LULU MILLER: the Sky was a slate of indigo. We were sitting in the bath, my year and a half old son and I.

LULU: My wife popped her head in the door…

LULU: Hey, it’s Radiolab. This is Lulu Miller. Latif is actually out this week, but I do have another friend with me.

SOREN WHEELER: Hello!

LULU: Soren Wheeler, executive editor of Radiolab. Man behind the scenes, often pushing us towards things we do or…

SOREN: Or don’t want to do.

LULU: Don’t wanna do.

SOREN: Yeah.

LULU: And he is here today with a somewhat questionable editorial recommendation.

SOREN: It’s not questionable at all, you’re just being hum– I don’t know, humble or something. Because what I want to do – well let me just say that in addition to being a great radio reporter and storyteller, you are also an amazing writer. And I’ve always wanted to find a way to share that on the show. So I’ve been angling for a while now, you know this, to get you to read one of your essays on the air. And there’s one essay in particular, it’s called “The Eleventh Word” and you, what, you wrote this about a year ago? Or so? Year and a half ago?

LULU: Yeah, like year and a half. Yeah.

SOREN: It was actually recently picked for a Best American Essays Honor. And I also think it speaks to the sort of chaos that’s been surrounding us, all of us, of late. But in a really unique and interesting way. So I think it’s actually a pretty good editorial choice and I think everybody’s going to enjoy it.

LULU: Well, I hope so. Alright.

SOREN: Do you wanna like, is there any set up? Do you wanna give us some set up and…?

LULU: Yeah, quick set up. So I’m gonna jump into it a little bit. I’m gonna just fast forward into it a little bit. All you really need to know is that I have mega baggage with the word “fish,” basically, because according to science, it is an inaccurate term. Many of the creatures we consider fish are more closely related to us. But I think my real baggage is with this fish as an example of this thing we do all the time, which is to group things together that don’t belong under one word, to preserve a sense of order, or comfort, or control, or whatever. I think it can be a dangerous impulse to believe in our categories. Anyways, so I’ve kinda been ranting and raving for the last many years about how you need to approach the world with more doubt and it all boils down to the evils and dangers of the word “fish.” and then about a year and a half ago, my kid said the word “fish” for the first time. And so that’s what this essay is about. It’s about that moment and what happens after, so we’re gonna just jump right back on in. In the bath, Wheels, you can leave.

SOREN: I’m not gonna be in the bath, but I’m gonna listen.

LULU: And a quick parental disclaimer. There is a brief mention of a part of the body involved in sex and two quick swear words. Nothing, you know, it’s pretty tame. But consider yourself warned. So here we go.

LULU: We’re sitting in the bath. My year and a half old son and I. My wife popped her head in the door. My son looked at her, giving her a smile I will never get. And then pointed to the painting of a magenta fish on the wall. “Sheesh,” he said. It was, I’m pretty sure, his 11th word. He had dog, and ball, and duck, and bubble, and momma. And mysteriously, in our lesbian household, “dadda”, and “nana” for banana, and “vroom vroom” for car, and “hah hah” for hot. And the root for so many of our evils: “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?” And then, there it was: “Fish.” It should have been a terrifying moment for me. I of all people should have felt that hot burst of fricative air as a puncturing of his innocence. “Sheesh.” His fall from grace in real time. His ejection from a Garden of Eden I had just spent a decade trying to hack a path back into. I should have pressed my palm to his lips and squeezed tight so that no more words would come out. Instead, I tested him. I pulled up a photograph of a goldfish on my phone. “Sheesh!” A salmon. “Sheesh!” Nemo. “Sheesh!” “Yes!” I squealed in the highest octave I could reach, cementing the lie with my glee.

LULU: Over the next few weeks, he revealed to me that fish were everywhere in the city of Chicago. Fish along the mosaicked wall of the pedestrian underpass beneath Lakeshore Drive, now barricaded with yellow tape to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Fish inside the library books we could no longer return. Fish in the windows of the shuttered nursery school on Clark. 

 

“Sheesh!” He would point his little scepter finger, stunning the former confusion into mastery. Under his rule, a snake was also a fish. A turtle, a fish. And one morning, as we opened the window to let an April breeze roll through the apartment, the potted palm tree became a fish, her fins suddenly paddling the air. 

 

As our world was closing in, his seemed to be exploding. The word “fish” turned out to be a sacred key for him, one that granted him the entire animal kingdom. Suddenly, no creature was unknown to him. If a dog walked by, it was “dog.” If we spotted a bunny, it was also a dog. The cows, bears, zebras, kangaroos, giraffes, and elephants stuffed inside our children's’ books, all dogs. As for birds, the robin on our porch, the cardinal on the bush, the pigeons flying with a new elegance across the quieted sky, all “duck.” Everything else was “fish.” It was Aristotle’s same scientific classification of animals. Land, sea, or air, with different labels on their jars. One morning, he called an ant a dog. His chest began to puff just a little bit. Mine did too. I did not yet sense the threat.

