The Totality
Robert Nozick and Wilma Dykeman
TITLE: The Totality
AUTHORS: Robert Nozick and Wilma Dykeman
SOURCES: Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, 1989, Simon & Schuster: New York, page 302.
Dykeman, The Tall Woman, 1962, Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, page 158.
PERMISSION: Fair use.
At the end of The Examined Life, philosopher Robert Nozick (1938-2002) expressed his own description of the meaning of life:
"I see people descended from a long sequence of human and animal forebears in an unnumbered train of chance events, accidental encounters, brutal takings, lucky escapes, sustained efforts, migrations, survivings of war and disease. An intricate and improbable concatenation of events was needed to yield each of us, an immense history that gives each person the sacredness of a redwood, each child the whimsy of a secret.
"It is a privilege to be a part of the ongoing realm of existing things and processes. When we see and conceive of ourselves as a part of those ongoing processes, we identify with the totality and, in the calmness this brings, feel solidarity with all our comrades in existing.
"We want nothing other than to live in a spiral of activities and enhance others’ doing so, deepening our own reality as we come into contact and relation with the rest, exploring the dimensions of reality, embodying them in ourselves, creating, responding to the full range of the reality we can discern with the fullest reality we possess, becoming a vehicle for truth, beauty, goodness and holiness, adding our own characteristic bit to reality’s eternal processes. And that wanting of nothing else, along with its attendant emotion, is – by the way – what constitutes happiness and joy.”
In the middle of The Tall Woman, novelist Wilma Dykeman has her protagonist Lydia McQueen sit with a sister while pondering Heaven and the meaning of it all:
“Be Heaven a place like the preachers say, I don’t know as I’d be easy amongst all that gold and silver. Seems like it might get wearying on the eyes…I’d take more pleasure in Heaven if there was a wide green field and plenty of woods, with streams and all manner of flowers and birds and living things to discover…The words I remember from the Bible mostly, they’re about the waters of life – and I think about my spring out here, bubbling up pure and plentiful – and about losing your life to save it. I believe I know what that means, Katy. I know it true. It means to lose your littleness in bigness, your own self into the all of living.”