voluminous.  Programming software had also become powerful and readily available, so the Knowledge Algorithm could be tested on more complex tasks.  But the final form of the equation would not be tested because by then other priorities were imposing themselves.

---

There had been fewer priorities and far fewer restrictions during the summer of 1981, a time that had felt like the apex of life’s parabola.  I had been so confident in my approach that I had even opened again the door to Solipsism, because I feltthat I finally had the tools to deal with it.  I could now impose quantitative analysis even on what had always been regarded as the ultimate subjective outlook. 

To that end I made liberal use of thought scenarios, and in one of them I imagined waking and trying to organize the day ahead.  In order to plan, I would have to remember a few things, like, Is this a workday? What arrangements have I made? What commitments have I taken? 

Even more basically, Who am I? Where am I? How old am I?  Etcetera.

I would find ready answers to these questions, especially to the last set.  Yet the larger question would remain: Where does the Algorithm find the data for the answers? From the conventional memory of real-life experience, or by manufacturing the patterns in situ, right there by the side of the bed?  

If I were actually sitting on the bed in full acceptance of the second possibility, I might relish again the feeling of being the sole actor in my own play.  At the same time I would no doubt experience the familiar frustration of not being able to play fast and loose with the script. I had encountered the same paradox in the days of pure Solipsism.  Solipsism meant that everything could be just a simulation, but with no clues as to who, or what, was writing the program and entering the data, or why it was even done in the first place.  By default, it had seemed easier to assume that it was I who was the ultimate author of the solipsistic world, even if it was impossible to see just how such a thing was accomplished.  To explain the creation of reality by such means one would have to postulate that some aspects of the I—the world-creating aspects—would reside outside the immediate awareness of the I, thus muddling the picture.  On balance it would still remain the simpler view; but, if I were to accept it again, I would be facing a familiar dilemma:  If I had created my own reality (or, equivalently, the memories of my own reality), why this particular one?  Why not that of a billionaire?[7]   

The difference from the old days was that now, while still not knowing why certain memories existed instead of others, I was beginning to see the fundamental process that gave rise to memories in general. 

---

Having grown up at a time when Science had been promising all sorts of grand unifications and simplifications, I accepted it as a given that ultimate simplicity should be at the base of all things.  I had even toyed with the idea of nothingbeing the foundation of everything, which seemed a provocatively simple assumption.  But in the light of the Knowledge Hypothesis (or even just Information Theory), it made sense to ask: What, really, is ‘nothing’?  Is 'nothing' simply the absence of all things?  If so, it would constitute an “environment” where the entropy would be zero for virtually every question that could be asked.  In the classical ‘nothing’, you would know exactly what you would find anywhere you looked: nothing, with 100% certitude.  Anything else would have a 0% probability of being found.  It would amount to an extremely skewed distribution.  Consequent entropy: zero.  From the point of view of the Knowledge Algorithm, it would be a most desirable state—the end point of the quest!  If you started with nothing there would be no incentive to find or create anything.

I considered a different starting point, a situation in which nothing could be said for certain, the state of maximum surprise; that is, of maximum unpredictability, and hence maximum entropy.  Thus, the new ‘nothing’ would be a situation in which all events, potentially an infinite number of them, would be equally probable.  This would be stipulated as the seed of all things. 

It immediately felt like a good choice because randomness was capable of producing apparently non-random patterns, like fifteen successive 'heads" in a coin-toss game.  Thus, randomness would contain the potential for order.  In fact, the vaster the randomness, the greater the certainty that it would contain some wondrously ordered—although ultimately fortuitous—pattern.

And so I put myself back in the “wake-up scenario”, at the moment of rising from the bed.  A tract of the chaos would immediately present itself, and the algorithmic process would go to work, trying out different ways of categorizing the elements of the jumble.  The algorithm would operate on the chaos by looking for any kind of pattern that presented a degree of consistency from moment to moment.  It would work on this by massive trial-and-error on a split-second scale.  At all steps the main change would be in the probability distribution as it evolved to describe an increasingly sophisticated representation of “reality”.  After extracting the first features the process might not even need the original chaos to spin and sustain a sense of reality since it would be working on the new features instead, and with objects and constructs derived from these.  

We seemed to pull from memory previously extracted patterns as if reaching into drawers, using them as templates in an unconscious work of trial-and-error.  After trying templates like “car”, “building”, “garden”, etc., we might find that “bed” fit the body sensations "best"; that is, the application of the “bed template” provided the partial description with the lowest contribution to H.

Other templates would likewise be selected and applied in a systematic manner to the rest of the chaos, and the “reality” of a typical morning would begin to emerge.  Having renewed the world, so to speak, we would then “step into it”, continuing to reduce H by exploration and intervention.  At the end of the day the refined templates would be put away, ready to be used for an even more efficient renewal of the world on the next day.

However, the royal we, as in “we face a jumble of random perceptions”, was somewhat fraudulent, since it ultimately meant “I”.  I wake up each morning, and I renew the world, by a process of back-justification. When the extracted features and objects come up for examination in the next step, entropy minimization would again direct me to find justifications for their existence in their present state.  I am sitting on a bed: How did I get here? And how did the bed?

There would be many possible answers to those two questions, but few—possibly just one—would fit the picture with a minimum amount of leftover entropy.  The bed having been carried to the room by movers, with no possibility of it having spontaneously materialized in place, would be consistent with a representation of predictable events; that is, the low H state. There likely would very few ways to explain it otherwise without introducing inconsistencies that would again increase entropy.

So, there I was, somewhat the master of my domain again; the only master, in fact, but still constrained.  It may well have been a game of solitaire that I was playing; but, just like the card game, it had definite rules and a clear objective, and the objective was to minimize entropy—nothing else.  Certain mathematical rules had to be observed; but, aside from that, just about anything went.  I could simulate, explore and intervene as long as the process reduced, or at least attempted to reduce, entropy—and all of it could be happening only inside my head. 

In fact, all those explorations and interventions could be construed merely as back-justification, as a chain of memories crafted and cobbled into self-consistency by the need to minimize the entropy of the perceived world.  In this view, I would experience these processes in the role of the unique, privileged carrier of the algorithm.  

Notwithstanding something still to be discovered, it seemed that I really had the freedom to choose between the two views, as well as the ability to arbitrarily change my choice at any time.  Much of the time and in contrast to the days of Loyola I chose the view in which the inner representation was treated like conventional reality.  How else could I justify the time that I was spending in front of a notebook and a computer?  I craved recognition from those who would one day be my peers in Information Theory, whom I fully expected to surpass.  For that to happen I had to believe, however provisionally, in the concepts of real work and real readers of my work.

---

The first programs were modest in scope, designed to extract ordered patterns from small artificial data fields.  But the task was not helped by the fact that I was using some of the earliest types of desktop computers, whose only advantage was that they were readily available in the undergraduate labs.  Ironically, these were the same computers to which Richard and I had objected less than a year before.  They were machines of limited speed, memory and sophistication, and I soon concluded that they were not the units from which the first recognizable signs of artificial intelligence would emerge.  But they seemed sufficient for testing the Algorithm in simple situations, so I began contriving small data batches to see how it would behave with those.  

At this stage I was only asking the program to minimize H by finding predefined features.  I would construct an image numerically, pixel by pixel, making sure that it included a feature that would stand out visually to the average person.  I might then direct the search for a particular shape, such as a rectangle, while leaving the location, proportions and size unspecified.  The smallest possible rectangular area (a 1×1 square) would be defined as a possible feature and tried over all possible locations in the picture.  The process would be repeated for all possible rectangular shapes and sizes. Once placed at a location, the entropy of the trial feature and that of the remaining area would be computed and proportionately summed.  The sum would then be logged for later comparison.  Finally, the combination of shape, size and location that had yielded a minimum H would be selected and the associated rectangular shape would be regarded as the extracted feature.

The early programs zeroed in on the target features infallibly.  It was not an unexpected result, but it was thrilling just the same.  However, I wanted the algorithm to prove itself with data that originated more plainly from the “real world”, and pictures from everyday life seemed the appropriate choice.  Not having off-the-shelf digitizers (they were still an expensive novelty) I tried to construct one myself, and this turned into a memorable effort for unintended reasons.  

The most immediate requirement was the means to focus images and log their luminosity by position, and the first component I acquired for the purpose was a plastic wastebasket from a stationery store.  I cut a circular hole at the bottom and  fitted it with a lens borrowed from the labs.  Then I visited a toy store where I found what must have been the most immortal toy of the twentieth century, an Etch-a-Sketch set.  I removed the back plate and emptied the device of its etching oil, which reduced it to a rudimentary x-y positioner.  I attached a photosensitive element to the back of the stylus and connected its leads to a digital multimeter.  I bolted all this to the open end of the wastebasket, and finally I drew a 16X16 grid on the Etch-a-Sketch screen for positioning reference.  Now, all I had to do was aim the lens at some object, move the stylus in a systematic way over the grid, record the luminosity at each grid location, and enter the information manually into the computer.  It was absurdly laborious, but it yielded what I could legitimately call “real-world data”.

I was proud of my creation, and I showed it to Richard.  He took one stunned look and immediately doubled over.  

“I am sorry,” he said, in pain from too much laughing, “but you must admit that a garbage can with a lens stuck to its ass and a disemboweled Etch-a-Sketch bolted to its other end is just too bizarre.”

But I remained undaunted, feeling that I was making progress.  It was mostly progress by elimination, since many detailed assumptions simply did not survive their first encounter with real the world.  Each failure stung, and one had been particularly disconcerting.

Objects and Time

From the start I had been prepared to make compromises for the sake of speed.  As with the previous artificial images, I would first direct the program to search for certain shapes only, because leaving the choice wide open would have stretched the search into days and even weeks.  This restriction was unpalatable for its lack of generality, but it did not seem an unreasonable compromise at this early stage.  Personal computers were bound to become more powerful, and when they did I could widen the search to other types of shapes and combinations of shapes, eventually removing all restrictions to see what H-reduction could do on its own.  

But from the start there had been hints of trouble in that direction, and eventually a suspicion was confirmed: The H-reduction process produced sensible results only if the shortcuts were left in place.  The Algorithm seemed efficient and reliable only while searching from within a predefined range of shapes.  Removing the restrictions generally caused the program to output unexpected solutions.

What was maddening was that the program’s unrestricted choices were totally justified in terms of H; yet, there was no going around the fact that they were not always intuitive.  Was the H-reduction process, then, flawed in what it attempted to do?  Was it incapable of functioning properly unless it relied on the crutches of a limited template set supplied by humans?  

I did not think so, but the alternative was even harder to swallow: in unrestricted form, the Algorithm would always make optimal choices, even when they looked puzzling.  In other words, the Algorithm would always be “right”, but we humans could agree with it only if we forced it to share in our own limitations.  

It was becoming apparent that we were the limited entities.  We had to use restrictions in our analysis, we were limited to only seeing features in the data that resembled something we already knew.  By inference it was now possible to see why: the memory volume of the human brain was limited.  The limitation made it impossible to contemplate all solutions in a reasonable amount of time.  Thus, we would take shortcuts, and in doing so sometimes we missed the optimal solution.  

This had implications for the concept of objective reality.  As the term implied, that kind of reality was based on the idea of “objects”; that is, of associations of features that exhibited a degree of stability and permanence when tested—having, in other words, a supposedly independent existence.  But what did it mean when we perceived, say, a square window?  

We always seemed to be more aware of the “squareness” and of the “windowness” than of anything else that really made up the image.  Those two attributes might well be all that we remembered at a later time.  

I was aware that this topic was at the center of a very old debate, but it seemed that a significant possibility had been excluded: that ideas like “windowness” and “squareness” might be based on templates employed merely for fast analysis, and that all such sets were critically conditioned by memory size.  What we called “objects” might turn out to be just artificial expediencies for speeding up perception and thinking. 

One day I was discussing these ideas over lunch with David, a new colleague.  On the table was the classic metaphor for such discussions, and I pointed at it.  

“A glass of water, right?”

David nodded noncommittally.

I slid the glass a couple of inches over the tablecloth.  

“Same glass of water?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t ask if it was.”

It was impossible to patronize David and get away with it, so I dropped all subterfuge and attempted to explain that the glass was certainly not the same glass of thirty seconds ago. 

There were two glasses, Glass 1 and Glass 2.  Glass 2 differed from Glass 1 in many respects.  Its water was rippling, and there was less of it. The glass was warmer, and there was less of the glass as well.  More obviously, Glass 2 was at a different location.  Yet, most of us would consider the two glasses to be “really” the same, and we would strenuously defend the validity of that ‘sameness’.  To preserve it, and thus continue to claim that Glass 2 is really Glass 1, we would first of all declare its position to be irrelevant, and proceed to state that Glass 2 is really Glass 1 except that it has moved. So, just to preserve sameness, we, as agents of the Algorithm, would readily introduce a new concept, the idea of motion, with all the consequences this would spawn downstream of the argument.  As for the other differences, we would casually widen the identity parameters and say that Glass 2 is really Glass 1 except that a few molecules have been removed by abrasion over the tablecloth, that the temperature of the glass has increased through motional friction and by heat conduction from the hand, and so forth.  ‘Sameness’ is preserved at the cost of complicating the physics.  

