First, where it’s at: it’s snowing today. We are supposed to be getting about a foot of snow before it’s over sometime tomorrow. I had just finished on Saturday cutting a path in our brushy undergrowth below the house to the paths in the woods. Now I’ll be able to snowshoe there more easily.

Second, where I’m at: I’m at the last chapter of Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life by Paul Davies. At last I found a science book that really takes seriously Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? and it even reads like a detective thriller.

As Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka says,
In our times such disparate thinkers as Wittgenstein and Heidegger have been struck by its poignancy. As Wittgenstein puts it: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” He is believed to have experienced at times “a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all,” and Heidegger has developed his metaphysics as the “exfoliation” of the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

I’m with you, Ludwig. That the world is is the mystical. I often have that exact same feeling: a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all.

Here’s what Homer Simpson thinks about the question: