Praise emptiness
Her rose-colored dress
Her circling motions
Praise emptiness
Tom Verlaine - Song lyrics from “The Fire”

Last night we watched the evening unfold from J’s deck with its view of the golf course under a vivid sky. We were talking about the idea of Jews as the chosen people. Y asked about the relevance of “chosenness“ in a universe that is 14.5 billion years old, in a world that stretches “in ten directions“ the breadth of billions of light years. God chose the Jewish people to be what exactly within this context? Forget about the Jewish fable of chosenness, and the Christian one of Jesus and original sin. Forget about everything we have until now taken for granted.

Forget about them because of their utter irrelevance in the face of the nothingness in front of you. It’s there, as Heidegger pointed out, right at your feet. A gaping maw upturned to you personally. The base of every extant thing other than itself. And you, with your dignity and your self-worth, what are you going to do about it?

To term oneself a nihilist, what exactly is required? Do you have to believe in it, do you have to actively acknowledge the Nichts? It can’t be a question of belief because physics has made it manifest; black holes, dark energy, the very age and scope of things. These are not questions of belief. So I guess being a nihilist means acknowledging the void, attesting to it, granting it the hegemony and majesty it warrants. Letting it in so to speak, and then not ascribing value to all the things that make up our world. Effectively ascribing to Leibowitz’s worldview, absent the leap of faith.