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.