There’s something beautiful and haunting about late night walks. The slight chill, the empty streets, the lonely stoplights shifting colors to an audience of one. My favorite parts are when that audience briefly becomes two, and I often make up stories detailing why they’re out so late. Perhaps a scandalous moonlit tryst with a secret lover, or the romanticized ideal of an insomniac artist looking for inspiration. The reality of it is almost certainly disappointing. This is Princeton: the most likely explanation is that they’re simply a postdoc or graduate student heading home after a late night in the lab. Work-life balance doesn’t seem to exist in academia, but I suppose that’s a bit rich coming from the only other person in the moon’s sight.
I look up at the moon, and for the fourth time that night I’m struck by its brightness. This chunk of rock, reflecting photons from nearly a hundred million miles away. How lonely must it feel, all the way up there? Or perhaps the moon isn’t lonely at all, kept company by the 10⁴⁵ photons emitted every second by the sun. In that respect, how could any of us be truly lonely, when we’re never quite alone? There’s that oft repeated quote, that we’re the universe experiencing itself. That when you really cut it down, it’s rather difficult to point out directly where the We becomes I. Where is the separation between us and the universe? And on the order of the I, what is doing the thinking inside of me?
Aristotle thought that the brain was a cooling system for the heart, which located our mind. We know now that much of our thinking comes from the brain, but so too does much of it come from the gut. We have roughly on the order of five hundred million neurons there, in something called the enteric nervous system. I could understand how Aristotle might’ve thought that, given the heat I felt in my cheeks and the chill I felt in my heart – nothing much at all to do with the weather. And I can feel my gut thinking too, that familiar sinking sensation filling me. I looked up at the moon one last time for the night, hanging proud overhead. Kindly providing me and that overworked researcher with a little more guidance, a little more warmth. Mindless, my feet kept moving, continuing on in the direction of the moon.