Parabola Magazine

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY

By James Opie

A young man awakens to the power of seeing in James Opie's memoir.

In the spring of 1961 a professor in the English department of Ohio University, where I was enrolled, loaned me a book that led to an unexpected experience of self-confrontation and inner truth. At that moment in my life, what would now be called "relativistic" ideas dominated my conclusions regarding "truth." Central in these notions was the idea that there are no universal truths, since all truths are subjective. If all truths are subjective, then, ultimately, one truth is just as good as the next.

I enjoyed remarking-proclaiming-that "Shakespeare's original manuscripts and yesterday's toilet paper are of equal ultimate value." Wouldn't they both be totally destroyed, in the end? Wouldn't the sun expand someday, and keep on expanding as its heat consumed the earth and all of earthly life? Nothing could survive this holocaust of holocausts in our solar system. And out in the universe at large, sooner or later all of the great clocks would gradually run down. This irreversible process would lead to a cosmic stillness, frozen and devoid of meaning. Therefore, lacking permanence, could anything be touched by reliable qualities of meaning now? Meaning was something that we human beings invent, injecting it into personalized pictures of reality, ex post facto, when difficulties arouse questions that are too complex for us to think through. Life, in itself, has no meaning. An incongruous feature of these conclusions was the passion experienced when I expressed them. There was no meaning and nothing ultimately mattered. Yet, surges of enthusiasm came over me when I shared these conclusions with someone who would listen.

Against this background, the professor who placed a book in my hands only said, "This might be for you...."