[Originally published on October 22, 2010.]
Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
“Morris,” he said, “do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?”
“No, Mert, I don’t believe any of that.”
Even though [Mert] then said, “Ha! I don’t believe that!,” it’s true. I don’t believe it.
But Mert’s question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were “signs from UIE,” or Universal Intelligent Energy1 (pronounced YOU-ie [“or YAH-weh?” my son suggested], and aka “God”). Now, I don’t believe that; now, I can just “be spiritual” naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I’m able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
I liked to say “Praise Youie!” If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
But in not very long, it won’t make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we’ve been dead a while.
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- In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein’s famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens’s Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:
...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc2, relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.
In the photo of myself and a jocular friend, he is Xuekui Xi, a physics post-doctoral student at the time. He and his wife and their daughter returned to China soon thereafter, and he was working in Beijing the last I heard.
ReplyDeleteXuekui & I had met by chatting at a Chapel Hill bus stop. I miss him.