David Adams Richards - Murder: And Other Essays

IT WAS A JULY NIGHT AND I WAS TRAVELLING HIGHWAY 11, along the Miramichi River in northern New Brunswick. Along the way I picked up a hiker, coming from town. It was dark and warm, and the stars seemed endless; endless enough to make us reflect that anything we did couldnt much matter to the wide universe. And this in fact is what the hitchhiker reflected upon as we drove.

That we didnt matter very much at all.

So I agreed. (It is a fairly prevalent idea nowadays. It is part of the irony of the times, I suppose. That is, that any office or opinion we have is, by way of irony, lessened; and nothing much matters.)

He was a nice fellow, a First Nations man who was travelling home to his reserve. I believed he simply wanted to make conversation. Dust in the Wind was playing, a song by the group Kansastheir lyrics stating that all our dreams are futile, for we are only dust in the wind.

He concurred. Thats rightboys, oh boys, look at them starspeople think we matter, but we dont matter much

His voice belied the import of the statement, making it homey and wise and innocent.

I agreed that when you consider our galaxy and try to comprehend the billions of others, you realize we are very tiny indeed.

However, there was something else I had noticed. It gave a curious feeling of aggrandizement to say we didnt much mattera feeling of actual importance in not mattering. We felt enlivened by the prospect that we were nothing. For a while it filled up a need in us. In fact it must have filled up something to be able to say it with so much contentedness.

Infinitesimal specks of nothing that we are.

The hitchhiker said after a time that he was an atheist. That he had become one because the church had hurt his people.

The church turned me into an atheist is what he said.

The song had stopped.

I did not dispute this. That the churchand many other thingshad hurt and displaced his people. He was telling me now that he was not a Christian and did not believe. I shrugged. I was not in the mood for an argument. And it never much mattered to me what a person is or was. That in fact is my stance, and always has been, and too, at times, I am still not certain what I am.

Still, I began to realize that in saying we did not matter because there were big stars in the sky, we offered some kind of acknowledgement to at least one line: For as heaven is above earth so are my ways higher than yours, and my thoughts than your thoughts.