On balance, it must be a desirable trade-off.  Introducing physical laws, whether simple and intuitive or complex and abstruse, must be advantageous if as a result we no longer need to account for every minute aspect of an object in order to refer to it.  Window-ness, square-ness, or, more famously, horse-ness, just had to be based on the more fundamental convention of same-ness, which allowed elements to be categorized broadly and represented economically.

But with larger brains it might be possible to represent a large number of variations for “window”, “glass” and “horse”.  

A greater variety of templates could be generated to subdivide, and perhaps even straddle, the components of the original template set.  Thus, a system with a sufficiently large memory might construct a reality different from that created by a more limited system, even if both systems were to access the same data through the same algorithm.  

It was reasonable to conclude that the two systems would likely experience two different realities simply because they possessed different memory volumes, and that even minor differences in volume might generate significant differences in perception.  Even natural variations in brain size within a species might be sufficient to cause it.  Left unaddressed, this effect could hamper communication and turn into a problem capable of crippling social progress, and possibly even bringing the evolution of the Knowledge Algorithm to a halt.  

It was plausible, then, that the Algorithm should develop cultural means to impose communication invariants, such as those of standardized language, in order to ensure commonality of perception between carriers.  Thus, English speakers would be taught to call “apple” a particular kind of fruit even when it differed in detail from the item used as the teaching prototype, and the acceptable degree of variance could be taught by induction.

It was not easy to entertain the possibility that so much of the reality we thought we knew was shaped by something as pedestrian as memory volume.  And what was assumed to transcend it, the supposedly “solid” part of reality, seemed to consist mainly of the symbolic knowledge transmitted through culture—the very kind of knowledge that was supposed to be just academic, an abstraction of the objects it claimed to represent!  

Yet this paradox was wholly consistent with our initial conception of the Knowledge Hypothesis.

---

It soon became apparent that memory was not the only unexpected factor shaping the attributes of objects.  Time was another.  

The program could complete exhaustive searches only when given an unlimited amount of time to do it, and it usually took days or more for a single feature extraction.  Reducing the amount of computing time often led to results that were relatively inaccurate by H-reduction standards, but, once again, also more consistent with human perception.  Even in the context of time, then, it seemed that the clumsier, more human-like applications of H-reduction reestablished the connection to ordinary human experience.  What, then, was the significance of the unrestricted searches if they did not reliably produce the intuitive result? 

I had to stick to the original hunch: Unrestricted H reduction produced the optimal solutions, regardless of what we thought of them.  More than that, the unrestricted processes could reduce even the entropy of total chaos to zero.  They could do it because such processes could simply assign a unit of memory to represent a unit of data until it eventually accounted for all the data.  This was the trivial solution that was always achievable by such brute force. With limited memory, on the other hand, one had to resort to ‘objects’, and then settle for only partial H reduction.

In any case, the ultimate goal remained the same: the reduction of H, partial or complete, immediate or in the long run, with the long run being the strategic goal.

---

David seemed intrigued by the prospect of an open-ended memory system, one that could grow indefinitely to eventually account for all the possible elements in the universe.  

How large would the memory structure have to be?  Would it need half of the universe just to account for the other half?  

The conversations kept getting stranger until David put into words a spooky little thought.  

“This concept of a god,” he said, “seems to be common to most cultures.  Could it be just a grand premonition?  Is it possible that God does not exist now, but that one day it will?”

He was another agnostic, but it seemed that we both felt uncomfortable at what he had said.  He was effectively asking: Could the Algorithm eventually grow to use as memory not merely one-half of the universe, but the whole of it?  Would each material element then become its own representation?  And, at that point, would the whole universe become aware of itself?    

We both may have the same thought: This might be just the way it is.  It may have already happened.  

I felt an obscure dismay at the thought of what it would be like:  no objects, no patterns, no features; just unconnected detail, all the way down to the subatomic level.  As for features, objects, worlds, etc., such constructs were of consequence only to carriers of limited memory and limited time.  An omniscient and eternal intelligence would know them for what they were, and thus be deprived of their comfort.

---

Eventually I found a way to reconcile the results of the unrestricted approach with the imperfect but familiar patternsextracted by the human intellect.  The clue had been the ease with which the software could deal with the earlier testscenes.  There had been no equivocation in dealing with those.  The crucial difference had been the low level—and in some cases the total absence—of noise.  With such data the program invariably extracted the intended feature even withminimal restrictions on the templates. 

I thought that there should be a way to achieve the same with “real world” data.  And, sure enough, with a single object scanned under optimal visual conditions, the result almost always coincided with human perception.  

So, why not routinely “train” the software in such a way?  Why not have “schooling sessions” in which the shapes of various objects were learned by presenting the camera with clear, centered and low-noise shapes?  Then, with the relevant shape memorized, the search for a similar shape could begin in the normal working environment.  Wasn’t that also the way with human schooling?

I tried a few runs, first showing the object under optimal conditions for preliminary extraction (the training phase), and then placing it in a noisy environment.  The improvement in extraction time and accuracy was remarkable, confirming that this could be the way in which natural carriers operated.

Partly to celebrate the breakthrough I bought a new camera, and the photos I took that spring show various locales close to home.  It seemed that the project was leaving little time for leisure trips, as it apparently took up most of my weekends and even some time at work.  

I began to plan the next stage, which would be the writing of a program that would not merely reduce the entropy of a representation, but also set in motion ancillary processes for a fuller interaction with the world.  Progress had been good so far, but the execution had been somewhat hodge-podge.  The processes were getting too complex, so it was time to start documenting the work more carefully.  Among the measures I took in this respect there was the purchase of a black hardcover notebook.

I have always been susceptible to the awe of new writing materials, and I began to summarize the work in exaggeratedly neat handwriting.  Writing the material tidily seemed by itself to clear up uncertainties and confusion, a practice that I had always encouraged in my students but that I had been late in adopting myself.  But the thinking kept racing ahead of the writing, and now it became entangled in yet another unsatisfactory aspect.

It bothered me that I was basing all analysis on an initially chaotic field of elements that was still ill-defined; in fact, that was not defined at all other than in its assumed randomness.  How many, and of what nature, were those elements supposed to be?

I first considered a facile answer: an infinite number of elements from an infinite number of categories.  But that was not the way the world seemed to be.  In the actual universe, an infinite number of elements could perhaps be envisioned, but an infinite variety?  Nothing in Particle Physics supported that possibility; matter seemed to be composed of relatively few types of elementary particles. Physics still had me in its grip and I would have to defer to it.  Nevertheless, I did not want to base a fundamental hypothesis on measures like “relatively few” or “relatively many”.  Since it seemed that I could not deal with an infinite variety of elements, I would try the opposite and consider only one type, but one capable of masquerading as all the others.  

I found what at first seemed the logical choice.  It would have to be the element whose nature lay somewhere between particle, wave and event: the photon.  

I could already see several approaches by which the photon could be coaxed into behaving in non-photon ways.  I even had old notes from Loyola in which I had hypothesized that all matter consisted of photons.  I had thought that the various velocities taken on by objects could be produced by photons that still traveled at the constant speed of light, but advancing by the “two-step-forwards and one-step-backwards” method, with the overall speed averaging to any value below that of light.  Now I viewed that undeveloped possibility as an indirect reason to be confident in my selection.  It just had to be the photon.  

Not realizing that this choice was the last blind alley, I took it in full expectation of success.  I also took Elayne for a premature celebration at the Greek restaurant.  

Again there was pizza, Cuba Libre and the customary drenching in proactive nostalgia for the day when I could look back on these times as the golden period of discovery.  But now there was something else, unwanted and puzzling.  Out of nowhere, just as I was gazing at the picture of the Parthenon, there was like an inner contraction, a flash of anxiety that bordered on panic.  Then it ended as quickly as it had begun.

There had been a more severe episode on one of our movie nights.  We had watched a story about an anthropologist studying the supposed psychic forces lurking in every human being.  He had tried to evoke them directly, only to instead awake, from within himself, a kind of ancestral gorilla that had gone on to trash the lab both physically and psychically.  I had found the premise and execution ludicrous, and I had felt vaguely depressed as we walked out of the theater.  Then, suddenly, I had felt panic.  I did not want to show it, but it was too strong to just ignore.  I tried to dissimulate it by feigning dizziness, and I sat down on the edge of the sidewalk with my head between my knees.  

Elayne hovered.  For something like a minute it felt like I was struggling to keep an unknown emotion from breaking out.  Being afraid of the way I might sound if I tried to speak, I signaled by hand that I was okay.  And then the moment passed, leaving almost no trace.  I puzzled over it, and finally I attributed the whole episode to an irrational response to the movie, towards which the brief incident had, in fact, shown some similarity.  

But there had been no such triggers at the restaurant.  The food had been good and the atmosphere pleasant; yet, the same anxiety had returned. 

Well, I decided in the end, it had been milder this time.  Whatever the cause, it must be waning.

---

Using photons as the building blocks of representation soon proved problematic.  Not that photons were an implausible choice, because if one could choose only among the known variety of elementary “particles”, they remained the obvious pick.  But one could do nothing with them unless detectors were involved to turn them into sensations.  Thus, having chosen photons I became embroiled in all sorts of photo-array designs, trying to come up with an arrangement that could stand as the archetypical detector.  But the overall picture was becoming unattractively complex, and it raised a number of questions that were discouragingly un‑general.  What should the optical geometry of the fundamental detector be? Cartesian? Polar? Spherical?  Should I really decide on fundamental detector geometry before moving on?  The dreaded regression of assumptions, to which I am particularly prone, started up and brought all progress to a halt.  

New doubts began to creep up.  How far down did I need to dig in order to find the beginning of the thread?  

And just to face that question properly I would first have to answer a different one:  What was it that I was actually trying to achieve?  It seemed unlikely that I would reach the foundations of “everything” by these means, so this new urge to find some kind of particle that would stand as the primal building block wasn’t even to the point.  

But some fundamental kind of input was certainly needed.  The entropy-minimization process could not be sufficient in itself, because it needed to operate on something just to be called a process.  I had surprised myself by actually being able to apply the formula to mundane situations and environments; but, judging by recent human history, the general process could not be content with those.  It seemed determined to push back the limits of knowledge in all directions, especially towards the very big and the very small.  Much research was being done worldwide just to reach deeper intothe small.  It was as if the general process was driven to search particularly in that direction for a basic component, and it was hard not to be infected by the same curiosity.  

But, what if it was just a distraction?

---

The Fall term began, bringing with it the sights, sounds and even some scents that announced the start of another school cycle, the twelfth of university life and the twenty-fourth counting from first grade.  I felt for the first time the oddity of having known no other life, either as a student or as a member of staff.  My journey had been dull and linear, a fact that was even reflected in a uniform westward direction.  To continue along it would now involve crossing another ocean, and I knew that it would not happen.  Geographically, at least, this was the end of the road.  

I felt a pang of nostalgia, one of several in recent times.  Just like the moments of panic, these feelings that were almost auras had started occurring without apparent reason or warning.  

I had experienced the first late one evening while working on the project.  Suddenly I had felt as if I were standing at the corner of De Maisonneuve Street and MacKay Avenue in Montreal, outside Concordia’s Hall Building.  It had been purely the reliving of an emotion, not a memory of images and sounds.  

The mood had soon vanished, leaving me slightly disoriented.  I would have soon forgotten all about it, except that a similar experience occurred just a few weeks later.  The intensity of the peculiar feeling had been the same, but this time it had involved the emotional memory of studying in the Loyola library with a classmate, a pretty Sicilian brunette.

I soon noticed a pattern.  These episodes, all of them brief and benign, appeared to be sequenced as a progression back in time.  And on this day, while walking through a wooded area of the UVic campus, I had briefly relived the emotion of the final day of a summer job between high school and college.  It had been a feeling of relief at the ending of manual labour and of excitement for what lay ahead.

I paused under a stand of fir as the experience faded.  

The aura-like episode immediately led to a reflection on past events, especially the flow of circumstances leading up to the Knowledge Hypothesis and all that had followed.  Now the project was stuck on something that had initially looked like a breakthrough. 

As usual, the devil had been in the details, which in this case had been those of detector geometry.  Still somewhat under the influence of the faded feeling, I considered a simple question: What is a detector?  

Now the solution came quickly: It is something set up to give yes-or-no answers.  Take a photon detector, for example. When you turn it on, you are asking it a question:  Did you detect a photon?  

A click: Yes.  

No click: No.

Stack a few of these in sequence, in a linear array where position is significant, and it becomes a measuring device. Coupled with a prism, say, it could be made to measure the wavelength of incoming light.  Alternatively, assemble several linear arrays side-by-side behind a lens, and you would have the essential component of an image-capture system.  The resulting binary images could be given gray levels by conceptually stacking more detectors "vertically" below each existing detector, as photon counters to be refreshed periodically.

But why stop at photon detectors?  The same principle would provide initial yes/no answers, and then finer levels of discrimination, to any kind of input.

---

I was out of the blind alley.  Basing everything on photons had been a misstep, but it had led to the real key: generalized detection.  This would be the fundamental link between the analytical system and the supposed “real” world.  

