From a young age, Katherine had trained her mind not to shy away from the truth. All around her she saw the weak minded, the stupid, the ignorant – eating meekly from the trough that had been placed in front of them and ignoring the wonder, the glory, the complexity that would be in right there if only they raised their heads to see it. She’d resolved that that would never be her. “I want to make sure”, she’d say to herself, “that if I had been born in Germany in the 1920s, I wouldn’t have become a Nazi.”
As she grew older, her interrogation of the world continued. Science, mathematics, philosophy – she gobbled them up, never satisfied with what was written on the page, always wanting to go one level deeper, to question the assumptions, to understand what lay beneath. She developed her own theories of the world and her own personal philosophies of life, stacked into an unblemished tower, their clean white walls shining in the radiant glow of her thoughts. Satisfied with its height, she delved into the foundations, cutting through layer after layer of abstraction, seeking to ensure her tower was rooted firmly in sound logic and the truth of the world. But if that was her sole drive, she would’ve been satisfied long ago. It was her burning curiosity that had her looking under the mats and going through basement after basement after basement, ever in search of the real.
And then, one day, it happened.
She was excavating a particularly interesting bit of philosophical bedrock, when her pickaxe not only hit, but went through, as did the rest of her, and she tumbled forcefully into the nothingness. Beneath it all, her tower, her thoughts, her very being, lay an endless abyss. And the abyss was this: sooner or later, it was all going to end. All of it: her thoughts, her cares, her compassion, her body, her life, her friends, her family, everyone she had ever known, everyone who will ever live, the Earth, the sun, the galaxy, all the galaxies. Eventually, it would all be one seething morass of entropy, every trace of her or anything she’d ever cared about utterly erased, as if it has never happened.
Oh, she tried all the common remedies. Religion? Vacuous. Existentialism? Weak against the cold horror of the pit. Nihilism? Nonsense against the emotional backdrop of her day to day life. She clawed in horror at her realization, trying to make herself forget, trying to unsee what she had seen. It was to no avail. She’d trained for this, after all. All her life, she’d made herself look. But now, when the truth of the world was too big for her, she couldn’t stop staring.
She died, 50 years later. A broken shell of a woman.