LULU: In late April, we learned of one of the few nature preserves stilled recklessly open and we recklessly plunged in. We walked through archways of naked underbrush, brambles holding in their buds. Carpets of moss stealing the show. “Dirt,” our son said. “Yeah! Dirt!” We said, pointing to the infinitely complex swirl of mineral, mycological, entomological, and electrical matter beneath our feet. That very same day came “wawa” for the small creek at the end of the hike, and later, for rain, and baths, and thirst. Next was “stick.” Yellow bloomed for one day and then left us. The tiny, black dogs that crawled along the cracks in our porch became “bug,” and then “ant.” And we cheered with every word. Two women waiting upon the doorstep of language, giddy to welcome him in.

LULU: And then five weeks after he first said the word “fish,” it happened. We shouldn’t have gone to see my in-laws, but they’re young. Not even 60. They don’t play tennis, but they could. We wore our masks and sat at the other end of the long rectangular table. We put our son to bed in their guestroom. Around 10 p.m., we were all still up, still chatting, when our son started screaming. Not crying, screaming. It was a sound we’d never heard. My wife went up, but after a few minutes, the volume had not lowered. I leaped up the carpeted stairs, worried he was sick, worried he had a fever, worried he had...but my wife shook her head puzzled.

LULU: “He isn’t hot,” she whispered. I took him into my arms, sure I could settle him. But he recoiled. He looked up at me with no recognition. We tried everything. Rocking him, showing him a book, the one with the penguins who like each other so much. We tried warmed milk. Nothing. Finally, my wife took him over to a framed photograph of Coptic tapestries.

LULU: Various trees birthing goat-like creatures with curling horns, and snail-like creatures with spiraling shells, and maybe snakes, and definitely vines, all coiling into one another in such a hallucinatory way that it probably would have caused me to have a psychotic break if I had been as disoriented as my son. My wife got him up close to the glass and started whispering the names of what she thought she saw. “Goat,” she said, tapping the glass. “Flower, snail, duck.” Thud, thud, thud. And slowly, through shaking inhalations, he settled enough for us to pack up and drive home.

LULU: Once upon a time, there was a German psychologist whose name I am forgetting, which will itself become relevant in just a moment, who argued that when you don’t name a thing, it stays more active in your mind. Specifically, he found that you have better recall for the details of an unsolved task, an unfinished puzzle, an unnamed psychological phenomenon, than a solved or labeled thing. “Loose ends prevail,” could have been the name of his law, but it was, I’m checking my notes, “the Zeigarnik.” Zeigarnik. The Zeigarnik effect. The man’s name was Zeigarnik and she was a woman, not a man, and she was Russian, not German. But still, it has stayed with me, this idea with a hard-to-remember name, about how unnamed ideas are easier to remember. This rabid, little law that suggests that unlabeled things gnaw and tug at you with more vigor. Their parts and powers somehow more alive when they’re left to roam wild outside the confines of our words. With the name comes a kind of dormancy. The name in this metaphor is a trap. The lid on the jar that extinguishes the firefly.

LULU: The next morning, our son was fine. My wife and I weren’t. “What was that?” we said to each other, shaking our heads over coffee prep and neglected dishes, glancing back at him, merry in his highchair.

LULU: My wife went into work that morning at the hospital where she is a psychologist to kids who have come into contact with chaos’ whims: amputations, and paralyses, and premature births. She took her supervisor aside and asked if she had any thought on the night terror like the one we’d seen. Her supervisor told her not to worry. Said it was a common occurrence around 18 months, a byproduct of all the neurological growth that happens around that time. I pictured a lightning bolt just charging from the growing ion storm of his mind.

LULU: I had done my own half-hearted investigating. Some fruitless googling and a serendipitous phone call with a colleague who mentioned that his toddler had had her first night terror the very same night! We joked that there must have been something in the air. “That’s reassuring,” I heard myself saying, un-reassured.

