The Nine Billion Names of God

I think I am slowly beginning to understand certain things. Perhaps my reading of Milan Kudera is helping me to learn.

Yes, I want to write. But the only book which I have the moral right to create is that book which has been hidden within my life, like a statue concealed in a block of marble, a potential "Pieta" awaiting birth as a narrative virtual reality. Although I admire many authors, I have no right to become them. I have only the right and the duty to be me, and to narrate that which is my self in that one voice which is uniquely mine.

There is a quaint and sentimental song about an old grandfather clock which stopped ticking the very moment that the elderly watchmaker, who had been entrusted with its care from childhood, died.

My book, my story is that clock, and when it is finished, then and only then may I die.

As a child, I would become so involved in a movie, so attached to it, so comfortable within the world which it created, that I felt great sorrow when I would see "The End" trail across the screen.

Gibbon worked for 20 years on "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." When he finally completed it and sent it to press, he said he felt a tremendous loss, like the loss of an old friend and constant companion.

What if there is something waiting to be completed before the world can end?

Perhaps there are really only a finite number of ideas which may be thought and feelings which may be felt, and when they have all been thought and felt and expressed, then the world will end with a sigh of relief.

Arthur C. Clark wrote a short story entitled "The Nine Billion Names of God," in which some Tibetan monks employ a computer to work out all nine billion names with the belief that once the task is completed the universe will end. At the end of the story, the computer does complete the task and as one of the technicians looks up at the night sky, he watches as one star after another is methodically extinguished.

A study of 40,000 galaxies by astronomers from Edinburgh University and the University of Pennsylvania now finds that too few new stars have formed to replace all the old stars that die. "Our analysis confirms that the age of star formation is drawing to a close," says Alan Heavens of Edinburgh University's Institute for Astronomy. "The number of new stars being formed in the huge sample of galaxies we studied has been in decline for around 6 billion years–roughly since the time our own sun came into being." One sign of this is the reddish tint of many galaxies. Most young stars project blue light, while more aged stars shine red.

The cosmos may simply be waiting for us to finish counting all the stars. We are counting on the cosmos, and all along, it is really the cosmos which has been counting on us.

Borges, in the essay "Kafka and His Precursors," suggests that our perception of the present alters our conception of the past, that we can look at texts from the past in a new way, influenced by things we now understand.

One day, someone looks at the world in a new and different way, and it simply ends. We say the secret word and Groucho sounds the quiz-show buzzer, the duck comes down and the lights go out.

"The more we look at it, the more the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician and looks less and less like a great machine and more and more like a great thought" - Sir James Jeans

Sir James Jeans once observed that, "If the purpose of the universe is to produce intelligent consciousness then it is a surprising that such a vast machine should be employed to produce such a miserly small quantity of product."

'If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe & adore, & preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?' - Emerson

"Beware! For when you stare into the abyss, the abyss begins to stare back into you." - Nietzsche

"In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones." - Sufi proverb

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