Bill Nye the Science Guy was also confronted with the question of the meaninglessness of life while discussing the end of the universe in an interview. Someone tweeted the interviewer a comment for Nye: “This is why nobody should care about the future. If everything will cease to exist anyway, then nothing really matters.” Nye’s response was blood curdling, at least to me:
Well, why get up in the morning? Apparently we are driven to live. Everybody works pretty hard for the last breath. If this person is not just being flip and off-handed and has this nihilistic approach, I say donate your car, if you own one, to charity, donate all your stuff to charity, and take the black capsule. And let the rest of us get on with it.Richard Weikart, The Death of Humanity and the Case for Life
Get on with what? Apparently with a life devoid of purpose we are nonetheless “driven to live.” Those who do not share that drive to stay alive can step aside, and—in Nye’s view-good riddance.
Here’s Bill Nye, as far as I know, having yet to “take the black capsule”.
Hi, I’m Hector Klumpp, and I’m delighted to tell you how I came to marry my best and most formidable friend, Rosetta. To help you understand, I’ll start from when I was just a pup.
I was raised on Bill Nye the Science Guy. He gets me. He is what folks here in Nibbling, MN like to call a Beefy Nihilist. So was I, a devoted gym rat at Nibbling Fight Club, and a devoted student in Nibbling’s Darwin Public Schools.
I accepted my meaningless existence until my high school years, when one day a dragon jumped on my back and sunk his claws deep.
“A dragon?” you ask.
Yes. A dragon– A flaming furnace of a world without meaning or purpose. He roared forth in a daily existential neck scorching.
I tried everything to shoo him away, but soon the only time his grip eased, and his fiery breath rescinded was when I was in the fight cage. There, at least the physical pain of every punch distracted.
But alas, there came a day when I stepped into the cage and the rain of external punches only joined the chorus. My meaningless tumult within pummeled me with equal violence.
I came out of the cage that day and immediately heard the faint train whistle of death, familiar from my daddy’s knee. We used to listen to its whisperings together, emanating from the Strange Uncharted Mountains, just north of Nibbling.
Like my Daddy before me, and Anna Karenina before him, I headed that way, drawn into the foothills, to a cliff we Nibblers call Echo Bluff.
I took the steep path up to the precipice and slinked to the edge; the whistle reached its crescendo, sounding louder than ever in my life. Here, with the dragon panting right along with me, I eyed the depths and waited for the courage to jump.
“What are you doing?” came a slightly recognized female voice deep enough to come from a heavy drinker and smoker, yet lighter and younger, tainted with neither.
I snapped my head around.
“What?” I asked, even before I saw her slight frame step into the sunlight, confirming her identity.
It was Rosetta Butterball, lean and lovely.
Considering this a private affair, I shot back, “What do you care?”
Did I just see a twitch in her eyebrow, perhaps a ripple of concern? Then she shrugged. “You looked troubled, so I followed you.”
When I didn’t answer, she folded her arms and smirked, “You aren’t thinking of jumping, are you?”
“It’s this dragon on my back,” I confided, turning again to the cliff and dropping my eyes to the distant ground below.
“Dragon?”
I expected her to slink slowly away. But instead, she took another step toward me and said, “Well, the dragon will be fine. He has wings. But you? Now that’s going to make a big mess. And then, who am I going to cheer for at Nibbling Fight Club? I’m your biggest fan, you know.”
“You’re my only fan,” I said.
“True,” she agreed. Then, persuasively taking my arm, she pulled me safely away, saying, “Tell me more about this dragon.”
Despite my despair, I found myself smiling slightly, feeling comforted by this small, beautiful Butterball.
Thus began many long conversations with this intriguingly curious toothpick.
I guess you could say Rosetta and Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill with his “drive to live” disrupted my deep desire to “…take the black capsule. And let the rest of us get on with it” as my favorite after school TV mentor put it.
Throughout the spring of our senior year Rosetta and I took to walking together to this precipice, she becoming a close confidant. She hated the dragon, and in her Beefy Nihilist persuasion, she didn’t understand why I couldn’t make the dragon disappear.
But even if I couldn’t, being such a persuasive person (she once convinced a goldfish to take swimming lessons) she thought she could. She thought making him leave would be as easy as making a super cheesy omelet (her favorite food). Yet, even she was stumped on how to get this dragon of meaninglessness off my back.
Of course, I wished it gone too, but the more I tried to explain the less satisfied she became. And when we graduated from high school, she went her way, and I went mine– She to NYU, and I and my roaring dragon to Penn State.
