Three Beautiful Things 06-20-2026: Organize, Nothingness and Emptiness, Existentialism in My Life

 1. Three boxes arrived today with dog food, toothpaste, toothbrushes, a portable litter box, bottled water, a travel soap dish, and flashlight. A few more things will arrive tomorrow. Then all I have to do is decide how to organize things and I'll wrap up this project. 

2. Rebecca Boyle opens her book Our Moon, with a description of the moon's nothingness: no air, no life, no color, and so on. We humans, however, project much upon this nothingness: our dreams, hopes, ambitions, curiosity, imagination, and so on. 

As I read more deeply into this book, I keep thinking about Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man". It in the poem's speaker looks upon a bleak winter landscape of "pine trees crusted with snow" and "junipers shagged with ice" and concludes that "being nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." 

Boyle's book opens with the "nothing that is" the moonscape, but as the book develops and she examines the creation of the moon, the rocks astronauts brought back, the role of the moon in shaping our sense of time, the moon's role in ancient religions as an embodiment of divinity, and a host of other things, she examines the "nothing that is not there". 

Thinking about "The Snow Man" and the moon transported my thinking to Chapter 11 of the Tao de Ching, which is a meditation upon emptiness:

We join spokes together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that makes the wagon move. 

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside 

that holds whatever we want. 

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable. 

We work with being, 

but not being is what we use. 

In short, the nothing that is there and the nothing that is not there.  

3. Ever since I was introduced to existentialism in the fall of 1973, just a few months after the Zinc Plant accident I've mentioned (many times) before, I've restlessly entertained the possibility that we humans come into the world empty, as being nothing, undefined.  This is the core tenet of existentialism. Existence precedes essence. We are not essentially anything.  

The Tao de Ching is helpful here. We are, in other words, like the hole in the wheel, the emptiness of the cup, or the inner space of the newly built house. The existentialist asserts that we are frighteningly free. We bear an enormous responsibility to make meaning out of our lives, to meaningfully turn emptiness into purpose, a responsibility that can lead to feelings of anxiety, dread, even nausea. We resist this freedom. Rather than make meaning ourselves, we let forces and influences outside of ourselves create meaning for us. We surrender our freedom and responsibility to dictate who we are and what life's meaning is. 

I'm not sure when I started reading Our Moon that I expected a book about the moon to lead me to thinking so much about these ideas about what it means to be a human being, but, as they say, here I am!