Taking it one step further, detectors would be viewed simply as the origin of data; that is, as abstract versions of thephysical senses.  Any material connotation would be disregarded and only the functionality would be considered.  Detectors would thus constitute the outer limits of a carrier’s world, and I coined a collective term for them: the boundary set. 

As had been the case with all apparent breakthroughs, this one immediately led to more insights. 

I considered the fact that a boundary set could allow, at least in principle, a near-infinite number of detector types.  But, despite this, animal physiology had only the dozen or so associated with the five senses. So, when a human carrier experienced an event it was only through elements of the five conventional senses, and often through only one principal sense with some input from one or more of the others.  

The Knowledge Algorithm was less limited in principle since it could create new detectors endlessly using the minds of its hosts.  It had recently acquired the technology for constructing the artificial equivalents of eyes, ears and touch sensors, and had mastered the biochemistry necessary to mimic aspects of taste and smell.  It had even extended the range of detection into regions alien to humans, such as those of x-rays and ultrasound, to name just two.

The significance of considering detectors in this way was twofold.  First, the approach showed that even detectors of a supposedly physical nature would only provide information in abstract form, as yes and no responses, and these would easily lend themselves to the creation of probability distributions on which the algorithm could work.

Secondly, there was the quantitative prospect of considering simultaneous inputs from the senses as combinations, or instances, that the carriers could potentially regard as events in their own right.  For example, the perception a bright flash combined with those of a loud sound and a feeling of overpressure would constitute a perceptual instance that might be labeled “explosion”.   This seemed to apply, in general form, to any construct that we called “real”.  The more numerous sensory channels intersecting at the event, the more “real” we consider the event to be.

Mind

I was discovering that grand structures put together in haste often crumble, but also that their rubble can lie around a long time. 

Traces of the silly extracurricular ideas I had cooked up at Loyola were now resurfacing, and some were even proving useful.  The mental fatigue that was setting in did not seem to hinder the recollections.  If anything, it seemed to enhance them. 

There had been a dark lounge near the top floor of Loyola’s Central Building, a cavernous loft with a dim ceiling that angled down to twin rows of gable windows.  I had first wondered about transmission by number and transmission by pixel at a table by one of those windows.  I could even recall some of the sketches I had drawn while puzzling over the problem.  Most of them had involved 4´4 arrays of black-and-white pixels, and I remembered my original surprise that even such a minimal arrangement could represent 65536 distinct images. And then I had marveled at the enormous representation capacity of only marginally more complex arrays.  

I reexamined those conclusions now, and I tried to imagine a carrier whose sensory system happened to only consist of a 4´4 binary array.  If diverse patterns were to be flashed over it at the rate of, say, 1 pattern per second, it would take almost a day before exhausting the set.  No matter how complex the surroundings, the carrier’s experience of the world would be necessarily confined exclusively to those sixty-five-thousand-odd variations. 

By adding more senses and more resolution, the number of possible instances would become truly staggering. A carrier with only five senses and 60 discrimination steps in each sense (a rather primitive system) would be capable of experiencing a number of instances equal to 2 followed by 90 zeroes, greater than the number of atoms currently estimated for the whole universe!  Thus, a carrier was apparently equipped to deal with quite a lot even with a rudimentary boundary set.  I could not help thinking of how prescient Richard had been when he had said at the start of all this, "We cannot possibly hold all those cards in our heads at the same time."  

It was sobering to calculate just how impossible it would have been.  But, although the human mind could not envision all those possibilities simultaneously, it was capable of selecting and experiencing every single one of them.

---

I grabbed a sheet of paper and drew the picture of a stick man holding up a mountain.  Was that a perceptual possibility that one needed to account for?  

Hardly. That particular configuration contradicted Physics.  Therefore, it could never “really” happen.  Although it was a potential configuration of the boundary set, no one would want to waste brain space to actually accommodate it.

I looked at the picture idly, and then it struck.  It could happen!

I drew a tic-tac-toe pattern over the same sheet. The drawing of the man holding up the mountain ended up in the center square, and then I filled the remaining squares with variations of the scene.  On the upper left-hand square I drew the mountain a few feet above the man whose arms were reaching for it.  One square over I drew the same stick man walking away with the mountain in his arms.  On the bottom middle square I drew the mountain floating away from the man. In the bottom-right square I drew the man squashed under the mountain.  I then filled the rest of the grid with more variations on the theme

By itself, the original picture of the man holding up the mountain was neither possible nor impossible.  Even Physics could not pass such a judgment.  However, physics, as well as extrapolation from ordinary experience, would have something to say about the various transitions from one picture to the next.  

The central vertical path—starting with the man walking off while carrying the mountain, followed by the stationary man at the center holding it up, and ending at the square below with the mountain floating away—would be a physically impossible path.  But it would be a different story along the diagonal from upper left to lower right.  In the first frame, the mountain would be a few feet above the man, who has instinctively thrown up his hands.  In the middle frame the mountain has just made contact with the man's hands, and in the last frame the drama had reached its gruesome conclusion.  Not pretty and not very frequent, but possible in principle and perfectly in accordance with the laws of Physics.  Only along a predefined analytical direction could something be judged possible or impossible

---

Now it all seemed within reach.

For the final layout, I did not deal with pretend men or mountains.  Instead, I set up a simple set divided into two subsets, Category A and Category B.  Since labels were arbitrary, I could just as easily have called them Location A and Location B, using a more convenient geometric terminology.  I could now think of the two locations as the only two possible places in a miniscule universe; or, equivalently, regard them as the only distinguishable states in a perceptual system.  I no longer saw any fundamental difference, because the term ‘universe’ had by now lost its traditional meaning.  

I endowed the two locations with the capacity to contain elements, and as such they could be visualized as side-by-side bins.  There would be many ways of distributing elements between the two bins, especially without restricting the total number of elements.  

To tabulate the possibilities I drew a grid that looked like an old-fashioned addition table.  

On the horizontal axis I wrote "Number of Elements at Location A", and on the vertical axis I wrote "Number of Elements at Location B".  I assigned coordinates (0,0) to the bottom left-hand corner, with the two scales increasing from there in steps of 1 along their respective axes. 

Each point on the grid would represent a particular distribution of elements; that is, a unique perceivable universe.  The various universes would be identified by their coordinates, and each pair of coordinates would in turn indicated the number of elements in the corresponding universe.  Thus, the square with coordinates (1,2) would represent a universe containing 3 elements, 1 element in Location A and 2 elements in Location B.  Similarly for all the other points in the grid.  It was easy to compute the entropy of such distributions, and I did just that, filling the grid with entropy values. Then I put down the pen and searched for patterns.

As expected, the entropy was a maximum all along the main rising diagonal, where the elements were evenly distributed between locations. But, just as significantly, the direction in which the entropy level decreased the fastest was in a direction perpendicular to, and away from, this diagonal.  An infinite number of such lines intersected the main diagonal at right angles, running from upper left to lower right. By what seemed at first only a coincidence, these diagonals had an additional distinguishing property: the total number of the elements along each remained constant. 

And then it hit: I was staring at the source of all the conservation laws. 

I called the new diagonals “conservation diagonals”, since along each of them the total number of elements did not change, as in the case of, say, (4,0), (3,1), (2,2), (1,3), (0,4).  This diagonal represented the evolution of a “universe”[8]that contained 4 elements, an unchanging total number variously distributed, and in this case the location with the highest entropy was at (2,2). 

Thus, starting from an arbitrary point in the grid, the Knowledge Algorithm would, by its very definition, impose a progression towards the nearest margin of the grid.  It would do so by the fastest minimization route along a conservation diagonal, since entropy decreased the fastest in that direction[9].  With a direction of events thus specified, and an impulse to follow it already defined (Minimize H), it was hard not to conclude that the existence of the Knowledge Algorithm automatically gave rise to the perception of time.  

This last point was just an aside to be explored later.  For now it seemed sufficient to note that even for the simple case of two possible locations—say, two actual boxes—the algorithm would encourage the typical human action of moving elements from the emptier box to the fuller one until all the elements would be in one box. Order out of disorder!

---

It almost seemed too easy.  Given a specific sensory system, a multidimensional grid could be built to represent all possible “universal instances” potentially observable by the system.  Next to each instance there would be others, identical to it except for a single perceptual detail.  Moving away from the original instance the differences would grow in all directions, all the way to points in the grid having little or no resemblance to the original “universe”. 

The multidimensional grid would encompass all that the carrier could possibly experience, and an entropy value could be computed for each point so that the grid would become a giant table of entropies.  Then, after pointing the finger of fate at any of the squares so as to designate it as the starting point—in effect, establishing the “wake up” moment—the Algorithm would be turned loose:  Minimize H!  

The algorithm would go to work “sniffing out” the neighbouring universes and picking the one with the lowest H as the next “stepping stone”.  Once there, it would examine the new neighbourhood and repeat the process.  The analysis could be extended naturally to universes of many locations, represented by grids of many dimensions and delimited by axes of increasingly complex definition.  In the particular subspace selected by the overarching version of the Knowledge Algorithm, a mountain positioned above a man would inevitably be followed, not many locations later, by the man being squashed.

All this showed that entropy minimization, the sometimes-complex process taking place below carrier consciousness, could find something to act as its proxy in aware perception.  A parent could pass on an aspect of the Knowledge Algorithm by teaching a child to consolidate all like objects into appropriately designated containers, so that the newly-empty containers could be used to tidy up somewhere else, ever decreasing H.  

And a physicist would advance the discipline by looking for conservation laws!  

It was these external aspects, the set of proxy manifestations of the Algorithm evident in such “ordinary” processes as those of parental and social teachings, that had first caught our attention a year earlier during a break from office routine.

---

I was almost inured to the euphoria from insights that were now coming as fast as they had a year back, but I never got used to another type of feeling, one that returned at unexpected times and that was by now part of a fairly long series of episodes.  I had experienced the latest not even a week since the previous one. 

That earlier experience had been particularly intense.  Suddenly, and accompanied by the usual mild surprise, I had had the feeling of being in a Grade 7 class, or Middle School 2, back in Italy.  As had been the case in all previous episodes, it had been a pure feeling, not coupled to visual or auditory memories.  But those had surfaced almost immediately anyway, called up through the channels we use to deliberately retrieve memories.  The feeling had reawakened a circumstance that I had almost entirely forgotten. 

The Scuola Media Statale di Maniago, the equivalent of a Middle School in a small North American town, had been housed in a three-story building at the edge of the town square.  Only the upper floors were used for classes; second floor for boys and third for girls.  Sometime during Grade 7 our class had been lagging behind, and our teacher had taken it upon himself to organize remedial classes.  These would take place on late afternoons, long after the building was expected to be closed.  He did this of his own initiative and presumably without remuneration.  Our parents were gratified, but much less so ourselves.  Time spent in a classroom on spring afternoons when other young people were out enjoying themselves seemed unnatural.

And yet, at times, the experience had almost a touch of vardalo.

At regular class time, the outside light was mostly morning sun shining through the window, but by late afternoon the classroom was pleasantly shaded.  The outside scenery, which in the morning had been harshly backlit, now stood bathed in the light of a sunset not visible from our angle.  The vivid tableau was often enhanced by the backdrop of a darkening sky.  In the crepuscular atmosphere even the tone of the voices was different, particularly that of the teacher.  I relived that aspect vividly.  There was a measured calmness to his words.  

I recalled the incidental detail of my Latin textbook on the desk by my left hand, with the outside light reflecting off the cover.  I even visualized its title, which normally should have been long forgotten: Via Latina.  The feeling of being in a detached bubble, outside normal school time but within a familiar classroom, had blended with another pervasive feeling from those days.  It was a sense of awakening, of a young Italy awash with restless adolescents from the post-war baby boom, still a poor nation, but one that was already embarked on an economic miracle.  From our naïve viewpoint, the world itself was being renewed.  The human family was young and clean; clean with knowledge, clean with technology and clean with modernity.  The centuries-old buildings blazing in the sunset added a visual contrast that onlyenhanced the feeling.  Even the old world had been agreeable; who could wait for the new?  

It had been only a week since those feelings and memories had bubbled up from nowhere.  I was therefore surprised when, so shortly after that experience, a new one occurred.  Previously these things had been spaced apart by several weeks.

As in the previous time, it happened at home during a break from the project.  I had left my desk to come to the dining area for coffee, and I had just sat down at the table with cup in hand.  And then it occurred, and this time it was different.  

In all the other times some aspect of school had been involved, in different decades and on different continents, but this time there was no such aspect, nor could there have been any, since the memories were those of a toddler.

A woman was carrying me, almost certainly my mother.  She was walking along the main road and we were approaching the last set of houses before our own.  Once again it was a sunset scene.  The light was striking the houses from the left, and there was the red of geraniums on one of the recessed balconies.  The feel was of a late afternoon in early fall, with a mellow light and a lingering warmth.  Nearby there was the sound of a baby crying and the voice of a woman soothing it.  Further away another woman sang, and it instantly brought back the fact that women used to sing, back then, right out in the open.  Then there was the trill from yet another woman.  She must have seen us approach on the road and then rushed over to meet us, because the memory ended with her face filling the view and with the loudness of her voice proclaiming her joy to see us.

I set the cup down.  The moment had been pleasant like all the others, but this time the memories had come packaged together with the overall feeling, unlike the other times when I had to fish for them after the fact.  And the quickening in the succession was also new.  Up until that moment the flashbacks had been on a roughly uniform regression back in time, but the latest one had upset the trend by coming in too early.  