LULU: I left them for five days. My book tour was canceled, I needed nature, I needed something. I drove to West Virginia. I hiked on a ridge trail and saw a Lady Slipper orchid, whose name I only learned weeks after I saw her. This swell vagina on a pedestal that lives on mountaintops. She was covered in dewdrops. She had pastel veins. I thought I was hallucinating. I missed my wife. I listened to Alan Watts’ “The Wisdom of Insecurity” on tape while I hiked. He told me that the root of all our problems is the desire to hold onto anything. Life is inherently flowing and our grasp to possess it makes us sick. I nodded and tried desperately to capture each beautiful thing I saw. I took a picture of the mist, of a toad, of a cairn. I took a timelapse of a sunset, an audio recording of a grouse bleating for her chicks. Six photos of the Lady Slipper orchid. I ripped up a tiny bouquet of meadow flowers, purple, yellow, and white, and stuffed them in an envelope to mail home.

LULU: What I find when I get home, after a short break.

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LULU: I returned home to new words. “Apple” and “help.” To the killing of George Floyd. To a city-wide curfew. I awoke one night to my wife saying, “Lulu, out, now.” She beelined down the hall to get our son. Our bathroom window was sunset orange with fire outside. “This is a communication,” I thought, as I wondered what to take. I chose our laptops and the scrapbook I’ve been making of my son’s life. His ink-y footprints, his finger paints, the growing list of his words. The garage one plot over from us was razed. It was declared arson. No one was hurt. My son’s eyes gleamed at the firetrucks, five of them, the best night of his life. I thought about everything he didn’t yet know. I wondered how on earth we could raise him to be a good white man. To not think of himself as sitting on top of the hierarchy society continues to maintain for him. In June, he began saying the word “up.” He began rejecting his beloved blueberries, throwing them on the floor, and I would – what would I do? Pick them up. In July, we visited our sperm donor, a close friend who we’ve decided to call “uncle.” Our son’s face is his face but he has no word for him yet. His new word that month was “bus.”

LULU: In August, a tornado pushed through Chicago. Flying saucers of roots rose from the cement as the tree trunks fell. I sat in the bath with my son. The thunder was so loud, it shook the car alarms awake. My son looked at me with “what the fuck” eyes. “Thunder,” I said. “Hummer?” he said. And I said, “Yeah. Hummer.”

LULU: In September, the wind rolled through bearing cicadas and a chill. He turned two. His “hot” grew its “t,” his “banana” its “b.” He spoke his name out loud for the very first time. And “no,” and “corona.” And now it is October. The mysterious, white creature I hung from the porch, my son quickly learned to call “skeleta.” He calls the giant orange orb sitting below it “apple,” and tries in vain to bite into it. Over the ridge of this month lies a greater unknown than we’ve seen in a while. The presidential election. How will the votes get counted? And will the votes get counted? And if the president loses, will he accept the loss? Will the social order hold and wouldn’t that actually be the worst fate of all? If it did?

LULU: I am alone again. My wife and son are both asleep. I slip out onto the balcony. I can’t see the stars between the breaks in the clouds, but I trust that they are there because I’ve been told that they are there. In honor of a more expansive world, in paving the path to progress through doubt, I let myself consider for a moment that there are no stars. I try to slip the word “star” off the stars. Or to unscrew it, leaving just the socket somewhere above me. I try to take down the word above and consider that the stars might be below or inside me. I roll my eyes at myself while trying not to all the same.

LULU: Suddenly, the words of this essay melt into paint or maybe to felt. To wooden waves of green and blue. The colors are muted but deep. The fish curl into the stars, which curl into the wind, which forms a kind of tornado at the center of which you can see is the soul, engulfing the earth re-engulfing the soul. There’s a sound of laughter which is rendered as a tiny bouquet of droplets off the tip of Antarctica. The word “Antarctica” is crossed out. The word “Antarctica” was never there. Ice melts from the brass pole around which the globe spins, then freezes, then sublimates.

LULU: I would like to stay here in the wordless place. After all of these years looking closely at words, I’ve come to mistrust them. So often they are used as the sober blades to scale selves away from the group. Its protection, its warmth, its assurances of justice. But even knowing that, something desperate in me still wants to hurl a handful of words out into the air, still believing they can catch and tame a terrible thing.

LULU: That night back in April, when my son screamed out in terror, a logical explanation could be that he had awoken to an unfamiliar room, my in-laws guestroom, and become disoriented and afraid. Yet prior to lockdown, we had dragged that child all over the place. In his short life, he had lived in three different homes, two different states, he had awoken to countless unfamiliar rooms, inside friends’ homes and hotels, remember those? And cars, and bars, and tents. And never before had it frightened him. So what was different about that night? It was the first time he had awoken to an unfamiliar setting after the advent of words. For 569 days before that, he had lain with the unknown each night and it had never bothered or frightened him. Instead, he had curled into her, this hulking, formless shoal of uncertainty and confusion because it was all he knew. It was only with the advent of words, with the illusion that he could name the whole world, every last corner of it, labeled and known, that the unknown became the enemy, became a threat. She’s flexing her wings these days, the unknown. She’s showboating around. She’s waving from the horizon in a coat of flames. She’s lingering on metal surfaces. There’s the same amount of her there’s always been, of course, but she’s making herself felt. Her presence can be seen in the whittling down of our teeth, the spikes in suicide, the surge in demand for therapists.

