Somebody has to Be Here
A remembrance about nothing, luck, and the fact of being here at all
“I’ve been asked, ‘Didn’t I think it odd that I should be around to witness the death of everything.’ I do think it’s odd, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Somebody has to be here.”
White, The Sunset Limited, Cormac McCarthy
The Cabinet
I open the cabinet and find bourbon.
No gin. No better option for the mood I’m already in, whatever that mood happens to be. The bottle is simply there, and my hand does what hands do in a world made of causes.
Sometimes the world makes a decision for you.
I’ve said that like a joke before. It is a joke, a little. But, it’s also a confession. It names something I keep feeling more strongly as I get older: how much of life comes down to what was already on the shelf before I walked into the room and called any of it choice.
That sounds bleak if you say it too fast. It sounds like a stripped wire version of determinism, the kind people hear as a threat. No freedom. No authorship. No real agency. Just causes all the way down.
But, that isn’t quite how it feels from the inside.
From the inside, it feels like standing in the kitchen, tired and alive, reaching for a bottle, feeling the strange doubleness of being both actor and outcome. I am choosing. I am also chosen, in a sense, by everything that came before me: my body, my history, my habits, my tastes, my injuries, the hour, the room, the fact that there is bourbon here and not gin.
That “both” has become one of the central feelings of my life.
I experience myself as a center of consciousness. I also believe, as fully as I believe anything, that I could never have been other than what this moment made me.
And, still, here I am.
Which may be the whole mystery.
The Question That Never Ended
When I was a kid, I used to ask my grandpa what nothing was.
Not once. Not as a clever, isolated question. It became one of our long-running conversations, one of those family stories that survives because it was funny and because, under the humor, it was real. I would ask what nothing meant. He would answer. I would object. He would answer again. Around and around we’d go.
“What is nothing?”
That question had the shape of a game, but it never felt like only a game to me. It felt like pressure. It felt like I had found a loose board in reality and kept worrying it with my foot.
Because every answer failed in the same way. If nothing is blackness, blackness is something. If nothing is emptiness, emptiness still sounds like a condition. If nothing is the absence of things, then even that absence seems to require a place, a frame, a silence around it.
A blank page is something.
A dark room is something.
Empty space is something.
Even the word “nothing” is something, a sound made by a mouth and held in a mind.
So, the conversation never resolved. It just kept circling. And, looking back, I think that circling was the point. These conversations were the inspiration for this essay, and I mean the whole thing as a small remembrance. I mean it as a way of staying with him and with the question a little longer.
Years later, I started recognizing the same pressure point elsewhere. In meditation. In philosophy. In physics. In illness. In that stubborn fact that the mind seems unable to imagine its own absence without secretly imagining some witness left behind to watch the absence happen.
That is probably why this question never left me. It was never really about a dictionary definition. It was about whether the mind can think its way to the edge of itself.
Grandpa, I love you. I miss you. And, I’m still thinking about nothing.
Somebody has to Be Here
Cormac McCarthy, in The Sunset Limited, gives White that line that feels almost too simple to survive contact with how much it contains: somebody has to be here.
I keep coming back to it because it captures something I’ve felt for a long time but never named cleanly. Consciousness is always somebody’s. However abstract our philosophies get, however impersonal our cosmologies become, experience is always local. It is always happening here, from somewhere, to someone.
Not because the self is a magical substance. Not because there is a soul hovering behind the eyes. I don’t believe that. If anything, I’m more persuaded by the opposite. The self looks less and less like a thing to me and more like an event. A process. A temporary pattern in matter with a point of view.
But, even a temporary pattern is still a pattern. Even an event still occurs.
That matters when you’re a determinist, because determinism can sound like a view from nowhere, a way of dissolving the person into mechanism. And, at one level, it does. I don’t think there is a little sovereign agent inside me making uncaused choices. I think there is a causal chain reaching backward farther than thought can follow.
Still, from the inside, that chain feels like being me.
This is the part people sometimes miss. Determinism does not abolish lived experience. It does not flatten grief, or tenderness, or fear, or moral revulsion into abstractions. It only changes what those things mean. It asks you to hold two truths at once.
One truth is cosmic: everything is caused.
The other is intimate: being caused still feels like being here.
Luck, Everywhere
Once you really start believing that, luck comes into view with almost embarrassing force.
Not just obvious luck, though there is plenty of that. The luck of birth. The luck of family. The luck of money. The luck of timing. The luck of which diseases exist when you happen to need treatment and which treatments happen to exist when the disease arrives.
