III. The House of Nothing

The traveller left the valley of clocks with the two stars still before him.

He had learned that before was not a place.

It was a relation.

But this did not satisfy him.

For there was another answer people gave when he asked what had been there before the universe.

“Nothing.”

He had heard the word many times.

It seemed, in some ways, simpler than everything.

Perhaps, he thought, this was the answer he had been looking for.

So he went in search of Nothing.

He walked for many days.

At last he came upon a house standing alone in a field.

It was an enormous house.

There were windows but no curtains.

Doors but no signs.

And, as far as the traveller could see, no one lived there.

Above the entrance was a single word:

NOTHING

The traveller pushed open the door.

Inside was a vast empty hall.

There was no furniture.

No people.

No sound.

No movement.

The traveller smiled.

“At last.”

He stepped inside.

“This must be Nothing.”

A voice answered from somewhere in the hall.

“What do you see?”

The traveller looked around.

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“What do you see?”

“An empty room.”

There was a pause.

Then the voice said:

“An empty room?”

The traveller stopped.

He looked around again.

There were walls.

A floor.

A ceiling.

A doorway.

He had imagined Nothing.

Instead he had found a room.

“This is not Nothing,” he said.

“No.”

“It is a room in which nothing is happening.”

“Yes.”

The traveller walked further into the house.

Perhaps, he thought, the room was merely the first layer.

He opened another door.

Behind it was a great dark chamber.

There was no furniture.

No light.

No sound.

Nothing moved.

“Now,” he said, “there is truly nothing here.”

The voice answered:

“Then what makes the chamber dark?”

The traveller frowned.

“Because there is no light.”

“And how do you know what light is?”

He looked towards the darkness.

“Because I have seen it.”

“And so you know darkness by contrast.”

The traveller said nothing.

He opened another door.

This room was filled with white mist.

He could see nothing inside it.

“Perhaps this is Nothing.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I cannot see anything.”

“Then perhaps you have found something you cannot see.”

The traveller sighed.

“You are making this difficult.”

“I am only asking you what you mean.”

He moved on.

The next room was completely silent.

“There is nothing here,” he said.

“What about the silence?”

“Silence is the absence of sound.”

“And what is sound?”

“A difference.”

“Between what?”

The traveller thought.

Between one vibration and another.

Between noise and quiet.

Between one event and the next.

He began to see the pattern.

Every time he tried to find Nothing, he found instead an absence.

And every absence depended upon something that could have been present.

He entered another room.

This one was empty except for a glass standing on a table.

He looked inside.

There was nothing in it.

He picked it up.

The voice spoke.

“What is absent?”

“Water.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the glass could contain water.”

“And if the glass could not contain water?”

“Then I would not call it empty of water.”

The traveller put the glass down.

He suddenly felt that the house was becoming smaller.

Not physically.

Conceptually.

Room after room had seemed to open onto Nothing.

But every room had contained distinctions.

Empty and full.

Dark and light.

Silent and loud.

Present and absent.

The traveller looked back along the corridor.

“Then Nothing is not what I thought.”

“What did you think it was?”

“A condition.”

“A condition of what?”

“Of the world before there was a world.”

The voice was silent.

The traveller continued.

“Something was absent.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“What was absent?”

“Everything.”

The voice waited.

“And from what was everything absent?”

The traveller froze.

He looked down the long corridor.

He had never asked that question.

If everything was absent, then there was nothing from which it was absent.

No room.

No space.

No time.

No boundary.

No observer.

No distinction.

Nothing.

The word suddenly seemed to collapse beneath its own weight.

He walked into the final room.

It was smaller than all the others.

There were no walls.

No floor.

No ceiling.

No darkness.

No light.

No silence.

No sound.

No distance.

No duration.

Nothing could be seen.

Nothing could be heard.

Nothing could be touched.

The traveller stood there.

For a moment he thought:

This is it.

Then he realised something.

He was standing there.

He stepped backwards.

The room disappeared.

He was once again in the corridor.

“What happened?”

“You imagined Nothing.”

“But I was there.”

“No.”

“I was.”

“You were imagining that there was a place in which Nothing was.”

The traveller shook his head.

“But if there is no place—”

“Then Nothing has nowhere to be.”

“And if there is no time—”

“Nothing cannot wait.”

“And if there is no boundary—”

“Nothing cannot be distinguished from anything else.”

The traveller sat down.

He was beginning to understand why the house had been built.

Not to contain Nothing.

To show that Nothing could not be contained.

He thought of the first answer.

There was darkness.

But darkness required light.

There was empty space.

But emptiness required something that could have occupied it.

There was nothing.

But absence required presence.

He thought about the beginning again.

Perhaps the familiar story was wrong.

Perhaps we had imagined the beginning as a passage from a simpler state to a more complicated one.

Nothing.

Then something.

Absence.

Then presence.

Emptiness.

Then fullness.

But perhaps nothing was not the simpler state.

Perhaps it was the harder idea.

To say that something is absent, you must already know what it would mean for it to be present.

To say that a room is empty, you must know what could fill it.

To say that something is missing, you must know what counts as there.

Even absence needs a world of distinctions.

The traveller rose.

“Then Nothing depends upon Something.”

The voice answered:

“Not exactly.”

He waited.

“Nothing depends upon distinction.”

The traveller looked towards the doorway.

“Distinction between what?”

“Between this and that.”

“Presence and absence.”

“Yes.”

“Something and nothing.”

“Yes.”

“But then—”

He stopped.

The thought was forming.

Nothing could not be the beginning of distinction.

Because the idea of Nothing itself required distinction.

He walked slowly towards the entrance.

Outside, the two stars were still visible.

He looked at one.

Then at the other.

There they were.

Separate.

Different.

And suddenly the traveller saw something he had not seen before.

The two stars did not need to be compared with Nothing in order to be different.

They simply had to be distinguishable.

The difference came first.

Not first in time.

There was no clock here to measure such a first.

First in the deeper sense:

before this could be called that,

before present could be distinguished from absent,

before something could be contrasted with nothing,

there had to be a world in which distinctions could be made.

The traveller turned back towards the house.

The word above the door had changed.

It no longer said:

NOTHING

It said:

ABSENCE

He smiled.

The house had never been the home of Nothing.

It had been the place where Nothing learned that it needed something else in order to exist as an idea.

The traveller walked away.

And as he went, another question began to follow him.

If Nothing was not the beginning—

if Before was not the beginning—

if even the distinction between Something and Nothing required a prior possibility—

then perhaps the oldest question was not:

How did something emerge from nothing?

Perhaps it was:

How did the possibility of nothing become possible?

And the traveller began to wonder whether, somewhere beyond the House of Nothing, there might be another house.

A house with no name.

A house where the first distinctions were made.