It was a funny thought, but soon I had an even stranger one: What would happen if I plotted the calendar years to which the flashbacks referred against the recent dates in which the flashbacks had occurred?  

Naturally I had not kept such records, but my power of recall was sharp, back then.  As silly as it may seem, I did plot the years and the dates, and by allowing reasonable approximation I obtained a linear graph that sloped downwards.  The last data point was problematic because it caused an abrupt increase in the downward trend.  Trying to keep the point from spoiling the trend but still wanting to include it, I gave it partial weight.  The resulting curve retained the downward excursion, but the deviation was less sharp.  It also appeared to intersect my year of birth a few days after the current date.

I was somewhat amused by this.  I clearly remember thinking that, at this rate, I might experience a flashback to my own birth “around Monday or Tuesday.”  I still recall an impression of imminence about those two days, as well as thesense that this little exercise must have taken place somewhere in the middle of the week that preceded those dates, possibly as late as Thursday or Friday.

Finally, having decided that this kind of thinking was too weird even for me, I went back to work.

---

In detailing the flashbacks I risk overstating their significance.  They were brief, pleasant and interesting in themselves, but their meaning, if any, is unclear even to me.  In any case this episode would be the last one.  The  experiences are remembered only because of their timing.  Had life continued evenly from that point on, they would have undoubtedly been forgotten together with the hundreds of inconsequential events that crowd even the most ordinary day.

---

One wakes up in the morning and renews the world, but ‘morning’ is a figurative term.  One wakes up every second, or at any equivalent seminal instant.  And at that moment, spread before the H‑minimization process that operates below consciousness, lies the vast array of instances that the sensorial system is capable of representing.  

In spite of their inherently equal worth, only one among those instances is selected by “life”, or “fate”, or, simply but more mysteriously, by the mind of the carrier.  How was it done, and why? 

I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference.  I had already dismissed the clunky view of a material brain somehow representing in abstract form the rest of the material world for the sake of survival.  It seemed much simpler to bypass all that conventional stuff, and instead regard “life” as a process of selectively considering universal instances in a sequence guided solely by the Knowledge Algorithm.  It seemed, in other words, that it might be possible to regard existence simply as a selection of possibilities, hopping from one possibility to the next along a direction constrained by Hreduction. 

I was approaching these aspects with what I would have considered, not many months earlier, an unjustifiable confidence.  But now I felt that I was no longer reaching for something elusive and ill-defined.  After all, I already knew the context and the rules.  The figurative beast had been corralled within a definite part of the figurative landscape by the figurative fence I had been laying.   And the best part was that the solutions to both the solipsistic and conventional models lay within the same perimeter.  In a stroke of convenience, the models had turned out to be equivalent rather than alternative.  Taking advantage of the equivalence, I would now attempt a particularly difficult twist: writing the material, which seemed relatively easy to analyze in the solipsistic outlook, as if it were intended for a readership in the conventional world—which, of course, it was.  What else would I write it for? 

---

Just as suspected, it was not straight-forward.  Suddenly, concepts that had lost relevance in the solipsistic view came back demanding to be dealt with.  An academic paper that purported to explain the physical world would have to use the language of Physics.  It would have to explain not only photons, with whose concept I had already toyed, but also atoms, orbitals, nuclei, and a growing list of subatomic particles.  Could the new theory produce explanations for all these?

I had no doubt: it had to.  The subjective and objective views were equivalent.

Actually, in order to be valid, the theory had only to predict the readings of the detectors set up to detect the building blocks of conventional reality, regardless of whether the building blocks “actually” existed.  This was, after all, the basis of empirical equivalence.  

But, even so, the task did not promise to be simple.  I was sure that I could succeed given time, but it also seemed a curious waste of time, this taking of a concept that was solipsistically simple for the perverse purpose of twisting it into a more complicated form.  And for what, in the end?  For the sound of applause?

Yes, said a voice that had become snake-like again, for that.  

I rested, relatively speaking, by transcribing old material into carefully written text and formulae, but my thoughts kept racing, sometimes in circles.  Now they were troubled by the unattractive menagerie of elementary particles that high-energy physics had managed to come up with.  True, I no longer needed to explain them in terms of photons, or any other kind of fundamental component, but they still stood in the way, making the landscape too unruly to be ordered and too structured to be chaotic.  

But, was that actually a problem?  

I had an answer that I had been using increasingly, but I hesitated before employing it again because the high usage seemed to cheapen it.  But, really, it was a valid answer, probably the most valid of all: The particles of Particle Physics were the building blocks of a specific universe only.  The universe of my awareness just happened to be describable in terms of the conceptual shortcuts of Particle Physics, the known ones and those still to be discovered.  A special diagonal subspace sliced through the arrangement of possibilities, and along that diagonal the number of elementary particles, or perhaps their mass-energy equivalents (together with other “fundamental” quantities) remained constant.  Everything that a human carrier could do would be confined to that diagonal plane, which was the carrier’s conventional universe.  Other universes were possible off-diagonal, some with fewer types of elementary particles, others with more, and others still, perhaps, with infinitely many.  My own perceptual universe just happened not to be one of those.  Why look for more complicated answers?  

---

I tried to keep my working examples simple.  I considered that, in some small corner of all that was possible, there was bound to be the world of that minimalistic 4´4 carrier.  Even if parachuted into an infinitely complex environment, that tiny carrier would only experience what was allowed by its senses, and it would take only a few days, at most, for it to see all there was to see.  After that, the pictures would begin to repeat themselves in some sequence or other.

Just to notice the repeats, however, the carrier would need to store and access records in memory.  To be viable, in other words, the carrier would have to be endowed with more 4´4 arrays capable of being exposed, compared and refreshed.  The immediate picture would come “from outside”; the memory record would be “inside”.  An awkward differentiation would start creeping in between external and internal.  

But there was one crucial point: The intellect could work on representations only; that is, it could only analyze what was already “inside”.  Even deciding whether the immediate image had been seen before would require that it be brought “inside” for comparison.

The immediate image was supposed to originate within the boundary set, the generalized supplier of data, beyond which the carrier would be free to construe whatever it wished, so long as it helped minimize the entropy of the representation.  It appeared, however, that even the idea of a boundary set might have been merely the result of old habits.  It might have been yet another creation of a human instinct that says that there must always be an “inside” and an “outside”; that is, that there must be mind and then there must be matter, always with some kind of boundary (or boundary set) in between.  And as if this weren’t enough, whenever the intellective process “looked at itself” it made a paradoxical assessment.  It claimed to be just an incidental—even insignificant—process seeking to understand a more significant “outside world”!   

The apparent ability to partly see around these puzzles made me feel very close to a solution, and frustrated at not being able to nail it.  Once again, part of the hypothesis was crumbling while already another version was rising in its place.  It had been the pattern all along, and I wished that I could jump ahead in time just to see if this new version would stand. 

Slow down!  The immediate goal was to prove that the zoo of Particle Physics was compatible with the new formulation; the rest could wait.

I was beginning to feel exhausted.  It had been an intense session on the project, and even before starting I had felt tired from some work I had done around the apartment.   I decided to take a break and go for a walk.

---

Considering the progress I was making, even pizza at the Greek restaurant might have been justified, but time had become precious, and walks just opportunities to refresh the brain.  

By all appearances, there had been an elating, if still only private, string of successes.  But the way in which a new finish line always seemed to pop up was becoming unnerving.  Would there ever be a definite one?  

For some reason, I never questioned the urge to find a finish line that could be called definitive.  I had taken a self-defeating decision without realizing it: I would publish nothing until I knew everything.  

But that evening I realized something else: The nature of the quest had changed.  I had already discarded many of the reasons that had motivated me earlier on, like the idea of helping humanity advance, or repaying the social debt, or creating artificial intelligence for fun and profit. 

And yet some aspects of the latter survived.

Off and on I still dreamed of marketing some application of the algorithm, and sometimes I fantasized coming home from a fancy cocktail party, head swollen with the adulation of powerful people.  The home of fantasy would be a glass penthouse with illuminated views of downtown on all sides, its interior furnished in a modernistic style that was regrettably going out of fashion.  I visualized myself sitting on a black leather sofa with tie hanging loose at the collar and blazer dropped with studied carelessness across a coffee table.  Elayne would flit in and out of the background still in her party dress while I held a conversation with the Algorithm.  

“Do you know what you are?”  

The screen would stay blank for a second and then an answer would form.  

“Do you know where you are?”.  

I might have a nightcap while conversing.   

“Do you know who I am?”

Even in fantasy I never heard the answers.

Years later while reconstructing these events, I would remember an interesting detail.  The computer in the imaginary conversation would have been equipped not with one, but with two cameras, one pointing at the world and the other at a portion of the computer screen.  This second camera would be set to scan a visual mapping of the Algorithm’s analytical processes displayed in real time, thus giving the Algorithm a perceptual feedback of its own “thoughts”.  

Remembering that detail unlocked more memories of trying to pin down a puzzle that had remained unsolved since the days at Loyola.  Through all the intervening time, ‘awareness’ had continued to resist being formulated unambiguously, let alone solved in principle as intelligence had presumably been accounted for in my work.   

I had been using the word ‘awareness’ to cover all variations of the meaning, like ‘self-awareness’ and ‘consciousness’.  Differentiating among them did not seem crucial because I saw them lying on the far side of an uncrossable line.  It was the very existence of that line that was troubling.  On the near side was the increasingly familiar domain of the Algorithm, and on the other the still intractable enigma of awareness in all its forms.

The second camera had seemed, at first, the masterstroke that would render the line obsolete.  Here, finally, was an easily-graspable concept of self-awareness, made possible not by some philosophical or mathematical breakthrough, but by the simple introduction of a video camera feeding the image of a computer screen back into the analytical space of the Algorithm.  The idea was almost quirky, and I had fantasized eventually turning off the world camera and leaving only the feedback camera on, just to see what kind of daydreams a suddenly-bored Algorithm would concoct.

More to the point, it seemed that the technical upgrade might allow any version of the Algorithm to say something like:Yes, I perceive an apple on the table and I can perceive my own act of perceiving it, and now I can conjure up the picture of the apple in my mind even if you turn off the world camera, and I can contemplate it almost as if it were actually here.  It’s not as easy or as accurate as watching it with the world camera—this image I create shifts and distorts (a classic feedback problem possibly affecting human visualization as well); but, with sufficient concentration, I can manage it.

There would be no need of an actual feedback camera, of course, because the interfacing could be made internally.  It was just easier to think of it that way.  And if one day I could actually contemplate the feedback image on screen at the same time as the artificial carrier did, would that not constitute a sharing of awareness?  Would it not mean, finally, the crossing of the uncrossable line?

 By the time I took that evening stroll the idea of the second camera was still around, both as a prop of fantasy and as a possible future development.  But I was beginning to cool on its philosophical significance. True, with such an arrangement another carrier would be able to claim self-awareness, and in a narrow sense the claim would be justified, which was no small point.  But there was no denying that it would still be me assessing the carrier’s words and situation; it would still be my awareness contemplating the evidence of my own senses, no matter how clever the technologicalconnection to the other carrier.  Ultimately I would still be unable to decide whether I was only dealing with a carrier of unaware intelligence.  In fact, the very transparency of the supposed awareness-creation process seemed to rob it of its intended significance.  

This peripheral problem was becoming a distraction that threatened to sabotage the rest of the project, but it was alsothe price of having cut that late deal with Solipsism.  

I told myself that I had to let it go, that the work still to be done on the near side of the line was daunting.  To know that the Algorithm existed, that it had a mathematical basis and that it was responsible for creating reality was one thing, but to structure the findings in publishable form was another matter.  How much more time would that take?  Possibly months, but more likely years.  In the meantime I should try to focus on the present time and the opportunities it afforded, which seemed huge. 

Remember this time, I told myself.  Don’t forget a single day of this amazing year that is passing; don’t forget even this inconclusive night.

And on this night I walked along Quadra Street on a sidewalk that glistened with rain.  The city had shut down as it did on most evenings, and even downtown would have only a few places open, but tonight I would not bother with any of that.  I just kept walking and spinning fantasies while enjoying the melancholy weather.  This was autumn on the island,and already the season and its climate had left their mark, just as the Italian summer and the Quebec winter had done in their own time.

What is this about?

The next evening I was again transcribing notes, at the same time following other thoughts in that regrettable split-mind approach that made all work inefficient.  

As I wrote, I kept envisioning a carrier in its unique journey along a particular conservation plane.  If the carrier were, say, a scientist, he would assume an objective world, and he would interpret the Algorithm's mandate as an injunction to discover as much of the universe and its laws as possible.  But, what were those "laws"?  Was it not intriguing that the term was found in Science?  Had Science perhaps adopted it out of regard for legalism?  

Hardly.  It seemed instead that science had a teleological skeleton in its closet.  

Science, as both engenderer and offspring of the Age of Enlightenment, had at one point soundly rejected the teleological view along with the theological one, but it had appropriated some language from both, perhaps as spoils of war.  And now the spirit behind the language was haunting it.  There was an unmistakable twang to the word "laws" when used in scientific context.  "The Law of Universal Gravitation", "The Laws of Motion", “The Laws of Thermodynamics", etc., all carried a lexical flavour that was not exactly scientific, and lecturers enunciated them like hammer blows on an anvil.  

