Thoughts about Nothing

Well, I mean, not nothing.  It's something.  Except it's nothing.  But, I mean, by thinking about it, we give it substance, so it's something.   I digress.

In a favorite book series from when I was younger (not Harry Potter favorite, but maybe second- or third-tier) called Keys to the Kingdom, a boy named Arthur has to defeat the seven faithless executors of the will of the Architect of the Universe, in the process acquiring the aforementioned Keys.  Long story short (and spoiler alert!) the same substance that the Architect used to create the Universe, and its centerpoint, the House, called, appropriately enough, Nothing, ends up encroaching upon the House to the point that the House cannot stand, and so Nothing destroys the House along with the Universe.   (End spoiler alert.)  The fact that the House, and through it the Universe, are destroyed by the same substance that was used to create them, is reminiscent of our own life/death cycle: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Nothing to Nothing.  Capital-N Nothing.  It's also quite evocative of Lucretius' idea that we can better enrich our lives in the knowledge that we are finite.  Humans have beginning and end points; whatever you may believe about the afterlife or its absence, we do not continue after death as anything like ourselves, if we do continue. 

I was talking earlier tonight with my friend Matt, who is a mathematics student, over a late dinner.  We were discussing math, because it's something that he can talk about at length and that I want to know more about.  On a whim, if a Shakespeare-driven one, I asked him who first came up with the concept of zero.  Apparently, in Western civilization, it was the Indians.  Another culture (I think it was the Babylonians, but I'm not sure) had a vague sort of idea about zero, enough to make a placemarker symbol for it, but they didn't really get the concept.  Our ideas of nothing are sort of like the second one - we know that there's something going on with nothing, but we really don't know what.  We just know it's nothing, but at the same time it's something.  For all we know, nothing could be a sentient black hole with squidlike appendages slowly crawling its way toward us and consuming our minds with considerations of it so we're easy targets once it gets here.

I think I may have just given myself a nightmare.

A Summer's Day

So, I was talking last night with my lovely boyfriend, and I told him that we were assigned to, for extra credit, go up to a stranger and recite the "Summer's Day" sonnet.  Then, because it's a lovely sonnet, I started reciting it.  (Well... I may have googled it.)  I got about two lines in before he interrupted me, laughing, and asked if he was a stranger. 

The conversation quickly moved on after that, but it made me think.  Shakespeare and his works make up one of the most unifying facets of the English language.  People from almost any corner of the world can hear the words "... and Juliet is the sun" or "To be or not to be" and instantly think "Shakespeare."  The sort of charm that Hughes discusses, that made it possible for Shakespeare's works to be appreciated by both the aristocracy and the common people, extends to allowing people today to enjoy it, if not understand it entirely.  Shakespeare sort of dissolves strangerhood, in a weird way.

(Also, I tried using the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech on a couple of friends, and they just rolled with it.  I need to find some less-literate friends.)