“My question … was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was… is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” (Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writing)
Do you remember that first moment, perhaps as an adolescent or a teenager, when you looked up at the night sky and found a giant question mark where the stars and moon had been? Under that newly vast, enigmatic space, you started asking yourself questions that were too big for you, something like: what is the meaning of life? Or: are we alone in the universe? Or maybe just: why is there something rather than nothing?
We laugh to look back on it because it’s an experience so many of us have. Profound for a few minutes and then we moved on, because we had homework to do o…
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