So, what were those “laws”?  

In the multidimensional sketches they had melted away.  Even the Law of Universal Gravitation had disappeared,notwithstanding its ability to describe the exact motion of planets around the sun, and despite the fact that just taking an introductory course in Classical Mechanics made it virtually impossible to view gravity-induced motion as anything but compelled.  General Relativity had disposed of the concept of force-at-a-distance, but even it declared that an orbiting planet followed a geodesic.  Psychologically, at least, that translated as “a planet must follow a geodesic.” 

I had been searching for an analogy to spotlight the absurdity, and I quickly found one.  Say that you walked into a huge quarry, an unconfined expanse of excavated ground where sand and gravel were being tossed around at random, and say that you came across a serpentine ridge of sand, a zigzag pattern that repeated itself.  You might stop and wonder about it.  You might follow it for a few zigzags, and eventually, if you were sufficiently naïve, you might conclude that the trend was locked; that is, that it would repeat indefinitely as you advanced.  You might decide that there was a law determining the pattern: the Zigzag Law.  The law might say: Zig for ten feet, zag for another ten, repeat.  What else could explain the data? 

But a nearly infinite chaotic quarry would have many interesting patterns dispersed thinly over its surface.  Somewhere there is bound to be a pattern just like the one you were examining, and that somewhere is here, before your eyes.  There were no “laws” to prescribe its existence or shape, but it was still possible to describe the pattern mathematically and then, pretentiously, call the description "law".  It was well and fine to observe and describe, but a law is something that is assumed to constrain, and, by implication, predetermine.  

It seemed absurd that rational and often atheistic scientists felt an inclination for such ideas.  After all, to assume a “natural law” was like invoking something that possessed will and capacity for control in spite of being abstract and undeniably inanimate.  It was like bringing a newly-banished God back on stage under the thinnest of disguises.  How simple, by contrast, the real reason for that serpentine pattern.  It was the simplest reason possible: no reason at all.  

A pattern was a collection of perceptual elements.  Any ulterior significance existed only as a function of the algorithmic structure that examined it, which sometimes described it with proxy concepts.  It looks like a sine wave, might say the science-trained carrier after trial-fitting known mathematical functions.  It must obey a sine wave law.  A few more steps over the gravel and there might be disappointment as the sine pattern comes to an end and blends with the surrounding chaos, as it statistically must.

So, a pattern was just a fortuitous deviation from chaos, made inevitable by the statistics of large numbers.  And, as it was easy to calculate, the number of perceptual states arising from even primitive senses was staggeringly large. This had further consequences, because even a fortuitous sine shape might not be recognized as a regular pattern unless scanned along a particular direction.  Before a carrier could even start to wonder about the pattern, an unaware Algorithmic process would have to identify, by the usual H-reduction means, the proper sense of analysis.  For a sine waveform, thespecial direction would have to be perpendicular to the sense of oscillation.  That special direction, applicable in different guise to countless variations on the theme, had always mystified humanity.  Unaware that the Algorithm was choosing it for wholly expedient reasons, it had given it a mystical name: Time.  By following its arrow, it was possible to describe selected patterns with a simple formula, or even with a short sentence: Zig for ten feet, zag for another ten, repeat.  

Incidentally, a sine path mimicked the Earth's orbit projected unto one spatial dimension as it advanced in “time” along another.  Supposedly, the Earth had been following such a cyclical path for eons.  First Newton and then Einstein had formulated methods to describe the motion, and the results had been called “law” in Newton’s version and “theory” in Einstein’s, even after the latter had gone past the stage of being just a theory.  But there was nothing that fundamentally required the Earth to follow that path.  Just as every sand pattern must eventually come to an end because that is the way with all sand patterns, so must the Earth’s orbit.  We have plenty of indirect evidence that the Earth has followed a regular trajectory in the past, but it is only through a leap of faith that we believe that such behaviour is bound to continue into the very next second.   And, by inductive reasoning, this would have to be true for any other “natural law”.

---

I had just been released from a Physics grip that had bordered on the religious.  Beyond doubt only Information Theory had the means with which to understand everything, an everything that sprang continually from chaos.  

Information Theory possessed a special measure that was tailor-made for tackling the chaos, and the Knowledge Algorithm used it to find regularities in randomness, sometimes resorting to shortcuts like those of Physics.  It would find them not because they were objectively there, but because they happened to conform in some way to the defining pattern of the Algorithm.  The human intellect could not easily perceive a process that was so close to its own nature; with which, in fact, it was intimately identified.  It would have been like a mirror trying to see its own reflection.  Thus, unaware of the special process that sustained it, the human intellect had ended up awarding a sense of specialness to what it produced,eventually labeling it with another mystical noun: Reality.  And Reality had been transmitted down the generations through objectification and permanence, the kind of ghosts that must haunt every limited version of the Algorithm.  And thus we had come to accept the materialistic premise that our own consciousness had to be a byproduct of inanimate building blocks, presupposing an independent existence for our own manufactured constructs, imagining that they had preceded us, and even attributing to them a mechanistic propensity to evolve into bodies and brains.

At that moment, late into the evening of what had been just an ordinary day, the meaning of my work seemed to shift, not in the way of a new solution or insight, but more in the way of a reappraisal.  And like a puzzle that has no cause for being a puzzle, it seemed to form the picture of what already existed.  It was shaping the ordinary under an extraordinary light.  The former illusions and distractions had fallen away, and the weight of the present moment grew unbounded.  With it grew the significance of the path that had taken me to it, and now I saw its true direction.  Not only had the passing of time been an illusion, but its perceived direction had been wrong.  

Time’s arrow always pointed to the past.  It led away from the present point of self-awareness towards the direction of entropy maximization.  There was no contradiction implied.  The new direction still conformed to the mandate of Hminimization because starting from the present moment, which was all there was, all paths led to a potential past.  “Moving into the past” along a path that maximized entropy was equivalent to “moving into the future” along a path that minimized it.   The Knowledge Algorithm had searched out the special path leading into the past, and human awarenesshad always perceived its mappings as terrain already covered in an imagined trajectory towards the “future”.  The percetual inconsistency was similar to that of seeing the world right-side up while knowing that our pupils actually invert the image.  

I recalled my old puzzlement about the physical world seemingly obliged to follow a mathematical path.  There was no puzzle: We had simply come to call “physical” anything that lay on the path mapped out by the Algorithm by the means of its defining mathematics.  Physics was one of the tools developed Algorithm; so, naturally, physics had tofollow the math!  The math was not inherently present in any of the elementary perceptions.  It was just the math of mathematically-shaped perceptions guided by a mathematical Algorithm.

---

After a long struggle to force a problem towards some kind of solution, sometimes all the elements simply shift and fall in place.  It had just happened, and I felt at a loss.  Was this it?  I looked at my immediate surroundings and into memories both recent and remote, trying to find some kind of precedent, or at least some relevant context.  

In impossible clarity, the living room now appeared to be just the innermost layer of a debunked illusion, with the outer layers expanding to form the universe I had loved since childhood.  I had loved it for its reassuring presence, for its supposed mystery, and for the dream of one day exploring even a tiny part of it.  I had never foreseen that the universewould turn out to be just a point in the configuration space of the mind, one among innumerable others.  Searching for a reason to view this point as special, ruling over the search, determining the modalities of contemplation—all these concerns were apparently motivated by a single, basic hunger:  Minimize H.  It really was the finish line.  

I was gazing outwards as if from a cliff and the view was stupendous.  Its very evanescence was stupendous.  A complex illusion had receded from a breadth of galaxies to retrace its path to a single planet, a single life, my life, me, sitting at a desk with hand suspended over a page.  I was here, in exclusive awareness of this precise universal point.  I was in it.  I was it.  The point of arrival had turned out to be the same as the point of departure; and, just as prefigured in afamous quote, the place could only be known now, for the first time.  

It’s hard to imagine, now, what could have possibly followed from that realization, in an ordinary course of events.  But there would be no chance for any of that, because, quite suddenly, something else became mysterious: All this had undoubtedly been intended to remain hidden.  If the illusion had been meant to masquerade as reality, why had I been allowed to lift its veil?  And, why me, of all people? What is this about?

I felt a groundswell: I had asked that same question, one night, in Gravena! This time the veil did not drop.  Exhilaration does not begin to describe the feeling of having come to know all there is to know, and of holding the knowledge within an awareness that towered above all else, even the Knowledge Hypothesis.  

No, not just hypothesis any more; not even simply theory.  This was the kind of realization  that could only be called truth.

Time, hopelessly trivialized, appeared to slow.  All along I had been avoiding the inescapable conclusion.  Could I finally believe what it implied?  

Believe it, hissed a sugary voice.

“So,” I said, rising from the chair, “this is how it feels to be God.”  

The inner groundswell became applause, a thunderous private ovation that went on for seconds, and the last memory.  Then, whatever it may have been up to that point—a lived life, an information process, or just a dream—ended.   So, you want to know how it feels to be God.

---

The senses disconnected and darkness swallowed the living room. People who have survived a gunshot report that they experienced the bullet as a sequence of distinct disruptions, one discrete layer at a time.  I have used metaphors for what is too difficult to describe, but what was commencing was so unprecedented that the mind began to produce its own metaphor, spontaneously and in real time, in an attempt to grasp it. 

I was in an empty room.  Even as the image formed, a corner of the facing wall seemed to peel back.  Then it was as if the whole wall were moving aside, or maybe revolving, gradually exposing a void.  Something in it was coming into view in partial profile, like a head that had been facing away.  In a movement that would not be completed, it turned toward me. 

So far only a fraction of a second had elapsed, and I had not reacted.  There had been no time even for adrenaline to be released.  I was still relatively composed, attempting to figure out what this was about.  Then, two things happened.  

What had seemed a wall now looked more like a back, a wide person's back, visible from the shoulders to the waist.  If this had been human anatomy, the “head” that was turning would have previously been hanging forward, in a posture of fatigue.  

I remember an irrelevant wonder: fatigue at what?  There was the sense of a struggle in the balance and of precious attention being diverted to this moment.

The last part of the encounter now began.  The visual metaphor, which all along must have been just that, a clumsy attempt to restore familiarity to what was unfolding, crumpled like a piece of paper.  Again, the darkness reasserted itself.  The words, So, you want to know how it feels to be God, were still echoing.  In this unsettled landscape came the taste of God’s existence, sudden and unadorned, like a scouring poison.  Half-formed thoughts became a shriek. I thrashed like a condemned man fighting off the noose.  Resist!  Resist!  

The message came as a self-knowing feeling that breached defenses I did not know I had.  I threw my whole mind at the breach in an attempt to reseal it, but the attempt was suicidal and now the mind was in splinters.  

But—and this was bewildering—the shattered mind was seeing more clearly than before.  It was wandering in the space it had supposedly occupied until that moment, but the space was empty.  What once had filled it now seemed to be elsewhere, still oddly accessible, but dissected, deconstructed, laid out as if on a clinical tray.  It was all there; it was all I had made it to be, information without substance, disconnected and meaningless.  The mystery that had veiled the causal origin of the illusion, the mind‑protecting illusion, was gone.    

There was instant and absolute despair, and then a frantic grasp for the last conceivable source of mystery, a world beyond Information Theory and every other human concept.  

But I had just received an infinitesimal taste of that world, and I was trying to retch it out!  It permeated me and would not be expelled.  Stuck at the very center of awareness was the horrifying knowledge that there was nothing above, nothing below, nothing at all.  Only one’s own mind in which to dwell, only the company of entities created out of nothing, made of nothing, existing only in thought and make-believe.  

I was falling to my knees with arms upstretched.  No! No! No!  

And now sight was returning, and the living room was reemerging like a perfect counterfeit of itself, like a mockery.  

I no longer knew what I was but I knew that I was alone.  With hands flailing into the void I tried to feel again the overpowering presence, or at least a fragment of the old world; something; anything at all.

September 27 Ends

The bedroom was dark.  Aside for the sound of Elayne's breathing and the ticking of a mechanical clock, nothing hindered the scream.  Through frantic thrashings in search of a mental handhold, a memory kept presenting itself.  

I was still a boy, standing behind my mother in our old kitchen.  

"You can't fool me anymore," I was saying.  "I know who Saint Nicholas is."

"Oh?"  She did not even turn around.

"It's you, isn't it?  It's you and Dad."

"No, it’s not.  Go away."

I did not let up.  "I know it's you.  Face it, I am not a little kid anymore."

This went back and forth a few times, and then, with her back still to me, she partly turned her head.  

"All right," she said. "Now you know, and now it has ended.  How do you feel now, big man?"

Had it been just a coincidence that the vision had drawn on that memory?  

No, it could not have been. The similarity fit like a glove.  For gain and loss, the correspondence was absolute.  A chant started up, like a rocking motion. "God, no!  God, no!”  But, for the first time that line of communication remainedinert, with not so much as a dial tone.  It had never happened before, not even in the days of rabid atheism, when, occasionally and hypocritically, I had turned to prayer in difficult times.  Even then there had been a feeling that someonemight be listening.