LULU: Uncertainty, it has been shown, is more painful than certain physical pain. For some reason, the neurologists say, we are wired to fear the unknown. There’s a thumbnail-sized in the soldier in the brain, they explain, who they’ve named the locus coeruleus, who is charged with tracking uncertainty. He’s useful for a bit, when faced with uncertainty, he puts the brain into a fluid state so it can better run through strategies to keep you safe. But when the uncertainty won’t let up, that fluid state starts to wear on the body. Such extended vigilance leads to exhaustion, to a measurable increase in stress. “The strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” declared H.P. Lovecraft, nearly a century earlier. But what if they’re all wrong? What if we are not, in fact, fated to fear the unknown? What if that fear only starts with the advent of words? With the false belief that a named thing is a known thing? Perhaps it is our words that transform the hulking unknown from friend to foe. It is a tidy theory. It allows me to explain away the fear that something’s wrong with my child, that his anguish is unsolvable, unknowable. If I can name it, I can swat that haunting look in his eyes when he longer knew who I was away forever.

LULU: With “fish” came every last creature on earth. The ducks are still “ducks,” but now owls are “huhus.” Both rocks and curbs are “stone.” He’s got “fern,” and “mushroom,” and “umbrella,” and “bus truck.” His chalk is “cock,” and the gay guys next door can’t stop laughing. The flippered mammals of the sea have all sprouted ruffled collars, “dolfish,” he calls them, animating the world with his wrongness, shaking us all temporarily awake.

LULU: A few weeks ago, I sat in the park under a heavy beam of wood that could kill me in an instant, but I trusted it wouldn’t, because I had named that thing “branch.” In that same park, I watched a man, face-twisted, run hard in my direction, but I trusted he would not kill me, was not running from a thing that might kill me, because I named him “jogger.” Behind me, dozens of ten-ton death machines whizzed by that I named “truck.” I named the flat ribbon of asphalt upon which they drove, “road,” and in road I trusted. With each word comes a false sense of assurances that now you know how it will behave. “We have the coronavirus totally under control,” said the president, the day after the first case was discovered in the US. With “fish” came a certainty about the entire animal kingdom. Although maybe I’m wrong. He’s still got no word for cicada. He’s never named a firefly.

LULU: That night in the bath, so many moons ago, the same moon ago, the light gave off its last indigo sparks of day and he spoke his 11th word. I heard it only as a mother. I clapped at all the finned creatures he had just caught in one syllable. I believed that he was drawing closer, each word a stepping stone to walk him nearer, nearer to me. And yet, the truth I knew even then, maybe, is that each word is another brick in the wall being erected between us. An experience named instead of shared.

[Music in]

LULU: I pulled the plug and watched as he watched, delighted, the water drain away. By the time it was gone, it was night. I wish now that I had lingered just a little longer in the warmth of that water, in the waning days of wordlessness, when confusion was still everywhere, when confusion was still nothing to fear.

LULU: Okay, you’ve got a new word. Jude, what’s that? 

BABY: Sheesh

LULU: What is it? 

BABY: Tffishh

LULU: It’s a fit? What is that? 

BABY: [babbling] Fshhhish.

LULU: Is it a fish? Oh, Jude a fish!

BABY: Fzhhizh. [slashes water]

LULU: Oh, yeah that’s a hard one.

[Music out]

LULU: Big thanks to Paris Review, where this was originally published. Big thanks to Dylan Keefe for the musical magic. Bigger thanks to you, listeners.

LULU: And by the way, if you haven’t checked out the Lab yet, take a peak. It is our way that we’re trying to make supporting the show a little easier. Plus there’s all kinds of cool swag, special virtual events, extra audio gifts. To check it out and maybe sign up to become a supporter, head over to radiolab.org/join.

MARNIE CAMPBELL: This is Marnie Campbell from the beautiful banks of Lake Washington in Seattle, Washington. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world more information about sloan@www.sloane.org.

 

LULU: Hello there, it's Lulu 

LATIF: And Latif. 

LULU: About a month ago Radiolab went to Camp.

JAD: Okay, they don't care about that. The part they do care about is we made these shirts… 

LULU: They’re a little radio sitting around a campfire. They're great. Go check them out. 

JAD: They were too good to just be wasted on the staff. Everybody should have an opportunity to own one of these cool shirts.

