I am old quickly. One day, I thought I would live and live; questions of after were as pointless and needless as questions of before. There was just this, the present, and me inside it. Now I know that I will die. It occurred to me while watching a John Adams documentary at the same time it occurred to me that he was dead, and his friends, each one by one in interminable loneliness — his wife in the chair on the porch. And I saw John Adams fight it, the sly and surprising vanishing of his finest friends and enemies, until his whole world and thought, and then he himself, were gone.

The myth I had been given, the myth of America — the founding fathers standing around proudly in massy unity — did not prepare me for and could not accommodate singular death. In my myth, the Founding Fathers lived lives posthumously imposed on them, lives of order and swelling, purposeful inevitability, and consequently must have died all together — their story finished — according to the law of common consent. To have to know that they died singly, at different times, in the unfinished loneliness of their wish, was too much for my myth to bear. It died that night in the awareness of death.

It was one of those strange things that make you weep. It is one of those strange truths that everyone knows, so that when you know it and try to say it you have only the words that everyone knows, and you fret because you can’t distinguish words-of-the-bones from words-of-the-mind.

I will die, possibly this next second, but then again, maybe not (I lived for 26 years on this ‘then again’). But what is worse is that everyone has, or will.

Sometimes a name is enough to pen me inside a pressing terror; today, I was supposed to write a check to Angela Archer, and the fact that Angela Archer existed, that I had never met her but that she had in spite of that managed to find a respectable job at the Department of Workforce Services-that she may or may not know yet that she will die-that she was just one of a grotesque number of people who had decided their lives had significance and who would die in grotesque anonymity: well, I did not write the check. It seemed like a vulgar thing to do.

I remembered Annie Dillard talking about the dark behind every beauty: If the question of existence is a meditation on loveliness, it is also a meditation on the horror of a purposeless infinity, of-Annie’s words-a hatch of bugs that swarm each other and the mind. We do not like that existence. Our desire to matter makes it ugly.

And a text from a friend: “I am starting to believe in God. The multiverse requires it. Everywhere there is a God to beings who are Gods to others. The universe is a fractal of Gods within Gods. Does that make me Mormon?”

I wrote back: Yes, and me too.

I used to not care about ‘doctrine’. What minutiae. Now it is the difference between a fractal and a fraction, 1 over 6 trillion-trillion, in other words, me: the top of a fraction that will die with no consequence to the final math, a casualty of plus or minus 2 degrees accuracy. And for whom? For what? To iterate back on itself, an elegant fractal of meaninglessness?

Perhaps a desire for afterlife is the most deformed of man’s multiple vanities. But vanity itself is a form of salvation, as any serious artist will know.

I do not know physics; I know only the mad math of desire where 1 always equals infinity: the mad, madding math of religion.

And maybe it is as revolting as a swarm of bugs crawling on top of each other to reach heaven. And maybe a God is someone who writes the story of the grotesque, the terrible delusion of being an individual rather than a placeholder in the common denominator of death.

Right now I am thrall to the grotesque. I hope it is nothing so serious as loss of bravery, a refusal to look hard in the eyes of an inconsolable loneliness, an insatiable wail that can never fill enough indifferent space.

But I know it’s true: I want a God, and desperately. And that is why I must understand this person, Joseph Smith. And it is also why I can’t enlist in the march, the moving-on.

I know from reading Survival in Auschwitz that the human mind is a trick of evolution: a thing that must destroy itself with its own desires, that finds itself always in the middle of a Gordian knot of longing that both undoes it and tangles it more tightly together, a knot it refuses to cut because it needs the mystery.

The desire to keep living in spite of the peace of death, the ability to look at the chaos of infinite dying and believe in reconciliation is insane, a perjury against reality that even art won’t commit thoroughly. In the end there is some restraint, some resignation amidst the fury, that will make it art and not religion. Religion is pure insanity, pure egotistical want that trades in infinities of decreasing terror: immortality for anonymity. To survive it at all takes the faith of an atheist or a saint or else an idiot so cajoled by the closeness of things that he closes his eyes.

At any rate, once you feel it, you’re done. You’ll feel it everywhere. You’ll wonder how you can live, and if you go to the symphony to hear Mozart’s Requiem, you will wonder how he had the strength to tell the terror straight. You will no longer be good at living, the bland, presumptuous self-evidence of it. And then you will start to read the oldest books again.