The world had crumbled; it did not exist.  It had never existed!  My own work had said so even before tonight’sencounter, and now I did not exist, either.  

But I could still think.  I was thinking at the moment—that must mean that I still existed.  Or maybe not, because every attempt at organized thought triggered another slide towards the abyss.  

The night straight out of hell continued a while longer.  Then, strangely, sleep came, and for the last time in decades it would be deep and continuous.

Abyss

The vortex had been revolving, pulling and straining to swallow.  Then, it seemed to relent.

Quick!  What is still real? 

My family! (No, not that.  A stupid idea.)

The Church!  The Church will take me back! It will give me counsel!  It will give me refuge!  

No time to quibble over whether one could re-convert so quickly and so conveniently, because this was about survival, by hook or by crook.  

But invoking the Church had a strange effect.  It conjured up a final visual allegory, the image of a shaft in which I seemed to be falling.  Falling up past me were the items I had just invoked: first, my parents, in the form of a wedding portrait; then, the Church, in the image of a rubber dingy riddled with my potshots and its own self-inflictions.  It flapped by, rocketing upwards and disappearing over a circular opening.

Zoom! Went my parents.

Zoom! Went the Church.

What about Elayne?  (Zoom!)

Montreal?  The Laurentian Hills?  Italy?  (Zoom, zoom, and zoom!) 

Gravena?  

The image of the shaft dissolved, as if this loss were too deep to be rendered figuratively.   

The vortex resumed its sucking motion.  Take me out!  Bring me to a mental hospital!

Somehow the autopilot dragged me out and led me away from the parking lot, allowing me to wander blindly through several city blocks.  It even overrode my attempt to check in at the mental ward of the Royal Jubilee Hospital.  It led me home instead, stepping back just as I staggered into the shower.  The fantasy that it could all fix itself had ended.

V

And so I came to know hell.  To be in hell is to know that you exist somehow, but that nothing else does.  All the things of the world and the world itself had transited into nonexistence.  

I missed the world like flesh torn off.  I wanted to rejoin it.  

No problem: I would simply let go and, presto! I would enter nonexistence at will and often against it, going from the terror of hanging on by fingernails to the annihilating panic of the plunge.  And, after the plunge, to arrive where the world had retreated and to find nothing!  This was, after all, nonexistence.  And then, always, a cat-like scramble against the pull of the abyss, barely sufficient to reach  the edge of the pit and grasp it, only to lose grip and plunge again.

But there was too much contradiction in being nonexistent and feeling existence sharply—too sharply, even.  Surely I must be confusing existence with reality.  From all that I had learned, that would make sense.  I had not set out to disprove existence, but showing that reality was insubstantial had been the goal all along!  

The despair of being trapped, hemmed in on all sides, was indescribable.  And this is how inescapable the trap was: the tools that would normally be relied upon for escape—reason, knowledge, common sense—were the very impediments that blocked the path.  The weapons of the intellect covered every escape route.  

The world was not real and I was not real, yet I existed because cogito, ergo sum.  Thinking was still allowed, it seemed, but that cogito was terrifyingly empty.  After all, I knew its nature.  It was an abstract process that could reside in a computer (which, as physical object, did not exist) as well as in my brain (which did not materially exist, either.)  Cogitowas everything and nothing at the same time.  Had Descartes understood his own Latin?  If he had been alive and real I might have strangled him.

A bewildering chasm had opened up between reality and existence, and this time it would be forever.  Reality was, after all, a byproduct of entropy reduction, and at one time it had even found safe harbour in that recognition.  Now a killing truth was replacing that sense of refuge, because the process would be reassuring only if it operated on imponderables; only if it could be regarded as a struggle to overcome the elements of the non-rational.  Crucially, even then it would be of little comfort unless the imponderables carried unspecified tendencies of their own, directed at counteracting, almost in a willful sense, the mandate of rationality.  That presumed conflict had been assigned different allegories at different times: knowledge versus ignorance, light versus darkness, order versus chaos.  Identification with any of them had kept us going as a civilization, and— now it seemed certain—it had kept me sane as well.  Now, any chance of regarding the imponderables as opponents, whether willful or just passively stubborn, was gone.  There were no imponderables with independent existence, let alone tendencies, let alone will.  I had succeeded in proving it to myself.  I had won the contest, but victory had deprived me of a vital opponent, and I was sinking in madness.   

Gray days followed others, all similar, in a static sequence.  Time was a stationary ribbon, the inert pattern that I had once called, inconceivably, my life.  The only thing still feebly alive seemed to reside outside of it, and it was scrolling over the ribbon like a semi‑sentient lens: the mind’s eye.  It was scanning the ribbon mechanically, frame by frame.  But it could only scan into the past, and so the fundamental process had ominously reversed direction towards greater H.

That was one view.

Another view suggested that there was neither motion nor individual life at all; no past and no future.  There was only the present moment.  What I had once called “past” was just a pattern of dubious significance selected by the Knowledge Algorithm.  Starting from the present moment, the only one that existed, the past stretched away as a kind of justifier, as the “reason” why the present moment looked the way it did.  

I had dabbled with such perspectives and exotic paradigms for over a year.  I had picked them up and looked at them in turn with what I recognized, now, as smugness. 

No, not smugness: Pride.  

The word had a flavour of vomit, but still I came back to it, like a dog.  I have formulated the Knowledge Algorithm, I continued to cry out, like a derelict recalling past glories.  Take all you want from me, but that.  

Something had occurred that could not be denied or ignored.  It really had happened, self-evidently so, and it was huge and irreversible, of a magnitude that precluded even the vaguest possibility of a remedy.  Even worse, the event had brought with it the clarity of truth, and to reject it, if it were even possible, would mean retreating into untruth, into a variety of lies encompassed by the biggest lie of all, Reality.    

So, there it was: I existed, but I was not real.  The world was not real, either, but neither did it possess the little existence that I had.  What perhaps can never be described, in words or otherwise, is one’s own existence experienced in a moment that is forever unique while nothing else even registers on that scale—not other people, and certainly not ‘things’.  

But surely I was a product of that world of things.  I was made of gross matter.  I ate, drank and breathed of it.  I had been born of a woman made of flesh, coming into the world out of an orifice between two others that discharged waste back to the ground.  From that same humus her food had come to nourish her body and mine, and new food continued to feed me.  If the world that had assembled and nourished me did not exist, how could I claim existence for myself? 

The absurdity of the human condition when viewed in terms that once had seemed self-evident, the very same terms that I had disproven and that now, in panic, I was trying to re-adopt, seemed to exceed every conceivable scale.  On such terms, the details of entering the world were ludicrous enough.  What about the exit?   

This (looking at my hands, and, by extension, at my whole body), all this was meant to end within a few short years through an organ malfunction of some kind.  Then the body itself, whose particular organization had supposedly constituted all that had been me, would come undone in stench, digested by maggots, worms and a myriad of microorganisms to finally be excreted back to the ground, waste matter once more.  Excreted into life, excreted out. Those were the supposed boundaries of existence.  

But the alternative to the grotesque scenario was worse.  Far worse.  

So, you want to know how it feels to be God. 

I was in a place in which I did not want to be, and I struggled to avoid speaking the unspeakable.  But it was impossible not to think it:  It cannot be that you have abdicated. Please, please, come back.  I never wanted your scepter or your throne!

But had I really never flirted with the notion?  In the penultimate instant there had been a snake-like voice counseling me to accept the evidence of the intellect.  Believe it, it had said.  It had not even bothered to add, and ye shall be as gods.  

And now I had to confront the fact that it had been only my own inner voice speaking, the same one that had been about to speak one more time while still under my control and censure.  It had not been independent of me like that other voice, the herald of an alien will that had been about to break unto the scene. Looking further back, I had to recognize that topics of personal pantheism would have been quite in keeping with the kind of discussions I used to hold.  Once, in a Montreal bistro frequented by the university crowd, I had held forth on the subject of ultimate philosophical revelation.  “When you reach the end of the quest,” I had said, with tongue lubricated into eloquence by a couple of beers, “and you are looking at the prime architect of all there is, don’t be surprised to find yourself staring at a mirror.”  

Delimited by those two extremes—Man as excrement, Man as God—was the in-between case, the case lost, the gift rejected.  I was searching for what I could never have again, a taste of ordinary life, a sense of everyday reality and commonplace unknowns, all hedged in by an ultimate mystery that somehow had always taken care of itself. 

But now the ordinary had become the impossible.  In an idle way, I had used to dream of impossibilities mostly because the impossible had seemed exotic.   How had the ordinary become unreachable?  This was poetic justice at its darkest.

No one was answering my questions, so I began to do what I always did when all else failed: talk to myself. 

I must find my way back to a certain place; I must rebuild an identity, and I will start by salvaging what there used to be; I will find the spot where my old identity lies in pieces and I will clothe myself with the shards.  

It was all too easy to find the place.  A catatonic figure stood in the simulacrum of a living room surrounded by the fragments of a former life, and the autopilot was already rummaging.  The shattered old story had been fiction to begin with, and the new one would be fiction as well.  There were no alternatives.  

But one character had slipped without effort from the pages of the old story into those of the new.  Elayne, oblivious to the changes taking place, one night asked why we had stopped going to the movies.  I agreed to go one more time, but it was agony just to hold still in a fictitious theater while trying to watch second-order fiction play out on an unreal screen.  Sitting with eyes shut I gripped the armrests while the panics roiled.  They, too, had slipped across the pages, like storms that would not be constrained by arbitrary boundaries.

---

A year passed. 

It was winter again, and the campus was deserted with only skeleton staff keeping some offices lit.  Christmas had come and gone, and the new year had not yet arrived.  The afternoon break now took place in a dusk that was almost darkness whenever the sky was cloudy, as it was on this day.  A stand of fir groaned under gusts from the southeast, and I drifted under it like a stunned animal, walking in the slumped gait in which I fell when no one else was around. It was a small relief from the daily pretense of being normal.  Out of habit I was following the same footpath over which I had walked on sunnier days to ruminate on a grand project, now all but abandoned.  Had those days ever had substance, or had even their illusion been illusion? 

The contrast between that then that had never existed and this now that seemed to tyrannically exist just to show me that nothing was real, was heart rending.  I had wept over it, once, at the edge of a Quebec forest.  Since then there had been moments of strange anger, a childish rage of the foot-stomping kind that invariably descended into panic and despair.  There was an implied question behind the anger: Have I really been so evil as to earn this?

Today I noticed that even the anger was ebbing.  I was getting too tired to keep up a struggle that was obviously hopeless.  The thought illuminated a fact that I had not considered before: Since that September night I had not stopped thrashing.  I had never completely surrendered.  

I have been harpooned, I thought; I am the whale that thrashes and pulls away with the barb set while the whaler pays out rope.  Now I am tiring, and soon the line will go taut and the struggle will have been for nothing.  I might as well have surrendered on that night.

That brought up another disturbing thought.  What would have happened if I had accepted it all from the start, without a struggle?  Where would I be now, if I had simply capitulated to the dissolution of all else?  I tried to put myself back into the circumstance, but I immediately backed off.  No way!  No one could surrender willingly to such a thing. 

The trees were leaning dangerously.  Some large branches had broken off during past gales, and there had even been a few uprootings.  

I could get killed standing here. 

In my youth I had strongly feared death.  At one point it had been the fear of eternal damnation, always a possibility in the old catechism.  Atheism should have freed me from that concern, but somehow atheism had always scampered off at critical times.  A falling branch might yet send me to the traditional Hell, and that would not be so bad, because the place would at least contain tormentors and tormented; not the best of company, perhaps, but company.  Alternatively, atheist death might send me into the great Nothing, and that would be better, because it assumed an unconscious nothing.  But the prospect of death now, vis-à-vis a new understanding of ‘nothing’, was the fountain of all terror, because it held the prospect of a conscious nothing, and I knew how that would feel.  

The shivering panics returned: I knew how it would feel because I was already in it! The panic was over the possibility that I would never die a conventional death, and that this hell, a vacant throne upon which I seemed to be bound to the point of strangulation, would be eternal.  And how many notions that thought churned up in its wake! 

Had I, perhaps, already died?  Compared to other possibilities, this one was not even farfetched, and it could certainly heve explained a lot.  There might already be a stone, somewhere, with my name and two dates.  Would the second date read September 27, 1981?  It made as much sense as anything else.  In fact, almost everything made sense, and yet nothing really did.  It was a logical helplessness from which I could not escape.  But I could not surrender, either.  No matter how futile the effort, I would have to keep on thrashing. 

---

Winter ended and the autopilot continued to guide me through a mild spring and bright early summer.  It was maintaining a line that, while not actually climbing, seemed at least to have stopped descending, perhaps because there was nowhere lower to go.  In doing so it had continued to sustain a semblance of normal life on my behalf, preserving my personal relationships and my job.  But the autopilot would sometimes step back as if taking a rest, and then I would find myself taking stock of an abysmal landscape.  Had I really survived all this, and for this long? 

One day I reached into the lower drawer of my desk and pulled out a black notebook.   

I was shocked by how little writing it contained—only thirteen pages, most of them double-spaced.  Then I remembered that this had been only the start of a good copy transcription, and that the rest of the material was still in scribbled notes and computer printouts scattered in various places.  This copy, by contrast, was neatly written, and it did not betray the slightest hint of what it had unleashed.  But the contents were puzzling because they consisted mostly of background material.  Apparently the writing had lagged behind the thinking much more than I remembered, since few of the steps that had seemed so momentous had actually been set down.

