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272 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2022
“Tell me what you know.”
“Nothing. I know nothing. I also know that Sill is up to nothing.”
“You’re telling me he’s not planning anything.”
“That’s not what I said. Listen this time. Sill is interested in nothing. He wants nothing. He plans to take nothing. He wants, rather needs, me because I know nothing.”![]()
“Imagine this,” I said. “There are three sheepherders who come to a bridge controlled by a troll and his two sons. He demands of them thirty sheep before they can pass. Each shepherd cuts out ten sheep from his flock and they give them to the troll. Once they have crossed, the troll decides that he should only have asked for twenty-five. He sends his sons after the men with five sheep. The sons decide to keep one sheep each and give three back to the herders. They do. Now it is the case that each shepherd has paid only nine sheep. Nine times three is twenty-seven. The troll sons kept two. Twenty-seven plus two is twenty-nine. Where is the missing sheep?”
“You sound like a physicist,” she said.
“There’s no reason to be insulting.”
I am serious about my study. I am a distinguished professor of mathematics at Brown University, though I have not for decades concerned myself with arithmetic, calculus, matrices, theorems, Hausdorff spaces, finite lattice representations, or anything else that involves values or numbers or representations of values or numbers or any such somethings, whether they have substance or not. I have spent my career in my little office on George Street in Providence contemplating and searching for nothing. I have not found it. It is sad for me that the mere introduction to my subject of interest necessarily ruins my study. I work very hard and wish I could say that I have nothing to show for it.
There are some distinctions to draw when considering nothing or at least a sense of nothing, nihil noema. I distinguish this sense of nothing from the physical object or embodiment, from the psychological or experienced, from any mental depiction or adumbration and from any logical conception or construction. There is no corresponding idea, form, or picture of whatever it is that I am talking about. Unlike a real anvil, the denotatum of which will accelerate from a height at 9.8 m/s/s and can break up or break something upon contact there is not much to say or imagine of nothing. In my mind, the imagined flight of the anvil is also true, true perhaps of all the noema of anvil. But of nothing (why the italics, as I am accentuating nothing or rather there is not a thing that I am accentuating), what can I say? Nothing. Fitting.
“I’m a dismantler. America killed my father and mother. And nothing is going to change that”
“Sacrifices must be made ……… If there’s one thing all this money has made me, it’s White”
[It was] Nothing like anything Lily had ever felt. She disappeared in its ocean. No more Lily. Nothing. And to try to preserve this feeling, she began her lifelong habit of keeping a diary: “I felt nothing today.” And only she understood that this was a sublime event.But enough about me.
“ . . . Nothing is everywhere and nowhere. It exists all the time and at no time. It doesn’t change or move and experience or exhibit any kind of change, so time is unintelligible when considering it. Nothing is so dangerous.” (179)A professor who is a professor of nothing gets involved in a villain’s villainous caper to steal nothing ... until the professor realizes what the villain’s really doing. The professor’s name (not his real one) is Wala Kitu—two words that mean nothing. He is a mathematician who doesn’t use a computer.