The End, The Beginning

 In his novel Zuckerman Unbound—the second in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy—Philip Roth portrays a typically tragicomic episode in which the eponymous author (and Roth alter ego) Nathan Zuckerman tries to find words of comfort for his dying father. 

Zuckerman is regarded as something of a traitor by his family—for depicting them in crude satirical terms in his scandalous bestseller Carnovsky (the fictional counterpart to Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint). 

Like Stephen Dedalus refusing to kneel in prayer at his dying mother's side—Zuckerman's scene at his father's deathbed in the hospital merely serves to underline his apostasy and betrayal. 

In his clumsy stumbling for something reassuring to say, he starts babbling to his father about a work of popular science he had just read on the plane ride down to Florida. The universe is going to last forever—he tells his father; scientists now believe it will expand and contract in 50-billion-year oscillations. 

And so—Zuckerman tries to tell his father—we will all be here again, ages and ages hence. Nothing really ends. This universe and life will go on forever. 

Zuckerman admits—internally—that the science is not really so clear on this point. In fact, he confesses that the scientists have lodged one big objection—a "crushing objection," really—to this theory of the eternal return. 

Namely—he admits—they haven't really found the few extra particles of matter in the universe that would be required to make the math balance. And so—on the current evidence—the universe might actually just go on expanding indefinitely, with no possibility of future life. 

He chooses to leave out this detail, over his father's deathbed. 

This slight flaw in the theory of the perpetually oscillating universe prompts Zuckerman to rail against the Deity: "He who had not seen fit to bestow on His own universe that measly bit of missing matter, that one lousy little hydrogen atom for each volume of ten cubic feet." 

But—as I understand it—science has now suggested that the objection to Zuckerman's theory may not be so "crushing" after all. The latest researches into the universe's "dark energy" suggest that it may be enough—indeed—to overcome this objection. 

If confirmed, the New York Times reported last year—the new findings would mean that the universe isn't actually doomed to fly apart into nothingness and entropy after all. 

I suppose this means that instead—someday, billions of years from now—the universe may start to contract again, and the whole process will start over. 

But does that make us feel better—or worse? As much as the notion of the eventual heat death of the universe fills us with existential horror—so, let us admit, does the notion that the universe will go on doing the same thing over and over again for all time. 

Which is more pointless—nothingness, or eternity? It seems to me like a toss-up; or, perhaps, that the two apparently contrary terms are actually synonyms. 

Did Zuckerman's dying father really need to hear that the universe was going to keep on existing for all time, in order to feel better about dying? 

Or do we not in fact need the awareness of our eventual extinction—the fact of nothingness—in order to make peace with existence? 

As D.H. Lawrence once put it: "If there were not an utter and absolute dark / of silence and sheer oblivion [...] how terrible life would be! / how terrible it would be to think and know, to have consciousness!"

We need an end to the story in order to make any meaning of the beginning and the middle. 

Perhaps our lives—or our universe—are not made more senseless by having a natural terminus, then; but more so. 

Perhaps immortality, then—as Archibald MacLeish once wrote—is a bit overrated. Which lives more—he asks—the salmon that is frozen as a slab of meat for all time in some kitchen refrigerator—or the one that merely once "swerves and vanishes in the river"?

It is Zuckerman's brother, in the novel, who gives him some intimation of this. He mocks him for having nothing better to say, over his own father's deathbed, than some drivel about the fate of the universe. 

His father didn't care or need to be told that the universe would exist forever. All he wanted to hear—his brother said—all Nathan actually needed to say—was that he loves him.