Doorless Room

What if there can be no exit from existence?As a child, the author lay awake at night in his darkened room, terrified by a thought he could not escape: Whether the universe is infinite or finite and surrounded by nothing, we remain forever bound to the one place we call existence. Even an afterlife would merely be a second room. And perhaps even God bears the weight of the infinity of his own being.Decades later, this fear has lost almost all its power. The question, however, has remained.In "e;The Doorless Room,"e; the author returns to his childhood primal fear and considers it from the distance of adulthood. He asks about its psychological origins without therefore dismissing its philosophical significance. The thoughts of Leibniz, Spinoza, Levinas, Mainländer, and others do not become ready-made answers, but voices in a personal conversation about infinity and nothingness, God, consciousness, and the possibility of an outside.This book constructs no philosophical system and promises no deliverance. It attempts to examine an old fear so precisely that a thought once almost unbearable can become an open reflection.A personal literary-philosophical essay about what it means to live in a reality beyond which nothing can be conceived.