Chris Scott

One of the books I’ve had the privilege of reading this year was Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger.” I know that Stephen King’s work isn’t exactly respectable literature; after all, this was the guy that called himself the literary equivalent of “a Big Mac and fries.” But regardless, I did previously read some of his other stuff, and my brother recommended it to me (he’s a King fanatic), so I read through the book over one of my breaks.

I can’t really describe the book in words, but it was very deep and ethereal. Although It was a fiction book, there was a lot of hard core philosophy; and not the kind of philosophy you hear people talk about very often.

In my opinion, the most profound, poetic words are found in the last chapter, in a confrontation of two leading characters: the gunslinger and the man in black. To examine the meaning of the text, the characters themselves and the circumstances surrounding them are not important.

The universe (the dark man said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain – although it may think it can – the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

The prosaic fact of the universe’s existence alone defeats both the pragmatic and the romantic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. One company (or cabal) led the way in this regard: North Central Positronics, it called itself. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts, there were remarkably few insights.

“Gunslinger, our many-times-great grandfathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which they called cancer, almost conquered aging, walked on the moon – ”

“I don’t believe that,” the gunslinger said flatly.

To this, the man in black merely smiled and answered, “You needn’t. Yet it was so. They made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination – having babies from frozen mansperm – or to the cars that ran on power of the sun. Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search. Do you see? Of course you don’t. You’ve reached the limits of your ability to comprehend. But never mind – that’s beside the point.”

“What is the point then?”

“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.

“You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

“Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.

“If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?

“Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things – as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it’s already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.

“Think how small such a concept of things make us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for such a race of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see… what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?

“Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and imagine a trillion universes – not worlds by universes – encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, a chain never to be completed.

“Size, gunslinger… size.

“Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?…

“You dare not.”

And in the gunslinger’s mind, those words echoed: You dare not.

As you may be right now, I was completely blown away after reading this. I don’t know if it was the pure poeticness or the loftiness of the statements made by the man in black, but it really stimulated my mind! I love readings like this that stretch your mind beyond reckoning. It’s comparable to the feeling you get after exercising, and you have all of those incredible endorphins running through your body. You can never get this same effect from watching TV or a movie.

Anyway, before the confrontation, the author (Stephen King), made it evident that many of the man in black’s words were “half-truths.” I don’t remember exactly where or how, but at one point it was hinted in the book that the man in black wasn’t exactly the bearer of pure, authentic truth. I believe that many lies or fantasies can contain small strands of truth that can be consumed, if carefully discriminated.

In the first paragraph the man in black said, “The universe is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain – although it may think it can – the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.” That really stood out to me. Very often people discover logical inconsistencies that exist in our universe that they call “paradoxes.” In agreement with the man in black’s statement, I believe that  paradoxes are really limits of the finite mind (what we obviously possess). They don’t “exist” as we know them because they are really illusions of our own intellect. This, in an of itself, is a paradox which is why it is meaningless to try and comprehend the nature of paradoxes!

I guess some concepts are so large for our minds to wrap around that they can only be fathomed for moments at a time. I don’t think that God is a concept that we can completely wrap our minds around, no matter how intelligent or learned we’ve become. It’s like the man in black said, “the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.” I believe that God is infinite, and by that He is many things. An infinite God is a God that is not limited by time, knowledge and space; he is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. God is transcendent and above all creation, so far above that there is no self-wrought mental cognition of his eminence. What we know about God is only what he reveals to us, and there is no drawing closer to God unless He draws us to Him.

Jesus Christ said “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”

I think that God is the giver of all answers, and that he is the founder of truth. There is no way of knowing truth apart from God.

So often we’ve ruled out God because of our inability to understand Him. “But where did God come from?”, “Why did God create man if he knew he would sin?”, “Why doesn’t God just show himself?” We ask these questions without being capable of understanding the infinite God, and we ask them to other, finite minds! Why not focus on the truths that God has chosen to clearly reveal to us in his word?

Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’

Christ said that, and he was quoting scripture from the book of Isaiah. He was explaining to his disciples why He chose to spoke in parables (stories) to the common people. I think Christ used parables, partly because He was an infinite God talking to finite minds. To explain the truths of God to men, He had to use terms that the finite mind was familiar with. Semantics that crossed or overlapped both the infinite and finite realms, so that the later could find meaning.

Wow, so I’ve discussed my thoughts on the first paragraph in the text…I think I’m going to refrain from going any further for now. I think I would be here for days If I discussed some of the other hidden truths I found in this fantasy. It is a fantasy after all; intelligently and beautifully written, but for the purpose of braintertainment. <–That’s an awesome word I accidentally made up there (I meant to type “brain entertainment”).

So I hope you had your fill of Stephen King theology, and I hope that you will maybe share some of your thoughts by commenting.

C’mon, don’t be shy, Post a comment! Let me know what you think!