becoming more human by becoming more godlike 357ing; we can place neither life nor death within a framework that ex-
plains them in ways communicating with our experience and concerns.
Nature, indiff erent to these concerns and working on a scale immea-
surably disproportionate to the span of a human life, operates as if what
matters decisively to us counts for nothing to it. As our knowledge of
the universe increases, this disconnection between the views from in-
side and from outside the human person seems only to widen. Whether
there is one universe or a plurality or succession of universes, our part
in the story leaves us only with the contrast between what we believe
ourselves to be and hope to become and what we know awaits us. It
awaits us in a universe about which we can only ever discover what
matters less rather than what matters more.
Th e second terror is the recognition of our groundlessness against the
background of our mortality. Th at we should have been born and then
die, that life should be so full of incident and end in nothing, that the
succession of time and of worlds upon worlds should be what it is
rather than something else, and that the advance of our insight into
nature should never bring us any closer to knowledge of the ground
of reality— of the being of anything at all— all this imparts to our ex-
istence its dreamlike character.
If, in the midst of our ordinary state of half- consciousness, we stop for
a moment to consider the impenetrable character not only of our own
existence but also of all being, the fantastical quality of our situation
becomes momentarily apparent to us. Unable to dissipate the enigma,
we would plunge into life, if we did not more oft en prefer to cling, in half
belief, to one of the religions or philosophies that falsely claim to disclose
the ground of existence.
We can never remove, confi dently or defi nitively, the threat of nihil-
ism: the apprehension that our lives and the world itself may be mean-
ingless: that is to say, not open to any explanation that is either compre-
hensive enough to elucidate why there is what there is or cast in terms
that communicate with our concerns about our ephemeral and myste-
rious existence.
All our understandings are fragmentary. All rest on disputable pre-
suppositions. Our methods and disciplines are a dime a dozen. Our in-
sights are not only partial and precarious; they also fail to meet in a single
encompassing vision. Or, rather, we can make them converge into so