of the divine.” He believed there was an explanation for
everything, that God did not create chaos but order. He
spent thirty years on this project, working on it until the very
last day of his life.^5
What we learn from Einstein and Hemingway is that a
healthy fear of death drives a person to continue creating
until the very end, but with that fear must come the
acceptance that even your life’s work will, in some ways,
remain unfinished. Why is this, and what do we do with
such a humbling reality?
Perhaps one of the proudest achievements in my life is
that I was a part of the very first honor code at my college.
Founded in 1843, Illinois College had never had an official
honor code, a formal document of ethics and academic
performance. Such documents were popular in most Ivy
League schools, but our small liberal arts school lacked one.
After a professor proposed the idea to the student body
government, I realized why our school had never had an
honor code. It wasn’t for lack of trying. A faculty member
gave me a list of students who had attempted to initiate the
very thing I was in charge of, and I followed up with each
of them. One was a woman who had tried to create a student
honor code more than a decade before. E-mailing her, I
asked for context, and she told me that it never happened
because there was just too much red tape. To me, that
sounded like a dare.
For the next year and a half, my friend Dan and I
endeavored to do what this young woman didn’t, and