I mean smaller and stranger kinds of luck too.
The luck of what your temperament can tolerate.
The luck of what books find you early.
The luck of being the kind of child who can’t stop asking a question.
The luck of being around adults who don’t crush the question for efficiency’s sake.
Even our convictions feel touched by luck. Some people seem built to crave justice in a cosmic sense. Some people can live without it. Some people feel instinctively drawn toward religion. Some people cannot make themselves believe. Some people need the universe to care. Some people eventually find relief in realizing it probably doesn’t.
None of this means luck is magic. I don’t think the universe rolls metaphysical dice. I think luck is what we call the felt difference between one determined life and another when viewed through the lens of value.
That is enough to make it morally serious.
If one person is born into warmth, stability, and love, and another into violence, chaos, and deprivation, it does not answer much to say both outcomes were determined. Of course they were. The point is that one of those determined outcomes is better than the other for the creature forced to live it.
That is where moral language enters for me. Not above causation. Inside it.
What Moral Realism Still Means
I’ve never found “it’s all relative” emotionally convincing, and I’ve found it less convincing intellectually the older I get.
Not because morality descends from somewhere else. Not because I think there is a divine ledger or a metaphysical rulebook stitched into the fabric of the universe. I don’t.
I mean something simpler.
Conscious creatures can suffer. Conscious creatures can flourish. Some arrangements of life are better for them than others. Some ways of being treated are plainly worse. Some institutions grind people down. Some forms of care help people live.
If that isn’t enough to ground morality, I’m not sure what would be.
Moral realism, for me, means refusing to treat cruelty as a style preference. It means refusing to say that a world where children are safe and fed and loved is merely one cultural option among others. It means refusing to pretend that the interior lives of conscious beings are unreal just because they are hard to measure cleanly.
None of that requires free will in the strong sense.
If anything, determinism sharpens the ethical demand. Once you admit how much of a person is inherited, imposed, shaped, and constrained, blame starts to lose some of its old glamour. Not accountability. Not consequences. Those still matter. But, ultimate condemnation begins to look confused.
The moral task becomes less about announcing who metaphysically deserves what and more about asking what kinds of causes lead to less misery and more decency.
That is one reason moral luck matters so much. We are constantly evaluating people without fully reckoning with how staggeringly uneven the conditions of personhood are.
History makes this obvious. We look back at people in earlier eras and feel the split. We see what they could not see. We also see, sometimes, the edge of what they did see, the way a person can strain toward a better moral horizon without ever fully reaching it.
That tension doesn’t weaken morality. It humanizes it.
Solipsism, Dark Fires, and the Almost Nothing
There’s a moment in Stella Maris—also McCrthy’s, and his final masterpiece—where Alicia says something that has stayed with me. She circles solipsism, or something near it, and says that before conscious creatures the universe was basically nothing. Dark fires, she says.
She isn’t claiming literal nothingness. Neither am I. The point is subtler and, to me, more haunting than that.
Solipsism, in its strict form, is the idea that only one’s own mind can be known to exist. Everything else might be projection or dream or hallucination. I don’t believe that. Alicia, I think, is doing what McCarthy so often lets his characters do: pushing a thought until it begins to glow from strain.
And, what glows here is not the claim that the universe was absent before minds. It’s the claim that without minds there was no inwardness anywhere. No felt world. No interior. No “what it is like.”
Dark fires.
I love that phrase because it gets at the exact border I’ve been trying to describe. A universe can exist objectively without any witness. It can be full of matter, energy, violence, formation, collapse, stars burning and cooling and exploding in total indifference. But, without consciousness, none of that is lit from within. None of it is present to itself.
That is not nothingness in the metaphysical sense.
But, it is awfully close to nothing in the only sense my younger self meant when I asked the question.
What is a world like when there is no one there to whom it is like anything?
The honest answer may be that it isn’t like anything at all. It simply is.
And, then a mind appears. A nervous system wakes up. A creature opens its eyes, or whatever counts as eyes, and the universe acquires an interior somewhere. It becomes experience. It becomes presence.
That is why the phrase “dark fires” feels so important to me here. It names the difference between objective existence and lived existence without collapsing one into the other.
Judgment Without Fantasies
If determinism is true, then praise and blame have to be rethought.
Not abandoned. Rethought.
