Matthew said, “I couldn’t get to sleep at night because I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. My mother told me to try thinking about something else, so I did, but whatever I tried thinking about would turn into thinking about the question. Every time.”
I understood what he meant. I was having similar difficulties with Miss Rheingold’s legs.
“I know what you—” I began.
“Please, Peter,” he said. “My mother told me to think about food. Pick one of my favorite meals, she said. Then imagine sitting down to eat it on a cold winter’s night. Eat my way through it, bite by bite, she said, and by the time I finished my dessert I’d be asleep. It sounded like pretty good advice to me, so I tried it.”
“What did you have?” Marvin asked.
“That’s not important,” Matthew said.
“But what you imagined eating might be a clue—” I began.
“All right, all right,” said Matthew. “Roast beef. Mashed potatoes. Lima beans. Chocolate pudding.”
“Lima beans?” Marvin said. “Your mother tells you to imagine one of your favorite meals and you think of lima beans?”
“I started eating,” said Matthew, “and I was enjoying myself. I even started feeling a little sleepy.”
“Eating a big meal can do that,” I said.
“But then I started getting worried,” said Matthew. “What if I got down to the bottom of my dish of pudding and I wasn’t asleep?”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“So I had seconds,” said Matthew. “I went on eating happily for a while, but then the same worry came back again.”
“I get the picture,” said Marvin.
“I fell asleep finally,” said Matthew, “but I’m not sure when. It must have been somewhere in my fourth helping. I was starting to feel a little sick by then. I never want to see roast beef again, I can tell you that.”
“Or lima beans,” said Marvin.
“Of course, you’ve probably already guessed that by the time I finally did fall asleep, I wasn’t really thinking about the food anymore—I was thinking about the question. I realized that I was wondering where being awake stops and being asleep starts. Even worse, I was thinking about where thinking about how much roast beef I could eat stops and thinking about where we stop starts. You see what I mean?”
“Yeah,” said Marvin and I.
“So,” said Matthew, “that’s when I realized that the point of the question is where—or when—do you stop thinking about this question. It’s a question about how our minds work, how we know what we know—”
“Epistemology,” said Marvin.
“—and what there is for us to know in the first place,” Matthew continued.
Marvin nodded. “Ontology,” he said. I could see that Marvin enjoyed throwing words around as much as I did, and I could tell that we were going to be friends.
“Well,” said Matthew. “You see what I mean. It’s a question about everything.”
“Couldn’t we split the question up?” asked Marvin. “Each of us take part of it?”
“That’s a fine idea,” said Matthew. “You two work on the obvious part. I’ll work on the big question, the whole synthesis. When we put the report together, your answer can go in as one of the chapters. That’ll be fine.”
“What about Nicky and Patti?” I asked.
“Those two?” He sneered and said, “They can draw the cover.” He walked off. About halfway down the hall he stopped at his locker, spun the dial twice to the right, stopped at the first number, twisted it leftward to the second number, then rightward to the third, and lifted the latch. Since no one had changed the combination yet, the door swung open easily.
I LOOKED AT MARVIN for a moment and then asked him the question that had been in the back of my mind since the first day of school: “Marvin,” I asked, “where do you live?”
He grinned. “Is that another of the Big Questions?” he asked.
I shrugged and shook my head, because at that time I didn’t realize that it was.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 600, Mark Dorset considers Consciousness: Loss of, in Sleep; and Thinking from this episode.
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