LULU: The Swag Lab is open until July 29 with a bunch of new designs, new T-shirts, new stickers, wristbands, water bottles, we'd love it, if you bought something and supported the show in that way. Go to radiolab.org/shop and thanks. 

LULU: Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. This week we are exploring the unknowable the places where our knowledge, our words, our faith, hit void. And this next segment is one from our vaults, and it features Jad and Robert way, way back in April of 2009. So you'll hear Robert and Jad referred to it being Holy Week for many people around the world. So without further ado…

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich,

JAD: This is Radiolab. Now, one of the things that we do on this program, of course, is look at big ideas, try and figure out how the world works. And to do that we often talk to scientists, who are, you know, asking questions, doing experiments, giving us data and statistics, but there are some questions that science just can't get to.

ROBERT: Well, this is Holy Week. So there's Easter being celebrated, and then we're gonna have Passover. And so it seemed like an appropriate time to not ignore the fact that for most of the world, some of the deepest and most unknowable questions are examined through Bible stories.

JAD: That's right. And, Robert, this is a sermon that you gave it a synagogue, right?

ROBERT: It's my attempt to try to reason to try to make sense out of one of the darkest and most difficult stories that humans have ever told each other. 

The chapter in the Bible begins with the question, it's only one word long—one word. Abraham is at home with his family, his servants his wife, we don't know what he's doing at this moment— the story doesn't say—it's probably an ordinary day in his life and suddenly Abraham hears a voice. And the voice says to him one word, “Abraham.” And Abraham answers, “Here am I.” 

This is not just a voice. This is the voice of God. The Bible says God, the Creator of the universe, calling down to one man—calling to Abraham. Not for the first time, not at all. 

When Abraham was younger, God appeared to him and told him to leave his home, which Abraham did. And then God told Abraham to go to a strange land which he did. And then God and Abraham exchanged promises and had a covenant together. And God told Abraham to send his first son Ishmael away into the desert, which Abraham did. And God told Abraham, he had a plan to destroy the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And this time, Abraham argued with God, and they went back and forth—Abraham and God—can't we save those cities are some people in those cities or anyone in those cities, and later God sent angels to tell of the coming of Isaac. 

So it was not completely out of the ordinary wasn't to get down on your knees miracle when God came to where Abraham was and asked, “Abraham.” And Abraham answered, “Here am I,” it was just the start of another conversation, another in a series until the next sentence. 

With god's next utterance, this conversation changes shape and becomes like no other conversation in the Bible, like no other story in the Bible, like no other story. Because God says, “Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee to the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains, which I shall tell the of.” 

Now most of us know the circumstances here, the backstory we know that when Abraham was a young man living in Ur with his father and his brother, God came to him and told him that if he left Ur, and traveled west away from his home, far from the places he knew, God would give him children and from those children would come a mighty nation as numerous as the stars in the sky. And Abraham obeyed and traveled west and settled in a strange land, and he waited for his first child, the child that would spawn this mighty nation. And Abraham waited, and he waited. And he waited, and his wife Sarah waited. Nothing happened. Nothing happened until Sarah was very old—an old woman well past childbearing age—and that's when three angels appeared at Abraham's tent and said, “Now is the time for Sarah to have the baby.” And Sarah said, “Oh, come on,” even laughed out loud at the craziness of that idea. But in fact, the baby was born—Isaac was born. 

His arrival was a little awkward, because there was already a boy in the house, Ishmael also Abraham's son by his servant, Hagar. But God had his mysterious priorities, and Ishmael was banned from the house. And God made it clear that the future of Abraham's people, the seed of this great nation, lay not in Ishmael, the oldest boy, but inside Isaac. So Isaac, for the purposes of nation building was Abraham's only son, the one whom thou lovest, even Isaac. 

But now years later on this day, now that Isaac was almost a grown up. Now God says, “Take now thy son, thine only son, who thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering,” by which he means a human sacrifice. The Hebrew word is olah, meaning and offering which is totally consumed. So Isaac, is to disappear to be reduced to ashes. This the boy who was to be everything, will now be nothing. 

Now what does Abraham do when he hears this command? What does he say? In the story, he says nothing. Instead, it says, “And Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him and Isaac, his son. And he cleaved the wood for the burnt offering and rose up and went onto the place of which God had told him.” He does not argue. He does not question he does not hesitate. He does what he's told, and he does it in silence.

ROBERT: It is hard to fathom, really, how could he not at least tell Sarah, his wife that he's going, where he's going, why he's gone—he has to know that when she hears Isaac has been killed by her husband—if this is going to happen, if it's really going to happen, he has to know that it will be the single most terrible fact of her life and of their marriage. 

