Free Falling Into Us by Jasinda Wilder Page B

her cheek against my shirt, then shook her curls in denial. “I’m not, but thanks.”
    “You’re not supposed to disagree with me. I can think whatever I want about you, and it’s true because I think it.”
    She turned her face up to look at me, a comical expression of puzzlement on her features. “That is very dizzyingly circular logic. You think what you think, and it’s true because you think it?” Her arms slid up my back to grip my triceps. 
    “It’s kind of like ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Wasn’t it Marcel Proust who said that?”
    Becca snickered, not quite derisively. “Descartes, actually. Proust is someone totally different.”
    I laughed. “See, that’s what I get for trying to be smart.”
    “I was just impressed that you knew that phrase, and that you knew who Proust was.”
    I grunted. “Well, obviously, I don’t know either. I’ve got no clue who Proust was. And I’m not even sure I understand the phrase much better.”
    We started walking again, and our hands resumed their twined grip around each other. 
    “Marcel Proust was a French novelist best known for his work In Search of Lost Time . He was one of the first writers to openly discuss homosexuality, which was a really big deal when he lived, around the turn of the century.” Becca seemed to lose herself in reciting the facts, her words coming out effortlessly, although she sounded like she was composing an essay. “The phrase cogito ergo sum , which translates from the Latin into ‘I think, therefore I am,’ was a philosophical statement proposed by the French philosopher René Descartes in the seventeenth century. And actually, the phrase was written in French, as Je pense, donc je suis . All it really means is that the process of doubting whether or not you exist is proof of your existence.”
    “Why would anyone doubt their own existence? It seems pretty self-explanatory, you know? I’m here, I see things, I feel things. I am, therefore I am.”
    Becca tilted her head and nodded slowly. “Very good. That’s a good point. And a lot of laypeople gave that exact same answer to the philosphers. To them, though—the philosophers, I mean—the idea went deeper than that. It went back to Plato, who talked about ‘the knowledge of knowledge.’ Think about it like this: Who told you two plus two equals four?”
    I answered immediately. “My kindergarten teacher. But she showed me, with blocks. Two blocks plus two blocks means I have four blocks.”
    “Right, that’s a concrete example. But apply that doubt, that ‘who told you so?’ mindset to more insubstantial, metaphysical ideas, like one’s place in life, in the universe. Like the conundrum, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear, does it make any noise?”
    I snorted. “That one is stupid. Just ask the squirrel who jumps out of the falling tree if he heard the damn thing crash to the ground.”
    Becca laughed. “You’re taking all the fun out of the argument. But you see my point, or rather, their point. That’s what Descartes was saying. The fact that he could outline physical reality as perceived by himself proved his own existence, in his perception of reality at least. ‘I must finally conclude that the proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.’ That was his ultimate argument.”
    I chewed on my lip and thought about it. “I guess I see his point. Like, how do I know what you see, how do I know what you’re thinking? I don’t. I only know what I know. If there’s no one around to hear a sound, the sound exists, but it doesn’t necessarily exist in the sense that it has…I don’t know…it doesn’t have any purpose if no one’s around to receive the sound waves.”
    She chuckled. “Yeah, sort of.”
    “Meaning I’ve totally missed it, but you’re too nice to say so.” She ducked her head, and I knew I was right. “See? Trying to get into a philosophical