I ran into him by the pond.
Not really, of course.
As far as I know, Christopher Langan does not live in the Vegilin woods, and the chance of an American known as one of the smartest people in the world walking my usual route on some random morning seems rather small even within Kos.
But suppose it happened.
He was standing by the water.
A big man. A little unkempt. Not the sort who makes you think: this man is about to tell me something about the fundamental structure of reality.
Rosco walked over to him.
‘Nice dog.’
‘He knows.’
The man laughed and held out his hand to Rosco, who decided this was apparently sufficient background screening and allowed himself to be petted.
After that, we happened to walk in the same direction.
He spoke English. American. I did not ask what he was doing there. He did not ask why I was walking through a Frisian wood in barefoot shoes. That is how it should be, if you ask me. You do not need every stranger’s curriculum vitae immediately.
After a few hundred metres, he asked what I did for a living.
‘Logistics.’
‘Interesting.’
People always say that when you say logistics.
Usually they mean: thank God, now I do not have to ask any more questions.
But he did ask.
‘What kind?’
I told him something about books. Warehouses. Stock. Things that need to be in the right place at the right time.
‘So you organize systems.’
‘Sort of.’
‘Complex systems.’
‘Sometimes. Mostly people make them complex.’
He looked at me.
‘That’s true of most systems.’
That made me laugh.
We walked on.
At the bend leading to the other side of the pond, he suddenly started talking about reality.
Not ordinary reality, as in: it is raining and my shoes are getting wet. No. Reality with a capital R.
According to him, you could not look at the universe as if you stood outside it. If everything that exists is part of the universe, then so is the person trying to understand it.
‘Of course,’ I said.
He looked sideways.
‘Of course?’
‘Where else would I be?’
He was silent for a moment.
Apparently I had said something in which he found more than I had put there.
He began to explain.
About a universe that does not merely contain itself, but in some way processes itself as well. About logic. Language. Consciousness. Information. He used words that, as far as I could tell, required at least three universities and a spare brain.
I understood about half of it.
That is usually enough.
‘So,’ I said after a while, ‘the universe is looking at itself through us?’
He almost stopped walking.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘Handy.’
‘Handy?’
‘Otherwise it would never know what a nice morning this is.’
He looked at the pond.
It was indeed a beautiful morning.
Mist hung low over the water. Somewhere farther on, a woodpecker was solving its own logistical problem. Rosco vanished among the trees and returned twenty seconds later as if he had personally checked that the forest was still there.
The American continued.
He had a theory about it.
A rather large theory, in fact.
Everything was connected to everything else. Reality could configure itself. Consciousness was not merely an accident that had appeared late in evolution. According to him, something far more fundamental lay behind it.
‘God?’ I asked.
He looked at me.
‘Ultimately, yes.’
‘Ah.’
‘You don’t sound surprised.’
‘I’m Frisian. We don’t like wasting words.’
That produced another laugh.
Then he asked what I thought.
That was more difficult.
‘Kos,’ I said.
‘Cos?’
‘Kos.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘No idea.’
Now he really did stop.
‘You have a word for something you can’t define?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if I could define it, it would probably be too small.’
He could apparently work with that.
So I tried anyway.
I told him that, to me, Kos was not something outside reality. Not a man on a cloud. Not a formula. Not an energy you can learn to feel for €49.95 a month from someone wearing linen trousers.
More the awareness that you are right in the middle of it.
That what you do causes something.
That what happens to you does something to you in return.
That you are cause and effect at the same time. Observer and participant.
‘A self-referential system,’ he said.
‘If you like that better.’
By now we had nearly completed the circuit.
He began talking again. This time about intelligence. About how few people, in his view, truly thought. About logical structures other people could not see.
I listened.
The man was, without question, frighteningly intelligent.
But something else had begun to occupy me.
‘Chris?’
‘Yes?’
‘Does all this make you a better person?’
It went quiet.
Not an awkward silence.
More one that needed a moment.
Rosco stood farther along, watching us.
‘That’s a different question,’ he said at last.
‘Exactly.’
We started walking again.
He asked what, in my view, did make someone a good person.
Naturally, I did not have a conclusive theory for that either.
‘Maybe that’s the point.’
‘What is?’
‘That you can’t calculate everything.’
He looked ahead.
‘Intelligence matters.’
‘Of course.’
‘Understanding matters.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Then what are you saying?’
I thought for a moment.
‘That understanding the universe and understanding the person walking next to you may be two different kinds of intelligence.’
After that, we spoke about nothing for a while.
That may have been the best part of the conversation.
At the path towards the car park, we stopped.
He had to go the other way.
‘Interesting meeting you, Arie.’
‘Likewise, Chris.’
He held out his hand.
‘Look up CTMU sometime.’
‘Is that you?’
He smiled.
‘Something like that.’
Then he walked away.
And that could have been the end of it.
I could have walked home, made coffee and used my phone to find out who that strange American actually was.
Christopher Langan.
An exceptional IQ. Numbers that would probably have caused my old schoolmasters to resign on the spot.
A theory about the universe.
About consciousness.
About God.
Rosco would meanwhile have gone to sleep as if he had understood the entire conversation all along.
And eventually I would probably have put down my phone and thought only one thing:
Damn.
I still would have liked to ask him whether he was at least a little happy.