Maybe Abraham is hoping it won't happen. We don't know. All we know, because he leaves early, early in the morning, it says maybe to avoid being questioned by his wife, “Where are you going with the chop? Why Isaac?” And Abraham and Isaac walk side by side with the donkey and the two servants heading to this place that God had chosen. In the text, they don't speak, at least not out loud. 

So much of what happens in this story happens in silence. In silence, they walk from one day, two days, three days, on the third day, he says to his servants, “Stay here, and I and the lad will go yonder,” indicating the mountain, and he puts the wood on the Isaac shoulders and his back and takes on a knife and some hot embers. 

And now the two of them the Father and the Son, they walk on alone. And that's when Isaac stops, and for the very first time, he asks his question, his heart-rending question, “Father,” he says, and Abraham, he answers, “Here I am, my son.” And Isaac asks, “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” And Abraham says, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering my son,” and Isaac doesn't answer. At least, there's no answer in the text. And the two of them, they keep walking together to Isaac's annihilation, saying nothing. 

Why no protest, no argument, no questions. Why this quiet? There are a few silences in the Bible, so troubling, so hard to understand. But there is another one. It's also in the Bible and maybe the two silences speak to each other. This other silence occurs earlier in the story of Noah—Noah and the ark—you remember. That God sees too much wickedness in the world and decides to destroy what he has created, except for one good and righteous man named Noah and his family and a collection of animals—two have every kind that Noah will gather on board a boat, a big boat, the ark. 

So Noah builds the ark, and he brings all the creatures on board two-by-two—actually, few of them came in sevens—but mostly it's two-by-two. And on they come. There's a beautiful children's book about this by the Dutch artist Peter Spiers. It's gorgeously illustrated and simple delicate line drawings with small splashes of color. And in Spears book and in my imagination. Noah is kind and hardworking and comfortable with animals better than comfortably can handle them and comfort them and tend to them he's a lover of living things. And then the rain starts. 

And Noah in zoo-y confusion, rushing from tamarind to baboon to Osprey is feeding and caring and managing, he looks out the window and he closes the hatch. Now's the time to batten down keep the living cargo dry. 

And in Peter Spiers version as the rain puddles around the ship, as the clouds mount up and darken and flash promising and annihilating rain, very quietly animals begin to appear out from the forest. They come down from the hillsides and out of the ground and down from the sky. And they gather. First it's a little group, then a large one by the ark—by the big, closed, silent Ark. And they’re not there in two-by-two-by-twos. No, they come in haphazard combinations, three drafts, seven gorillas, 30, armadillos and a Robin, a panda, a dozen lionesses—these are the animals who are not going to travel on the ark, who are not going to be protected, who are not going to live. 

And together they stare up at the closed ark, at the boat that contains the survivors, the lucky one, and there is no sound. In my imagination and in Spiers’ book, you see them all so quiet, just the Jaguars starin, and getting wetter and the camels and the elephants and the mice who had one could argue never been wicked, who outnumber the humans on the planet by hundreds of 1000’s by millions they stand there, silently accepting or maybe just enduring this inexplicable end. And in the silence, I imagine a chimpanzee baby nuzzling its mother in the light rain, asking, “How long will it rain mama?” Just as Isaac asks his father, “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

And there is no answer a parent can give to that question. There is silence and the animals stand in silence and make no noise of protest. They don't cry out. They just stand there as the sea level rises in the drip, drip, drippy endless drip of the rain as the fish the octopi the mackerel—were they less guilty? Why did they get to survive maybe even thrive in an expanded watery environment there? There aren't any answers to these questions. 

And what of Noah tending to his creatures, feeding them, keeping them warm and dry, caring for their babies, nursing them and their sickness? What would he have thought just before he closed down the arch? When the slow tortoise or the last two snails or a pair of lazy worms were scuttled inside with Noah, the good man, the righteous man looked out on all those creatures all over the world, sentenced to death by drowning and starvation. What did this righteous man say? The Bible doesn't tell us. It's safe to conclude that he turned away, and he said nothing. That he closed the ramp, and he walked onto the ship, and remained silent. I imagine it was a pregnant silence, but the Bible doesn't tell us. 

Here's life. Life we're told is precious. Life is dust touched by the breath of God, or life is chemicals that somehow know how to attach to each other—chemicals that link and bond and split and bind and become a jellyfish pulsing in the sea, a butterfly, flittering in a forest that can form the shy gaze of a fox pup ready to play. That can become the glance of a boy carrying wood who asks his father, “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering,” to take that boy, that fox that butterfly to extinguish that life that breath, you would think would wound the universe, would pain the Creator. 

