The sea is an endless, boundless, ever-shifting world that we know to exist, but can never fathom the depths of its body. While in the ocean, the fish and mollusks and clams do not know that they are in a world larger than themselves, they do not know there is something above the surface, they do not know that humans even exist. Despite all our knowledge, despite our methods of studying the world, despite our technologies that can travel far into space, we are just like the animals of the sea, completely oblivious to what could even be possible.
On this pier, I would sit every other day to set up my fishing pole, my lure, and my bucket, to snag whatever might be popping up by the surface. Partly as a hobby, partly because there was nothing else to fill my time after retirement. The days would flash by, one after another, after another, dividing my life between a series of days I was fishing and days I was not. Until this past Thursday, no one had accompanied me or even batted an eye as I sat on my chair. But for some reason, another aged man, not much older than myself, had decided without any words, to plop his weary body next to my own. After some pleasantries, he introduced himself as Alexius Meinong, a professor from the Polish University of Graz who specialized in the study of the imaginary, the theory of objects. Despite the heavy Polish accent, he spoke eloquently about both fishing and the theoretical, weaving both together in a rich tapestry of words until the two ideas became as one. He said “space is endless, yet the ocean is finite, as far as we know. But we know that we don’t know and we can never know what we never know. So how can there ever be a definitive truth about our universe if we cannot even know about our own planet?” This was something I never thought about, but it got my mind racing. What would happen if we travelled to the deepest part of the ocean? Was Jules Vern onto something with his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Could there perhaps be a worm hole that somehow shot us out into space, connecting our planet and the universe into one infinite moebius strip? I voiced these concerns to my new companion Meinong who sat in silence for a while, then replied with a heavy sigh, “these are the questions I wasted my life on. The questions that have no answer. The questions that in the short span of life I have left, will never be fulfilled. This is my life of regret.” We both sat without speaking for too long, reflecting on the regret of life we both had. Our lives are finite yet the life of the universe, of the sea, of the atoms all around us that constantly move, are not. I then offered a wager to him, that if he could tell me what lay at the bottom of the ocean, that if he could dive to the lowest point and resurface to share his findings of what seemed to be impossible, then his life would have been worth it. But if he were not able to touch the bottom, then for the remainder of my days, I will forego my love of fishing. It’s only fair that we both live in fulfillment or both live in complete disappointment.
To that, he scowled at me, his mind turning over the idea, studying the imagination of the situation, then turned the frown into a smile and he dove into the sea, deeper than ever before. I still sit here a week later with a smile on my own face, patiently waiting for his return and his tales of discovery.