{non-fiction}

Isaac Newton invented modern physics, died a virgin, and believed he was facing the apocalypse.

It’s an eclectic bucket list, fitting somehow for a once-in-a-millenium mind. Does it really surprise anyone that, after a life that included the discoveries of calculus and motherfucking gravity, the man himself was proudest of his celibacy?

As Voltaire commented on learning of Newton’s apocalyptic beliefs, ‘There had to be something that made him mortal.’

With another apocalyptic fantasy behind us, I thought about Sir Isaac and the modern soul. Here was a man of unsurpassed reason, a man who set the stage for a rational examination of nature – the first of its kind in the modern age.

Yet there is this intense religious faith that animated his mind – the kind of all-consuming devotion we associate with a regressive brand of fundamentalism. For those of us who accept a generally scientific worldview, it’s hard to take those people seriously who thought the world was coming to an end last Friday because of an old calendar. And none other than the greatest scientist of all time was right up there with the best of the left behinders. What gives?

It’s what takes: death.

The Center for Disease Control estimates that gunshot deaths will outpace car accident deaths within the next three years. Days of national tragedy involving the senseless murders of innocents have become a sickening routine of modern American life. It’s gotten so bad that the government is actually acknowledging the problem and doing something about it – a milestone we have yet to achieve on the gut-clenchingly ominous threat of climate change.

The ennui of modernity isn’t just for Parisians with high verbal abilities anymore: the apocalypse is no longer the province of mystics, but of scientists. It’s become perfectly reasonable to view the end of days as a conceivable eventuality. The world is violent, unpredictable, filled with more people with more beefs than ever, and armed to the teeth. It’s also, quite simply, melting. If anything, we as moderns have much more reason to believe in the apocalypse than Newton did.

The shape of apocalyptic fears has changed for many of us, but its resonance in our lives is stronger than ever. A lot of that has more to do with the consequences of advanced technology than the scientific worldview, strictly speaking. But death and the human mind haven’t changed since the apocryphal apple fell on Newton’s head.
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No rational person believes that they are all that exists, but it doesn’t take much training in philosophy to understand that our own minds are all we know. 

A bad metaphor is that we see life through a single lens – but that lens has everything in common with what it surveys. We overlap with nature, because nature can only be perceived through us.  A mind isn’t really a lens on the world at all: it’s the light creating what it falls upon.

Americans lost twenty small children and six of their teachers to gun violence a week before the world was supposed to end. For them, the prospect of environmental collapse, the threat of nuclear war, decade-old wars overseas, the scientific worldview, and bowling all became meaningless, all became the same, and all became nothing. Rational people know that sooner or later, nothing will happen to them.

That’s a very hard thing. It’s death. It’s as hard a thing as there is. And no sentient mind can face it without fear, or without awe. It’s the driving force of human achievement, beginning with the art and science of survival. It’s also the biggest reason why human beings, in the grandest Aristotelian sense, are social animals. Survival is tricky as hell alone, and happiness is almost demonstrably impossible, especially when solitude is taken to extremes. Being alone is not something human beings have usually had to endure. Generally, we homo sapiens sapiens tend to huddle together, fence to fence, pipe to pipe, back to back, front to front – hell, even front to back. We don’t like to be alone.

Yet here we have Isaac Newton, a virgin to his last day, an obsessive biblical scholar, and a man who brought his lone intellect to bear on nature’s most enduring mysteries. A thinker, a sage, a monk. A man alone.

A large portion of Americans live alone – the largest on record. Americans commute an average of an hour and a half a day, and most drive alone. For the middle class, modern technology makes it possible to live and work alone comfortably. Leisure ranging from the blue glow drone of the TV to the vast realized id of internet porn have made it perfectly routine for the modern soul to be intensely alone – or alienated, as the rhetoric of the day usually has it. When a blackout is the best occasion to meet your neighbor, the influence of technology on human interaction can’t really be overstated.

So what do Isaac Newton and – well, you – have in common? You’re going to die alone. Isaac Newton was a big and solitary enough mind to conceive of his death as the end of the world. And four hundred years after Sir Isaac learned how to measure the infinite, the light of reason and the philosophic mind converge as always to a limit. 

Your death is not really the end of the world. But it’s as close as it could be. For the twenty children we lost to technology and madness on the eve of this latest apocalypse, it’s all the same, and nothing.

12/28./12