We know this pain. I think of Abraham Lincoln down at the war office in Washington D.C., checking telegrams from the front reading the names of casualties, sometimes known to him of people who had been killed or wounded. A newspaper correspondent saw President Lincoln there—watched him reading the list as he wrote with bowed head and tears rolling down his furrowed cheeks, his face pale and wan, his heart heaving from emotion. And when the President walked out of the building, he was in such a daze, he and I'm quoting, “almost fell as he stepped into the street.” 

A good man knows the weight of hurt when someone dies. Abraham Lincoln sent other people's children to kill, and to die, and when they died, he shared their hurt. And this image, the image of Lincoln in anguish is our image of a good man. That's what we admire, to have a heart big enough to feel another's troubles, to sigh with others, to cry with others to join their suffering, or, in different circumstances, when the occasion is right to laugh with them, to share their joy, and every so often to love them. That's the best of all to step out of our lonely cells, however, briefly, as the poet Paul Celan, has written, “At times, when only the void stood between us to get all the way to each other.” 

That's the highest expression of ourselves. There's nothing more sublime between two people— between parents and children, between friends, and for those lucky few who feel it to experience it between man and God—than to feel the other, to be touched, to be heard, to be loved. And yet here in this chapter of the Bible, in this moment between God and Abraham, God who loved Abraham, and Abraham who loved God. I mean, if this is a love story, this is the most twisted love story you have ever heard—a loving God wants to test his favorite disciple, the man who loves him the most, and so he says, “That son—the son I promised you that would be a nation that would grow and multiply, the son you and your wife waited for all your life, the son that was so improbable that when angels came down and told Sarah a boy was on the way she laughed—that son—the one you nurtured, promoted over the other boy, Ishmael, the one who will be your future—in spite of all the things I told you, what I promised, what you counted on, what we agreed upon. I want you to kill him. Would you do that?” 

And Abraham, Father Abraham, who had discovered this God in His heart, fought with his father Terah, destroyed idols honoring other gods, left home, fought battles for God, Abraham, who had contested with God bargaining over the lives of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham hears this command from the God that he loves, and he doesn't argue, he doesn't hesitate, he doesn't refuse. His love is so great, the sages say, so powerful that he saddles up he takes his son and walks to Mount Moriah in silence.

He doesn't say yes, he just goes, without a word. What are we supposed to make of this story? What's it telling us? What kind of God would put his creation, his favorite to a test like this, and what kind of man would pass the test? Here's a God who wants a human sacrifice as proof of devotion, and a father who would kill his son for God. Both parties God and Abraham turned devotion into murder. 

Why doesn't Abraham say, “Why?” Why doesn't Noah say, “Why?” And the sages say we should admire their devotion to which I say, “I don't know. What is there to admire here?” 

It's interesting to see what happens to these righteous men Abraham and Noah after they do as they're commanded. When Noah rides out the flood and releases his cargo back into an empty world to start over, what does he do? Well, he plants a vineyard, he presses those grapes into wine and he drinks, he drinks hard. His children find him half naked in a silent stupor. 

And Abraham, he comes down from Mount Moriah and returns to his servants and he heads home, but not with Isaac. Isaac is somewhere else, not with his father. The silence between them has deepened. Abraham returns alone to Sarah. And what of Sarah, well, presumably, she heard what happened, what almost happened. But as soon as Abraham returns in the very next sentence of the very next chapter, Sarah dies. She dies and Abraham is alone. And he stays silent. And Noah stays silent. 

And God says to Abraham, “Because of what you were willing to do,” the Bible says, “I know that thou art a God-fearing man, seeing that thou has not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.” And God goes on to promise Abraham that he will “multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” And to Noah, God creates a rainbow, a sign that promises never to destroy so much life again. These stories describe remarkable men who put their faith in God over their deepest instincts, over their horror of suffering, and were rewarded—Noah with a rainbow Abraham with a blessed nation, but at what price?

The thing that makes this story so alive to me, is the silence. Abraham saying nothing. Noah saying nothing. And I have a hunch about these men, their silences look respectful or maybe dutiful or fearful or maybe hopeful that the suffering they were about to allow would somehow be explained away or be justified later on. But I don't think of their silences as acceptance or submission or an expression of blind devotion. They were, says the Bible, good men, and because they were good, and caring, and above all human, they could feel the suffering of others, like President Lincoln did, like good people do. Abraham felt for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah for the animals that he nursed and he cared for it. So I have to believe that beneath their silence is barely contained, was the furious roar of two wounded, angry, voluptuous human hearts filled with questions, and worry and insult and wonder, “Why my son why Isaac? Why slaughter so many innocent creatures in a deluge? Why is this happening? Why is this necessary? I can't do this, I need a reason. I need an answer. I need to know.” 

