I give the world’s largest ball of paint four stars.

SYCAMORE TREES

MY CHILDREN LIKE TO PLAY an age-old game with me called Why? I’ll tell them, for instance, that I need them to finish breakfast, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say so that you receive adequate nutrition and hydration, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say because as your parent I feel obligated to protect your health, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say partly because I love you and partly because of evolutionary imperatives baked into my biology, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say because the species wants to go on, and they’ll say, “Why?”

And I’ll pause for a long time before saying, “I don’t know. I guess I believe, in spite of it all, that the human enterprise has value.”

And then there will be a silence. A blessed and beautiful silence will spread across the breakfast table. I might even see a kid pick up a fork. And then, just as the silence seems ready to take off its coat and stay awhile, one of my kids will say, “Why?”

When I was a teenager, I used the why game as a way of establishing that if you dig deep enough, there is no why. I reveled in nihilism. More than that, I liked being certain about it. Certain that everyone who believed life had inherent meaning was an idiot. Certain that meaning is just a lie we tell ourselves to survive the pain of meaninglessness.

A while back, my brain started playing a game similar to the why game. This one is called What’s Even the Point.

There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I’ve quoted in two of my novels and will now quote again, because I’ve never come across anything that describes my depressive blizzards so perfectly. “That chill is in the air,” the poem begins, “Which the wise know well, and have even learned to bear. / This joy, I know, / Will soon be under snow.”

I’m in an airport in late 2018 when suddenly I feel that chill in the air. What’s even the point? I’m about to fly to Milwaukee on a Tuesday afternoon, about to herd with other moderately intelligent apes into a tube that will spew a truly astonishing amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in order to transport us from one population center to a different one. Nothing that anyone has to do in Milwaukee really matters, because nothing really matters.

When my mind starts playing What’s Even the Point, I can’t find a point to making art, which is just using the finite resources of our planet to decorate. I can’t find a point to planting gardens, which is just inefficiently creating food that will sustain our useless vessels for a little while longer. And I can’t find a point to falling in love, which is just a desperate attempt to stave off the loneliness that you can never truly solve for, because you are always alone “way down in the dark which is you,” as Robert Penn Warren put it.