What Reality Is

The first half was the small someone behind your eyes. We have looked for it; it is not there. But the dream’s second half is still standing, and it is the bigger half: the world. The out there. A vast warehouse of separate things — chairs, mountains, strangers, stars — solid, independent, indifferent, with you somewhere inside it like a marble dropped in a machine.

This half deserves the same honest look. Pick up any object and ask of it what we asked of you: are you really a separate thing? Where, exactly, do you end?

There is an apple on the table — or bread, or this morning’s coffee; choose anything. Now find the apple’s edge. Not the skin; the skin is part of the apple. The edge — the place where apple stops and not-apple begins.

Trace it backward first. The apple is rain that fell last spring; remove the rain and there is no apple. It is sunlight — literally; the sugar in it was assembled out of light, and when you eat an apple you are eating last summer’s sun. It is soil, and the soil is dead leaves, and the leaves are last century’s trees. It is the tree it grew on, the bees that crossed the blossom, the hands that picked it, the truck, the road, the iron in the truck’s engine — and the iron was forged in the heart of a star that exploded before the sun was born. Pull any thread of the apple and the whole universe comes with it. The apple is not in the cosmos the way a marble is in a box. The apple is something the whole cosmos is doing, briefly, right there on your table.

So is the table. So is the rain. So is the one looking at it.