The thirteenth page was only half-filled, ending with

The argument of the summation had remained unwritten.  This, then, had been the moment.  

I took up a pen and drew a horizontal line across the page, and then stared at the blank lower half.  I wanted to restart the work.  Dog to the vomit again.  The intention drowned in nausea before I could write a single word.  I covered the fresh line with a dab of whiteout to obliterate even that small trace of the attempt, and then turned the page and wrote something altogether different.

July 9, 1983

It’s been two years since I’ve written in this notebook.  The previous page contains a line left half-written, from one late night, on September 27^th, 1983 [sic].

Something happened that night that I still can’t explain.  As a result, my life has gone through a process that has turned most of my views around, some by 180° […]

Although much of the change has been gradual, the essence of it was brought about — I still don’t know by what — almost instantaneously, seconds within writing the last summation sign on the previous page.  

It was like being born in the body of a 30 yr. old man, entering a brain already full of strange memories […] I experienced a madness that at the time felt horrendous and final.

Today, I walk through daily life in a manner that must appear seminormal to most…

Of the pages of my own writing from that time, this is perhaps the first in which the problem begins to appear explicitly, even if still accompanied by the usual minimizations and self-cheering.  Self-encouragement was certainly needed, but that “I still don’t know by what” in the third paragraph is not quite forgivable.  

---

On a sunny day around the time in which I wrote the note I went for a stroll through the grounds of an old cemetery.  The graveyard was at the top of a hill, shaded by oak trees and dotted with flowers growing wild between the tombstones.  

I had come to clear up my thoughts before taking an important decision, and on the grave that happened to be in front of me I figuratively laid out what was left of my life, as I had done once before, in a different city.  I promised what lay under the earth that this would not weigh much.

First, religion.  Well, God was gone; it had simply abandoned the field.  There was no bitterness at the thought, only ablank dismay.  

Second, my future.

‘Future’ was an empty word; no need to even consider it.

Third, social relations.  

It may sound peculiar, but I had come to the graveyard to think especially about this.  I had no God, no soul, no peers and no world—in sum, no reality of any kind, but I was still clinging to the possibilities of the first three.  I maintained a baffling allegiance to the theoretical existence of a separate God and of my soul and the souls of others, perhaps only as a mental crutch.  It was arbitrary commitment at best, but one that deserved at least some consideration.  

If other souls existed, then none was closer to mine than that of the woman who lived with me.  Would I take one more step over a bridge that existed only in my own mind?  It was set on a stage where fictitious characters could look real and even appear to care for each other.  Should I honour my commitment to the idea of other souls to the point of marrying one?  The world was make-believe; that I knew for sure.  It ultimately made no difference whether I married my companion or walked away, but we just could not stay as we were.  The reasons that had brought us under one roof had long since expired; and, in any case, they would have been too frivolous even for a pretend world.  

As if in response to the thought, the world suddenly seemed real; or, at least, less unreal than usual.  The moment was miserably short, and immediately a dark cumulus that never strayed dropped with its usual suffocating impact.  The scene returned instantly to its vacuous, two-dimensional feel, in all ways except for one aspect.  On the stonework, tomb after tomb, religious symbols and spiritual quotes stood out, black letters on white like pointing fingers.  They seemed real.

I told myself bitterly that I knew why.  I knew the point of outward religious trappings, of crescents, crosses and scrolls paraded about.  I knew the reasons behind mindless rituals that were repeated year after year and generation after generation.  It was all of the Algorithm, by the Algorithm and for the Algorithm.  It was a way of ensuring predictabilityin human affairs, a method of lowering social entropy by introducing, and periodically affirming, cycles.  It was one more crucial thread in the flimsy fabric of reality, another scheme designed to reinforce the illusion.  And, as the silent ground witnessed, all for nothing in the end.   

Panic was rising again, and it was becoming difficult to breathe.  Hard-dying pride was holding me by the throat while droning out the same old song:  Stay the course; trust only Reason.

But the more I used reason, the blacker everything seemed to get.  Far from restoring light, Reason had been the thief of the world.  It had begun, reasonably enough, by dismissing religion and replacing it with the laws of the material world.  Then Reason had moved on to discover a new self-evident truth, which was the primacy of awareness—my awareness—as the origin of all things.  And finally the same Reason had come around full circle to equate my awareness with that other universal awareness spoken of in theology.  Thus, reason had initially forced all the metaphysical eggs into the physical basket of logical positivism; then, after only a few years, it had declared the basket to be insubstantial by the authority of Information Theory and straight-forward logic.  In this way the world’s supposed solidity and evidence-to-the senses had turned out to be as insubstantial as that of any proposed deity.  Armed with that conclusion, I had evenmischievously confronted a few atheists with,  When you say that God does not exist, what is the implied comparison?  That God does not exist in the same way as the “solid” world does?  Well, big deal to that.

But the lethal stumble had come precisely at that step, the one that at first had seemed natural, inevitable and ultimately harmless.  It should have only amounted to a simple concluding synthesis, a formal recognition of something—yet again—obvious.  What could have been more natural than awarding the vestiges of an archaic dignity to the one remaining,indisputable entity? God the Creator, evidently a misunderstood attribute of the same human intellect that had conceived of it, would be returned to its proper perspective, and its awareness, perforce a “universal” awareness, would be formally attributed to the privileged awareness of my own identity.

I had arrived to this conclusion by clean and sincere reasoning.  What, then, was the meaning of an irrational intrusion upsetting a picture so carefully aligned, and of doing so without even offering a viable alternative?  

The intervention had cleared a crowded place and left a riddle to guard it.  And the riddle said: Reason proves that there is no substance; Reason proves that you have no proof of anything except yourself; Reason holds up the mirror that shows the sole artificer of Reality, just as you had once predicted.  In all these diverse ways Reason assures: You are alone.  But your memory disagrees.  It whispers: Something struck you that night that was clearly not you, and are still spinning from the blow.  So, decide: Which is it?  You alone, monolithic? God and you as complementary aspects?  God and you in your separate places?  God and you and the world, the trinity of the religiously egocentric?  Or you and other sentient entities existing within the non-sentient world?  Or is it just the natural world alone, of which you are merely an accident?  

There seemed to be more permutations than the number of possibilities should allow, all spread out in a flat probability distribution.  

Pick one, repeated the taunt.  Choose one possibility and defend it, because your sanity depends on it.  

But, which one?  The most attractive was also the most discredited, the sepia image of a reality that would never again be fully dimensional, and whose ghosts, achingly beautiful but maddeningly out of reach, continued to parade before the mind’s eye for no plausible reason.  And still the voice insinuated: Even if you could effect it, even if you could eraseyour own memory and thus regain an ignorance that would now be bliss, would you really do it? 

Beyond the oaks at the edge of the graveyard were glimpses of a blue strait that had seemed so serene only two years earlier.  It had not troubled me, then, that the liquid depth hid an unending traffic, a continuous stream of lives entering and exiting the world, some feeling the excitement of the bite and just as many thrashing in its agony.  Unbelievably, it had all seemed natural.  Now the imagined scenes appeared to expand and multiply to encompass all of life, that same objective life that I craved.  The old, laboured conventions used to smooth it all out.  They had rationalized it withalternatives that now seemed flaccid: the indifference of Evolution, the mystery of Creation.

But if this was the result of Evolution, if indeed such unaware cruelty was a survival tool, what justified this new compassion for all forms of life?  If, on the other hand, this was all by design, what kind of designer was responsible for it?  Given the necessary means, even a lowly human would “design” a better reality.  And yet, whether by evolution or by design, here was that reality in all its wretched glory.  If I were to somehow regain it, its paradoxes would again become the challenges to which I had already proven myself to be unequal.  The illusion of suffering would again become “real”, in a transformation that would demand that something be done about it.  The imposition would come from a moral sphere where all kinds of questions lurked, ready to pounce on an unsuspecting conscience: Why do you walk by such suffering? Why do you ignore the possibility that you may be a contributor? 

There were no answers, but Reason had once provided the liberating counter-question: Why not?  

No wonder I had accepted it so readily.  After all, this might simply be the way it is along this particular conservation plane, with no malice intended or incompetence implied.  Nothing through analysis and reason had ever suggested otherwise.  But how could something that had been so reasonable and liberating now seem so hopeless?

The hopelessness was personal.  I knew I could not survive reality’s fable even if it were to be offered it again, because just a glimpse of its underpinnings had erased the aplomb needed to navigate it.

And the hopelessness fed on comparisons.  Buried right in front of me was a former representative of the objective world, and almost certainly he had recognized the worth of predictable seasons, of the rising and setting of the sun, of the alternations of work and rest.  He had not been one of my ancestors, but he probably had more in common with them than I did.  I sensed stares coming from my own genealogical lineup, a sequence of faces all unknown except for the more recent ones, and I imagined a mixture of compassion and contempt in their gaze.  Many of them had undoubtedly known actual hunger, concrete terrors and the unimaginable grief of burying some of their own children, all the while forging an improbably long chain of survival.  I was the last link in the chain.  Where was my share suffering—“real” suffering? Why had I been spared, and why did I not feel fortunate for it?  Instead, I was wishing that I could change places with anyone under the sods, trading an incomprehensible existence for a life already lived and sealed.  

Back at the apartment I tried to distract myself with chores.  Elayne was out on errands, and I decided to prepare an early supper.  I was at the sink getting ready to wash some lettuce when the same cloud returned, darker than usual.  I closed my eyes.  Come back and tell me what to do! And still I hoped that, if a voice were to answer, it would not ask me to abandon the Knowledge Hypothesis.  

But there was no answer, and I no longer expected one.  I looked down at my hands holding the lettuce, and I thought that here, at least, was something I could still manage.  I could still wash lettuce.  

And so I rubbed and rinsed, leaf after leaf, and spun it dry.  Then I made an offering of the effort, setting the care with which I had washed the food on a pretend altar in the mind.  There were similar offerings already there, just in case a visitor were to drop by again.  So, I thought, this is how I try to match the ordeals of my ancestors: by washing a head of lettuce and thinking it a sacrificial rite.  Futile.  Everything was futile.  Like a malignant trick, a curtain had fallen on reality and then lifted up to reveal only fiction.  It had risen over the same scene, and to a hypothetical audience it mighthave seemed as if nothing had changed.  So, why not just look at it in those terms? 

It is now later in the play, and, from all that the spectators can see, everything is going well.  All the actors know their lines, even a player who seems to have turned a little somber during the last couple of acts.  His shift in mood is almost imperceptible, nothing to really raise concern, but the actor suddenly stops just as he is about to deliver a line.  And then, seemingly oblivious to all else, he sits down at the edge of the stage. 

This play has never been performed before, and the spectators might just accept this as part of the script; or, at least, as some creative variation.  But the other actors are bound to be confused.  Soon it may become apparent to all on stage (but perhaps not yet to the audience) that the actor is no longer part of the play. 

To make the analogy work, an arbitrary restriction must be added:  that the director and stage manager cannot simply force the actor off the stage.  So, what to do?  The play must go on even if one player’s behaviour is becomingintolerable.  He is giving no signs of it yet, but, who knows, soon he may become abusive, or worse.  He might even reach for the prop gun over the mantelpiece.  

The director may have an inspiration at this point.  By gestures and whisperings he may instruct the rest of the players to deal with the situation while remaining in character.  Stick to the script if you can, but stray if you must.  That means that if the actor were to actually grab the pretend gun and pretend to shoot, someone must pretend to fall.  But if that came to pass, the mutineer must not be allowed to just keep on shooting, otherwise he might kill all the characters and totally wreck the play.

No doubt the rogue would look on in sad compassion but also with some amusement as the others try to keep up an untenable pretense.  Perhaps some off-duty actors might decide to rush in from the wings dressed as cops or mental ward nurses, and in short time a dignified drama might descend into ridiculous slapstick.  But what else could the troupe do?  They might try to point pretend guns of their own, or attempt to bodily force the actor into a pretend jail or asylum, and he might just go along with it. Or, maybe not.  After all, he is free to do what he wants, and the other ones aren’t.

The actor, like the actual person he represents, had until now an autopilot to deal with, which in his case was the script.  The imposed script, the oppressive script, but also the convenient and reassuring script.  The actor remembers how fun it used to be to act along with the others, seeing them as real characters while identifying completely with his own.  Now he loathes the whole thing, and not necessarily because the script is lousy.  It’s just that it’s a script!  If he were to abandon it, it would not be over any of its particulars, but in reaction to its underlying phoniness.  And to think that he used to believe that the play was everything there was!

The actor is about to take the irreversible step: from this point on he will be neither character nor actor.  But he knows that there will be a price to pay, because he has no other experience to draw on—no other life.   