And I believe Abraham and Noah had those feelings, but they had something else too. They had a hope, a deep hope that beyond reason that beyond understanding that somehow there was good in these terrible deeds, that God is merciful in ways we can't understand that we are not meant to know or built to know and their hope barely, just barely contained their horror and their anger and their insult. 

But I have to think it was in both of them a mighty struggle to smother what their hearts failed to put their hope in a power that was beyond their understanding. Because the other part of being human, of being a good human, beyond our capacity to love and to care is a desire for answers for explanations a desire to know why, and here I think is the key to this story is power. Because all of us—not just Noah and Adam—all of us live with this paradox. To see things that seem wrong that seem cruel, and to wonder, is there a logic a higher logic to explain what we see? And if we can't know that logic, if we can just hope for it? Hope there's an explanation. Is that enough? Can we live with the fact that we may never know, that all we have is hope? Can we face the terrible silence of the universe with just hope in God, in good?

This is a powerful question. When cosmologists study the universe, they also tell a story a story about silence. Their story says that everything we are all the particles all the forces, the duct tape of our existence, popped into being they say entirely by chance out of a great quiet out of nothing, out of flux, a quantum flux. Suddenly, with a bang that made no sound matter and energy appeared and eventually formed atoms and the atoms stitched themselves into compounds and the compounds hung around for a long time, and spun themselves into stars and then into planets and seas and clouds and air. And at some time somewhere, somehow, maybe God breathed life into those molecules, or maybe the molecules assembled themselves according to some deeply rooted plan. 

But cells beget cells and life began on Earth and maybe elsewhere. And those cells then recombined to form newer and newer forms of life, and for a long, long time for billions of years, sea dwellers, and then land dwellers, and evergreens and flowers, none of these creatures, none of them had evolved the ability to appreciate what was happening, to have a feeling for the beauty and elegance and chemistry around them to ask the question, “Why are we here?” Until very, very recently say the Darwinians life produced mind. 

A creature with a brain, who could ask, “Where do we come from? How are we made? Why is the rose red and what a lovely velvety, very beautiful red.” So the universe at long last got an appreciator. After 14 billion years of self-assembly we now have physicists. And one way to think of a physicist is to say that a physicist is the atom's way of admiring themselves. After all, a physicist is made of atoms, and can say what a good job those atoms have done. But a human brain not only appreciates beauty, a human brain has a moral sense, a desire for justice for good. A human brain can suffer and love and care and feel the suffering of others. We may come from Silence, but mind, mind breaks the silence of the universe. Mind introduces meaning, or at least the search for meaning. 

Maybe this is in the master plan, because with our minds, we can ask, “If love and mercy are good things, why are they missing so much of the time?” Abraham can ask, Noah can ask. And I can ask, “How dare you kill those animals, all that innocent life? How dare you ask a father to kill his son, his own son? How dare you kill that boy in Darfur in Treblinka, in Baghdad?” I hope there's a reason. I sometimes think there's a reason for the life of me, I can't think of what the reason could be. 

I know enough of life to know that God you don't always send angels down to stay the hand of the killer as you did with Abraham. Sometimes the killer kills, often the killer kills. And yet against that awful indifference, somehow we survive and we hope. Which brings me to the last and the most interesting player in the story to Abraham's son, to the boy who was bound, who was tied to a rock while his father stood above him, holding a dagger, ready to use that dagger ready to kill. Isaac saw his father's eyes, saw his father's will, and then Isaac survived. 

What was Isaac thinking when he went down alone from Mount Moriah? When he walked into what was left of his long, long life, he must have asked himself, “Why was I tested? Why was I spared? What's the point? Am I an accident? Am I alive, because my father passed the test. Would I be dead, if he didn't pass the test? Do I matter? Am I precious? I don't know. I don’t know, so what do I do?” I go on, I grow older. I marry Rebecca. I have children of my own. I make mistakes. I laugh. I savor my love for Jacob and Esau and for sunsets. I hope that I'm here for a reason one day it'll make sense. Sometimes I believe it does make sense sometimes not. I've seen cruelty and I've seen kindness. I hope the kindness wins but I don't think about it much. I just hope in silence.

[Music in]

JAD: Alright, well Radiolab is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I’m Robert Krulwich. 

JAD: We’ll see you in two weeks. 

[Music out]

SPEAKER 1: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwan, Alex Neason, Sara Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sandbach. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Przybyl.

BABY: I gotta keep doing this. 

LULU: Okay, last one. Say bye bye. 

BABY: Bye bye!