Like Gratiano, according to Bassanio in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Ronald Green 'speaks an infinite deal of nothing'.
The struggle to understand the concept of absolute emptiness, the absence of everything, has been going on for two thousand years, Green points out in Nothing Matters: A Book About Nothing, or for at least as long as there have been written records of what people thought was important.
He explores the fundamental human need to pursue the mystery that is the negation of everything, not only within the obvious framework of philosophy, but also within the arts, science, religion, indeed, all that we humans do.
Tackles Nothing From All Possible Angles
As the opposite of everything, nothing seems to be the key to that most basic of questions: what does it mean to exist? And here lies the difficulty, for as soon as you contemplate nothing it becomes something. The word 'nothing' exists, of course, but how can nothing exist in any way?
This challenging but irresistible book – a reviewer's paradise for punning, itself much ado about nothing – tackles these and many other questions from all possible angles and with great good humour and aplomb, covering an astonishing amount of ground and argument (with, one must add, a valiant abstention from paronomasia wherever possible).
The powerful urge to reach towards nothingness (as opposed to nothing, which would place us in an existential quandary) is a common human trait so it's not surprising to see it manifested in religion and the arts, and Green spends a large part of the book discussing these areas. The idea that there must be something beyond what we can readily perceive or talk about, beyond what is rational, lies encompassed by the realm of mysticism.
How Nothing Held Back European Progress
Green tells the intriguing story of how, because of the Catholic Church's fear of nothing, engendered by a mistaken translation of 'zero' as nothing instead of a number, European progress in mathematics was held back by 600 years. For the Church, there could not be, and never could have been, nothing because God was eternal.
Also pursued exhaustively is the notion that nothing is a way to deal with the evergreen question: what is art? Green explores modern artists' fascination with the 'subject', concluding that art and nothing are 'like an unrequited love affair, with artists chasing what they can never reach'. While art can represent nothingness, it cannot show what is not: nothing.
Believing in nothing, and thinking about nothing, are other issues Green invites us to consider – for example, the difference between eastern and western religion, the former urging us to turn something into nothing, and the later, nothing into something; and then the big cosmological question: could there have been nothing before the Big Bang brought the universe into existence?
Book Makes One See Why Nothing Matters
A teacher and lecturer with postgraduate studies in linguistics and philosophy, Green has skipped through a semantic minefield to write an eminently readable book which provides much food for thought and certainly makes one see why 'nothing matters'. He succeeds in opening up pathways to a new way of looking at the world.
A perfect epigraph for the book would have been this, from Bob Dylan: 'Now, it’s all been done before/It’s all been written in the book/But when there’s too much of nothing/Nobody should look' (Too Much of Nothing, 1967).
When there's too much, certainly. But Ronald Green gives us just the right amount – of nothing.
- Green, Ronald, Nothing Matters: A Book About Nothing. O-Books, 2011. UK £9.99 / US $18.95. ISBN 978-1-84694-707-0.
Geoff Ward - Geoff Ward, MA Lit., is a British journalist, media consultant, author and lecturer/tutor in literature and creative writing