With these thoughts, the bleakness that had been hovering like a sad light seemed to darken and descend, smotheringeverything in murk.  I had thought that it could not have gotten any worse; I had assumed that all had been lost already, but apparently there had remained this last unsuspected step, and now even the lexical boundaries that had given somestructure to the fiction appeared to dissolve.  I felt a bizarre sense of relief thinking that even the panics would have a hard time getting through that soup.  The last dispirited hopes were abandoning ship and joining the ghosts already on the outside—fading images of a door left ajar, unsorted shoes scattered on the carpet, a single lamp left on in mid-afternoon. The ghastly show was winding down like a worn-out mechanism.  And then, with all energy spent, even the inner thrashing stopped. 

The effort that had sustained me thus far—the straining against metaphorical harpoons, the endless scrambling up a figurative down-escalator, and the old unstoppable scream—it all deflated, collapsed upon itself and sank beneath the murk.  Despair became a featureless totality.

I heard a distant sound and saw Elayne coming through the doorway.  I watched in tunnel vision as she set down some groceries and then stepped back to look at me.  At last, she seemed to sense something new, and I could tell that, far above the murk, the autopilot was cracking a smile. 

The silly autopilot.  I had never respected it, not even when it had laboured to keep me out of trouble.  Through all that had happened, I had never taken it seriously.  To me, it had been like the half-witted servant who steps in to rescue his demented master again and again, with no hope of recognition or gratitude.  The plodding persona had always tried to keep up appearances for me; with what success I could not tell, and as for the purpose I could not even begin to guess.  

A cold calm was descending, and I thought I recognized its origin.  In the last few months I had leafed through manybooks in search of a remedy, or at least a viable explanation, for what had happened.  I had found nothing relevant, but in the process I had learned something about panic attacks and depression.  A sudden calm or an unexplained lifting of the mood could be a warning sign, because it might indicate that a decision has been taken and final plans have been made.  I did not feel suicidal—it had never been the case—but the mechanism was similar.  Like the would-be suicide who has taken the final decision and feels the calmer for it, I felt the deep and not entirely unpleasant letdown of surrender.  Let the gravity of the abyss do its work.  

But, the autopilot… 

Even in this stricture its simple-mindedness was almost endearing.  Already virtually out of my reach, it was about to open its mouth—my mouth—with an overture so contrary to the one I had selected back at the graveyard.  And to my own surprise I felt like letting it run with it, because at last it didn’t matter.  The antics that would continue to play out on a pretend stage were no longer any of my business.  

But there are complications even in such basic decisions, and I sensed that the autopilot might not survive the partingof the ways.  Now it seemed poised to set in motion what might well be its last act, and I felt that I ought to at least be present for it.  Piling new absurdity on top of the existing one, I stepped in with a preamble. 

“I am going to ask you a question,” I heard myself saying, “but before you answer, please consider that a ‘yes’ may mean the end of happiness as you know it.”

---

The murk did not lift.

Nothing appeared to change in response to what is normally a big step in someone’s life.  On the other hand, it did not take long before Elayne was appalled at what her ‘yes’ had precipitated.  In quick succession, a church date was set, arrangements were made for a simple restaurant reception, and tickets were bought for Europe.  The unusualness of the proposal, the suddenness of events and the minuscule size of the proposed wedding party were difficult enough for her to swallow; but, to top it all, I had demanded a religious rite, preceded by Confession and followed by full mass and Communion.  It hadn’t even been my choice.  The autopilot, obtuse as ever, had simply picked the steps by default, digging through a half-remembered checklist.  Elayne was aghast.  Not only was she an atheist, but to her knowledge I was one myself, or so it had seemed until that afternoon in the kitchen.  Regardless, she soldiered on with the preparations.  Herself a former Roman Catholic, she was already drilled in the ceremonial, and so was the best man, Richard.  The matron of honour was Anglican, a denomination with nearly identical liturgy, so it promised to be smooth sailing.

We had asked for the procedure to be expedited, and the local church, contacted by phone, had agreed to the fast track.  They might have attributed our rush to a case of having jumped the gun, so to speak.  But, hurry or no hurry, Catholic procedure required some preparatory schooling for the applicants, and we were expected to submit to at least one training session.  And so on an early August evening we left on foot for downtown, which was a half-hour walk from our apartment. After double-checking the address, we discovered that the small church we had expected to find was actually a cathedral, an imposing nineteenth century structure surrounded by minimal grounds.  I was in the process of settling allmy internal affairs, and I addressed the autopilot in that vein.  This is just a minor nuisance; go along with everything they say so we can be in and out quickly.

Elayne looked nervous, and for someone who was not supposed to care I was also uneasy.  It had been years since I had set foot in a church, but I had thought it appropriate to go back one last time.  After all, this was the same Church upon which I had flung my worst vitriol, missing no chance in conversation to implicate it in all the major crimes since the fall of Rome, all with a hatred that had been as intense as it had been unprovoked.  Now I was feeling the need to make some kind of reparatory gesture, and I told myself that this was atonement—another pointless offering.

We found the chancery at the side of the church and a clerk welcomed us in, leading us to a simple room furnished in oak.  

A few moments later an old priest appeared.  His manner of greeting hinted at why our request been honoured so promptly, and that was by the way in which he sneaked a doubtful look at Elayne’s belly, which was confusingly flat.  

Despite my earlier resolve to endure the meeting gracefully, it did not take long for the whole set up to became unbearable, even the priest’s bland recitation of the joys and duties of holy matrimony.  The proceedings dragged on, not helped by the fact that the old man’s mind appeared to wander.  Among other slips, he initially transcribed my year of birth as 1917, which would have turned me into a groom of sixty-six marrying a bride of thirty-one.  More strangeness followed, with Elayne balking at the required repudiation of divorce and abortion.  After several kicks to her shins by the autopilot, she managed to drag out a couple of grating yesses.  A few more minutes of this and my own thoughts began to wander.  Alarmingly, they appeared to be weighing the prospect of crawling down the hole right there and then.  But before I could decide either way, I noticed that the priest had stopped talking.  He was looking at me and his face showed surprise, as if he had just noticed something.  Caught off guard I shifted in my chair, but his gaze remained steady and puzzled.  

“You know,” he said gently, “God forgives all sins, but not the sin of despair. If we despair there is truly nothing that God can do for us.”  

The meeting must have continued, but the memory of it ends there.  Something had happened that I could not place.  All around the darkness had remained as complete as it had been on first arrival, two long years before.  The tan of the walls, the oak of the desk and the aged figure leaning across it were just reflections that the darkness had left behind as it swallowed the objects.  But the words! They had descended through the obscurity like raindrops in a desert, like a sprinkling of cool moistness on the dust.  

---

We were out of the chancery and back into downtown streets.  It was a mild evening, calm, clear and with a last band of light lingering low over the harbour.  We started walking arm in arm in the old fashioned way, just following the sidewalk.  I can still recall a single star between two buildings, the first of the evening, and the sound of casual conversations all around us.  And all I could think was: You!  It had really been you that night, face to face. And now I know how far down you had to reach:  One more moment, and I would have been lost.  I will not question why you did not complete the rescue at the edge of that pit.  Let me savour this moment instead, however short it may turn out to be.  Right now I want to think that I belong here, on this summer evening with a beautiful woman walking at my side, and I want to feel that we are nothing special, just another couple strolling along the darkening streets of Victoria.  And most of all I want to remember these voices around me: casual, carefree, ordinary voices.

---

Years later—and that, too, is now long ago—there was a foreshadowing of how it would settle out, but I did not recognize it.  Our family had grown by then, and we were living on a quiet street at the edge of a small community by the sea, with our kitchen looking east over a schoolyard.  It was towards evening; it had just stopped raining and the house was silent except for a dripping from the eaves.  Then I heard the venetian blind being carefully raised, and Elayne’s voice calling me over.  Outside the sky was still dark with clouds, but the sun had reemerged in the west and was radiating horizontallyacross a playing field.  Distant trees stood out in the light like splashes of copper against black. Caught in the same rays, two hummingbirds hovered over our vegetable garden, facing each other and setting off flashes of ruby and green witheach sudden movement.  

We watched in silence.   Then Elayne said,  “Isn’t time weird?  This moment is here now—and now it’s gone!  It was the only thing that there was just a second ago, and now it’s as if it never existed.”  

Gazing through the windowpane, I thought of all the misunderstandings that had punctuated our life together.  Sometimes the mutual incomprehension had seemed unbridgeable: If we could not communicate meaningfully about marital matters, child-raising problems and financial issues, what other understanding could there be?  

Now she had posed a seemingly irrelevant question, but her thoughts matched my own in content and timing.  The line could be crossed, after all.  Too often our carrier-shells made us strangers to each other, but occasionally they cracked to give a clue as to what they covered, and there was vertigo at the glimpse.  

---

And finally there was a long, cold walk along a shoreline, during which the usual thrashings had only managed to force me back to the edge of the old pit, over it, and then some distance down the slope.  I had been trying to reason my way out again, but the old arguments were proving as useless as ever.  

    “I am sorry,” I said at last, and this time the apology had a definite address, “but I must take a break from this.”  

And so I decided to suspend the thrashing and attempt to recover some balance, knowing from experience that just stopping might accelerate the slide.  

But minutes passed, and nothing seemed to happen.  

I looked for the warning signs that preceded a crisis, but there was only the windswept view.  

I looked inwards again, at the slope to which I clung.  Tentatively, I let go of some mental handholds.  Aside from an uneasy sense of relief, again nothing happened.  I continued to let go until I felt an unexpected calm, as if I had entered a tranquil space of no definite shape or boundary.  Outwards in all direction was the world, the usual fabric of interpretations that the mind produced while digesting chaos, and it was still the same old collection of elements always threatening to become unglued.  I could see that the assortment had a kind of hierarchy to it, with the features I couldaffect the most laying closest at hand, so to speak.  Some were even addressable in possessive form: my head, my arms, my hands, and, poking out from under the first hint of belly, my feet.  I could call them mine because they correlated with volition.  I willed them to move and they did: low conditional entropy.  Moving away from them the sense of control became tenuous, indirect.  The world grew recalcitrant, and in a landscape that was only infinitesimally at my command other hands and other bodies were visible, other figures looking out over the sea.   In many ways it was still theAlgorithm’s domain spreading open to my senses, and it still encompassed all that could be seen and felt.  

But it did not comprise this new and unexpected point.  Here, at the center of what I had been calling the abyss, was a point so empty that it seemed to exclude even the mind.  

I recalled how this space had not seemed so featureless the first time.  It had resembled a real room with real walls; a trap, with the trapper looking in.  And I remembered how I had eventually reached for a remedy of last resort, in an attempt so ludicrous that I had even apologized for it. Nothing could have been more alien to the proper concept of knowledge than the idea of soul.  

Abyss and soul, so naturally antipodal.  I had tried to escape the first by turning the second, never suspecting that the difference was only in the name.   

There was a familiar impression that the circumstance had again become the message.  With a voice it might have said: You are back.  A grinning impostor tried to claim this place, and you may never know how, or at what cost, the intrusion was halted, but you do know that it felt like poison. And it was poison, meant as a quick mercy.  But what should have died that night fought back tooth and nail.  It lingered thrashing and screaming to this day. 

The shore had receded below the cliffs.  I had climbed an escarpment to the turfed ground hemming the bay, and there I sat down, thoroughly emptied.  I folded my arms over my knees and leaned my head against them.  I had never thought that emptiness could feel so good.  

I had wished for this moment through a stretch of time not found in calendars, and now that the moment was actually here it seemed too sudden and too much.  I feared that it might end as soon as I opened my eyes, but at the same time it was unbearable not to try.  The damp ground and cold air finally decided, and I got up. 

The wind out of the strait was speeding the clouds past the first slopes of Beacon Hill Park.  It drew a fine spray from the breakers that arced over the cliffs and fell glistening on the bushes at the edge, on the old grass and on a few figures walking along the trails.  The air carried the smell of the sea, a briny blend of decay and vitality that was like a breath by the ear from a forgotten friend who still delighted in surprises. 

It was like hearing words: By what name do you wish to know me?  You used to play in my garden and lose yourself in my smile.  You can reduce me to a meaningless ghost without a name again, or you can take me as I first came to you, as cliffs and water and clouds, and companions along the path, and the precious continuity of a million ordinary things.

[1] Gabrielle Roy, Children of my Heart, McLelland and Stewart, translated from the original French by Alan Brown.

[2] In Italy, the title professor applies to educators from middle school to university, while teacher refers exclusively to a primary school position.

[3] This type of idea, which was not exactly new even then, would often be employed in science fiction movies and television productions over the following decades.

[4] Here, "simulation" implies an illusion based on the comprehensive manipulation of sensory signals to mimic patterns observed in "conventional reality". 

[5] Years later I would discover that the recipe for that drink had predated Communist rule in Cuba by decades.

[6] Claude E. Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Bell System Tech. J., vol. 27, 1948), p.1.

[7] There was always a possible, but not very satisfactory, solution to the apparent paradox, which undeniably looks like a paradox if we expect Solipsism to instantly deliver the world we want.  The solution would consider one’s own life as “slow and imperfect” Solipsism, the gradualbuilding up of an approximation to the reality of one’s choice, with entropy acting as the moderating factor.

[8] This description attempts to be consistent with the way we conventionally experience the universe: not as a static moment, but as a progression from state to state.

[9] This particular aspect turned out to be not as clear-cut as it had seemed at first.  The original conclusion remains valid, but with a general restriction on where the starting point is located.  However, this aspect was not explored further within the timeframe of this account.