We still need accountability. We still need protection, law, repair, restraint, warning, consequence. A person who hurts others still has to be stopped. A society that permits preventable suffering still deserves criticism. None of that disappears.
But, the old fantasy that people stand outside causation and author themselves from nowhere starts to look impossible.
That changes the emotional atmosphere of judgment.
It makes self-righteousness harder to sustain. It makes moral disgust less intoxicating. It forces you to admit that what you call your character is, to a terrifying extent, what happened to happen to you and through you.
That should not end ethics. It should deepen it.
Because if nobody wrote themselves from scratch, then compassion stops being decorative. It becomes basic intellectual hygiene. It becomes the appropriate response to a world in which everyone is, in one way or another, thrown.
And, still, somebody has to be here.
Somebody has to say no when no is needed. Somebody has to protect the vulnerable. Somebody has to build institutions that produce less harm instead of more. Somebody has to make the cabinet kinder.
That is ethics in a determined world as I understand it. Not transcendence. Not purity. Not cosmic merit. Just causation, taken seriously enough to be used with care.
The Mistake we Make About Death
Death is where all of this tightens.
Because once again the word “nothing” comes forward, looking obvious and collapsing under pressure.
After death, people say, there is nothing.
Thomas W. Clark makes a point I find clarifying here. He argues that we tend to reify nothingness. We treat it like a positive condition, a place or state the dead somehow enter, usually imagined as darkness, silence, blankness, emptiness. But, that picture cheats. It sneaks a witness back in. It imagines someone there to undergo the blankness.
That is the contradiction.
Darkness is something perceived. Silence is something perceived. Even emptiness, as we imagine it, borrows its shape from experience. To imagine ourselves dead, we usually imagine ourselves somehow still present to register the absence.
Epicurus saw the problem a long time ago. When I am, death is not. When death is, I am not.
Simple, almost too simple. But, it breaks the spell.
The mind cannot experience its own non-experience. It can fear it, picture it, symbolize it, pace around it, write essays around it. But, it cannot undergo its own absence as an event.
That doesn’t solve grief. It doesn’t make loss small. It does not console me out of loving particular people in their particular forms. I do not want “generic subjectivity” in place of my grandpa. I do not want a philosophical substitute for an actual person.
But, it does matter that the feared abyss is conceptually unstable. We keep imagining a darkness someone will inhabit. And, the someone is the part that cannot survive the picture.
The Unfinished Conversation
My grandpa died, and I didn’t get to finish the conversation.
Which is, in its own way, the only ending that makes sense.
Because there is no finishing it. There is only carrying it.
I still picture him in his better years, across from a chessboard, or in one of those rooms where a family builds its mythology without noticing. I picture the patience it took to keep answering the same impossible question. I picture the kindness of not shutting down a child who was clearly not going to let it go.
Later came illness, dementia, the slow dimming that seems to insult every easy account of identity. If the self were simple, its erosion would be simple too. It never is. Pieces go missing unevenly. Recognition flares and fades. Traits remain after memory weakens. Affection survives in altered form. Sometimes apology appears where it hadn’t before. The person is there and not there, familiar and altered, present and receding.
It is hard to watch because it reveals too much. It reveals that the self is not a block but a pattern, not a statue but a composition.
And, yet, even there, love remains legible.
That matters to me. More than most arguments do.
If the self is a pattern, then love is part of the pattern too. If we are constellations, then maybe we go on mattering to one another precisely through the traces we leave in other minds.
Grandpa, I love you. I miss you. And, I’m still thinking about nothing.
The Line Returns
I keep coming back, in the end, to McCarthy’s line.
Not because it resolves anything. It doesn’t. It just names the fact cleanly enough to live beside it.
Somebody has to be here.
Not heroically. Not triumphantly. Just factually.
The universe does not become experience in general. It becomes experience locally, through particular nervous systems at particular moments. It is always someone’s view. For a little while, it is mine. For a little while, it is yours.
That may be all the metaphysics we get.
But, it is not small.
It means that luck matters because lived experience matters. It means morality matters because suffering and flourishing are real from the inside. It means death is terrible without having to be transformed into a positive state called nothingness. It means the old childhood question still opens onto something worth standing beside.
And, it means that before minds there may indeed have been dark fires, a vast objective universe with no inward light anywhere in it. No witness. No felt world. No interior.
Then here we are.
A cabinet.
A glass.
A memory.
A question.
And, somebody, for a little while longer, to ask it.
Waves are nothing but
The entire ocean waving
Singular object
