“The End of Everything,” by Katie Mack

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. I was talking earlier in the show about the book I just finished by Katie Mack called The End of Everything, and she’s a cosmologist at North Carolina State University.

And she studies the beginning of the universe and the end of the universe, or what we can tell about it from the science that we know right now. It was a pretty ambitious read for me. I have to confess that my mind is a little sore from the workout, but it was great mental cross-training to at least try to read this book.

I’ll confess that a lot of it was over my head, but, you know, over is relative if you think about it, if you think about the cosmos. The word over is relative, and the fact that I’m even thinking in these terms, however simplistically, I think is a testament to the book itself.

But I did want to share a passage that is an example of sort of the mind-expanding way that Katie Mack writes. And it also includes a term that was new to me.

It is said that astronauts returning from space carry with them a changed perspective on the world, the overview effect, in which, having seen the Earth from above, they can fully perceive how fragile our little oasis is and how unified we ought to be as a species, as perhaps the only thinking beings in the cosmos.

For me, thinking about the ultimate destruction of the universe is just such an experience. There’s an intellectual luxury in being able to ponder the farthest reaches of deep time and in having the tools to speak about it coherently.

When we ask the question, can this all really go on forever? We’re implicitly validating our own existence, extending it indefinitely into the future, taking stock and examining our legacy.

Acknowledging an ultimate end gives us context, meaning, even hope, and allows us paradoxically to step back from our petty day-to-day concerns and simultaneously live more fully in the moment.

The overview effect. Yeah, I’ve heard of that before.

The pictures looking back from Saturn’s rings of this tiny glowing dot that happens to be Earth.

And you realize how utterly small we are against all these pinpoints of the other stars in our galaxy and the universe behind.

Yeah, yeah. It really gives some perspective.

And I don’t know, I feel like I needed that right now, just really zooming out to look at the Earth.

That sounds like a wonderful book.

You know, I had another experience through my son’s eyes.

He recommended a book series to me, which he doesn’t often do.

But all these years, my wife and I, mostly my wife, have been reading books to him at bedtime.

And they started on Lois Lowry’s The Giver series.

This book has been around for quite some time and is well known in young adult circles and often recommended by libraries and librarians and teachers often recommend it to their students.

But it was new to me.

And he said he wanted me to read it so that we could discuss it as a family.

So I started it.

And this series gave me a perspective on what he’s going through as a teenager because it’s about a young boy, Jacob, who lives in a strange society where life is highly regulated and controlled.

Their feelings are repressed.

They don’t see color.

They don’t have the same relationships with each other that we have.

They’re assigned spouses.

They’re assigned children.

The first book gives the series its name.

It’s called The Giver.

And the boy reaches an age where he is to be assigned his adult duties that he will train for.

And he’s assigned to be the receiver.

And he meets the giver.

And this new position puts him in a place to learn histories, feelings, and sensations that have been kept from everyone else in his community.

And this knowledge changes his life and leads to a dramatic ending.

The second book is seemingly unconnected when you first read it, but across the four books, you kind of see all of these four stories coming together, and they all deal with young people coming of age, and they all deal with decisions and culture that these young people have inherited, and they’re all wrestling with their places in it, and whether or not they can accept those past decisions of others and this culture as they are or whether they must change them or fight against them.

And I’ve really been enjoying these, not least because my son recommended them and obviously I want to connect to him.

But also because the protagonist, unlike a lot of young adult literature, they’re not jaunty sexpots or your typical young adult heroes.

You know, it’s not all about, you know, do they find me attractive?

Oh, yeah, let me kill this bad guy.

You know, paragraph alternating with smooches on one paragraph and sword fights in another.

So anyway, my son Guthrie recommends Lois Lowry’s The Giver series, and so do I.

And we’d love to know what you’re reading.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us all about it in email, words@waywordradio.org.