It was here that I took a writing class where I was introduced to Robert McKee’s Story.
My world would never be the same. I gulped down story like it was cheap beer at the local bar. I called Rosetta and excitedly told her all I was learning.
“Go for it, Hector!” she exclaimed in her Beefy way. “Maybe this will finally chase that dragon away!”
“Go for it how?” I asked, genuinely.
“Chase McKee!” she said simply. And suddenly I knew what to do. I flew to California and chased McKee’s book with one of his Story seminars. I was hooked and the chase continued, as I dropped out of college, following McKee around the globe, taking every seminar offered. I called Rosetta from every stop, she taking an equal interest in Beijing and Paris as she did in Story.
One unexpected result of this globetrotting, Rosetta pointed out—my dragon seemed suddenly muzzled. Perhaps he moved up to perch on my shoulder, for I rarely felt his claws any longer.
This made me wonder…would a muzzled dragon make a way for Rosetta and me?
After that year of globetrotting, with empty pockets, I returned to college and called Rosetta. Her advice was the same—Go for it! Chase McKee. From this point on I became determined to make my life’s focus the study of story. I switched my major to creative writing, the dragon and I reasoning together that this would provide purpose to my existence.
In my senior year McKee revealed to me the importance of the question that drives every story—What do you want? I had never paid attention to my desires in the gnawing reality of my Beefy Nihilist existence.
I’ll let McKee explain in his eloquent words:
More often than not, confusion in story is due to a confusion of desire. It’s when you do not understand what your character wants, that the story goes left and right, up and down, forward and backward and confuses you, because you cannot find that spin of action. You cannot find what it is the character wants, and therefore is constantly struggling to achieve it. And so it becomes confusing.
Robert McKee, Q&A: How Do We Live a Better Story?
The same thing would be true of life. When you’re stifled in life, and feel stuck and you don’t feel like you’re living your life fully, the best answer I know, the best way I know to get back on track is to ask yourself the same question: What do I want? What do I really, really want? In the midnight of my soul, ask yourself that question and come up with the honest answer. And then have the courage to pursue that desire. And life becomes a lot more livable.
Doesn’t necessarily mean that your story’s going to have a happy ending. You may or may not get what you want out of life. But at least when you’re pursuing a desire that in your heart you really want, and not what other people want, not what you think you should want and all that. But when you’re pursuing a desire that you really, really want, then as I said, life becomes livable. And your life story comes to life.
So, I ask myself—besides meaning and purpose, what is it…honestly… you most want, Hector Klumpp?
My heart pulsed to bursting, as immediately I knew what I wanted in my heart of hearts—to marry Rosetta Butterball.
So, as soon as my Penn State graduation ceremony was over, still in cap and gown, (the only non-writer in my graduating class with a creative writing major), I took the first big risk of my life and sat down to write Rosetta a letter. She called me after reading it, saying, “Let’s meet in Nibbling. Did you see our 5 year reunion is coming up?”
I can’t recall how much of the reunion we actually attended, but again and again we went to our favorite spot—the precipice at Echo Bluff. When the reunion ended we spent the better part of the next 4 days there together too, where I did a deep dive into this force called Rosetta, and she evaluated Hector and his nasty dragon.
Like a jealous lover, she eyed my dragon carefully. All the while I expected her to take the next train back to New York where she resided.
But she didn’t.
Instead she surprised me with a proposal— “You, Hector Klumpp, can become my husband, on one condition,” she said. “We’re keeping the dragon muzzled, and you’ll do whatever I deem necessary to keep him so.”
That sounded good to me, so we hustled down to the justice of the peace, picking up a few of our favorite Nibblers along the way.
Her next action was to sell my Walker Percy collection, as well as Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace—on which she commented, “no one needs to read this more than once, Hector, let alone 4 times.”
After that, she declared, “I’m moving us back to Nibbling, Hector. I believe I can make a place for us both in our favorite stomping ground, keeping that dragon muzzled forever.”
Within weeks, my persuasive wife, who once talked a mime into giving a TED Talk, talked herself through three rigorous interviews and into a job as CEO of the Nibbling Chamber of Commerce.
That’s not all. She then turned around and used her persuasive talent to create a job at Nibbling Community College for me as their first ever professor of Story. She told them they wouldn’t be sorry, and so far, they’re not.
I love my Rosetta Butterball, and thus we began together, enjoying omelets often, finding our own brand of happiness in our Beefy Nihilist meaningless existence.
The dragon? He stayed muzzled…for a time.
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