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Although I have read The Amber Spyglass before, this reading felt unlike any prior experience I had with the novel. As a kid, the themes and subtext went straight over my head, but after this reading I wish that I had paid closer attention. While not completely relevant to my spiritual journey today, many of Pullman’s themes, namely those concerned with the perception of God and death, helped me to make sense of a journey I faced in my adolescence.

Before I turned seventeen, I believed in God. My best friend, Jeff, also believed in God, but far more than I did. He was a zealous Catholic altar boy who was fond of memorizing scriptures and training to become a “holy warrior” in the U.S. Army. Pullman would probably remark upon the distinct lack of dust particles floating anywhere near his head; in fact, he might call Jeff a dust vacuum, as he had a way of impressing Christian ideals onto others. By contrast, my other best friend, Shelby, was just about as full of dust as you could get. When Jeff wasn’t telling me to live by God’s rules, Shelby was challenging me to think as hard as I could about the universe and to come up with my own interpretation of concepts such as fate and spirit. At the time, I thought she was mostly just full of nonsense, but I half-listened to her ramblings from time to time and managed to hold onto a few of her ideas.

Her main argument, which I nicknamed her “thesis” because she kept pushing it, rested on the assertion that human beings know nothing at all. She believed that, when you get down to it, human beings are just small organisms on a rock in space, and the mysteries of the universe are always going to be mysteries to us because we are incapable of the thought required to understand such concepts. Shelby pointed out that human ideas such as time aren’t universal, and science is largely dependent on planetary subjectivity. Even the principles we consider “laws” might just be constructs limited by mankind’s paradigms. We as organisms, she claimed, do not have the capacity to understand certain aspects of the universe beyond our earth, and to answer those questions man creates the concepts of god and science. Shelby saw the two words as synonymous, and believed both were flawed in that they attempted to assign order to a universe beyond our ability to fully comprehend. Of course, she didn’t see all religion as bad and all science as bad; on the contrary, she thought both could do some good things. But she believed neither of them possessed any real truth, and encouraged me to be skeptical of their institutions.

Before I turned seventeen, I thought she was just a rambler that tried to push her philosophy as much as Jeff pushed his religious code. Of course, I loved her, but I learned to tune out her existential ponderings. It made a lot more sense to me at the time to just accept that an omnipotent being created the earth and peopled it with humans. In other words, I didn’t have much dust, and I was perfectly content with that. I actually preferred Jeff’s sermons because they gave me answers instead of telling me I’d never understand.

I met Shelby when I was eleven, and it took me a full six years to make sense of her thesis, though it didn’t happen in the way I’d hoped. The day I turned seventeen, about four hours after we ate lunch together, a sudden downpour of rain caused her car to hydroplane and flip off the road. She died instantly. Something strange happened in the moment that she died, and it took me a few hours to figure out what it was. Jeff came over as soon as he found out and immediately commenced his sermon about death. He told me exactly what I expected, that she was with God and she was happy, yet for some reason his words didn’t quite ring true for me. I realized, then, what Shelby had meant by all of her spiritual nonsense, and I saw that she was so perfectly right about everything she had ever said to me, and that all of her ramblings formed the basis for this ultimate truth, which was that there wasn’t any truth at all, not for us at least. No matter how fervent his sermon was, I couldn’t believe a single word Jeff was saying, and it was because of this thesis that was stuck in my head, this thesis I found myself so willing to believe after six years of dismissing it without even a moment’s thought. You see, I understood exactly what happened. God died the instant Shelby died, as all of her ponderings became my ponderings.

Ever since then, I’ve wondered why I had that revelation in the first place, and why it happened when it happened. Given that we’ve been discussing a lot of the ideas Shelby liked to discuss, she was on my mind while I was reading the end of The Amber Spyglass, and then I read the following passage. “I will love you forever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.” This made me think of an article I read once, and unfortunately I can’t cite it, but it described how some of our atoms jump off our bodies when we die and join with all the matter around them, and theoretically everyone in the world should have a bit of Mozart on them because his particles have passed through so many generations. I think some of Shelby’s atoms might have found me, because once she died I started to see things the way she’d want me to. And the truth is I was pretty angry with her when I thought about it at first, because she made the world seem so small and the universe so big, and nothing at all is certain anymore. I got so wrapped up in the idea that I was convinced it was the only explanation, and I found myself wishing that her atoms had just left me alone. I’m doomed now, you see, because I used to know so much, and now I know so little.

As I thought about the idea more though, I started to feel okay with it. Because if a part of her grabbed onto me when she died, even if that part is the size of a molecule, even if it’s subatomic, it’s still a part of her that’s alive, in a sense. I know it might sound cheesy, but it made me think of Mary Malone, and the way she felt “cut off from [everything]. And it was impossible to find a connection, because there was no God.” I couldn’t help with disagree with her on this point, because if Shelby’s atoms are in me, well, it wouldn’t really be me, anymore; it’d be us, together still. I figured, in the end, that I might prefer it, because God always seemed far-off to me, even when I believed in the idea, and now Shelby seems so close.

I spoke with Jeff recently; he ended up enlisting in the Army, and from there went into the Special Forces. When he got back from his first tour in Afghanistan, he called me because he wanted me to know what it was like to kill someone. He told me he had killed several people, but the worst part was how difficult it was to tell if they were innocent or hostile. He decided, while overseas, that it’s difficult not because they don’t wear uniforms, but because all men are actually innocent. He told me that he felt compelled to fight harder for every man he killed, because he knew that if he were to die, they would all be there to judge him in heaven. He fights harder now to prolong that judgment, so that he will spend less of eternity with them when he finally does die. I immediately thought of this conversation when I read the description of the land of the dead, and how godless the afterlife seemed even from one so pious. And I found myself wishing the whole time he was talking that there was no heaven, that we don’t stagnate for eternity, that Shelby’s atoms did make it to me, and that someone did cut a way out for the dead so we’re all connected by particles and never, ever alone, not even if God is dead.

DMU Timestamp: February 10, 2012 21:22





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