Yes or No

Yes or No

With fists clenched, my body tightens and I just want to explode. ‘Best of all possible worlds?’ He even underlines it on the blackboard. I want to run up there and punch him in the nose. But with 300 witnesses, I just sit and fume instead.

So, when he posts his office hours, I see my chance.

I have to wait three days before the time comes and by then I'm armed and dangerous.

I knock hard on his door.

He opens with a smile that I want to erase like chalk.

“Hello, Phil is it?” “Yep.”, I say.

“So, what can I do for you?”

“Did you really mean that?”, I ask.

“That this is the best of all possible worlds?” I demand.

“Well, there are those that think it so and as I said in class that was Leibnitz's view.”

Staring at him itching for a fight, I start with an accusatory tone.

Quoting Joyce, I say; "History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awaken,”

"Do you want to sit down?' he says.

“Sure, fine.” I say.

I launch in again. “Do you think Liebnitz would say that if he knew about the wholesale slaughter of industrial warfare during World War I and II in which ten million died? Or an Iron Maiden—he even know about that? That alone is enough to make me want to claw my way out of history. Or what about the influenza pandemic after World War I where twenty million died. Not to mention the Irish potato famine?”

I pause, letting the weight of it settle.

“All of it points to the same conclusion.”

He leans in.

“It’s a horror show from start to finish,” I go on, expecting—no, hoping—for resistance, for debate. But he offers nothing but his presence.

“And that’s just the icing on the cake,” I continue as if to drive the point home. “Have you ever considered that all of organic life is predicated on death? I eat you, you eat me. We stand on a mountain of corpses and have the gall to call life beautiful. Good. A miracle.”

He rests his hand upon his chin. He doesn’t say a thing.

“It’s like some cruel cosmic joke. A sick game of suffering, insanity, and pain.” I pause, my voice low, as if resting my case.

He smiles gently and meets my eyes.

“You know,” he says, kindness in every word, “there were two kinds of people who came out of the Holocaust—those who said yes to life, and those who said no.”

“The choice is yours.”

I am stunned by simplicity of the choice.

I’ve read Man’s Search for Meaning. I’ve read Night. My father fought in that war. I've seen the Holocaust through their eyes; six million tortured, exterminated. And yet, some—like Maude in Harold and Maude—emerged from that darkness and still said yes to life. They saw it as a precious gift to be lived with zest, with defiance, with joy.

How could I argue with that? My own childhood, growing up with a bipolar mother, is nothing like that kind of suffering.

With calm resolve, I choose...

...light over darkness.

Not in denial of darkness, but in transcendence. The kind of transcendence that comes from sitting my a fire gazing at stars.

With gratitude, I stand and reach out to shake his hand.