The Hard Problem of Consciousness By Laura J. Oliver

I’m walking across my college campus, mahogany leaves crunching beneath my feet, just as they did the year I arrived as an Eventual-English major.  

I climb the steep steps of William Smith Hall to sit in the same classroom where I studied American Lit in order to learn about “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” from Jeff, a fellow alumnus. Spoiler Alert: no one knows how to distinguish mind from brain or how life first became self-aware. No one knows how it was that millions and millions of years ago, some microbial cell in the primordial soup woke up and announced, “Eureka! 

“I see me!”

What if, I wonder as I glance out the centuries-old, massive windows of my classroom, one of us, one day, makes a similar leap in consciousness and announces, “Eureka! I’m love made manifest.” Because of course, we are.

I see you. 

Chairs scrape on hardwood floors as I wave goodbye to Jeff but rising to leave, I see the freshman co-ed I was rushing down the worn varnished steps of Smith Hall to my work-study job on High Street. 

I had been hired as a companion to an elderly widow named Mrs. Molloy. She employed a housekeeper but wanted a nice young girl from the college to accompany her on afternoon walks along the tree-lined streets of Chestertown. That nice young girl was me. 

She might have done better. 

Mrs. Molloy wore her silver hair up in a twist, and her home was only a block from the shallow banks of the sparkling Chester River. I thought of her as wealthy because she had traveled all over the world, though I had no means of comparison. She dictated letters for me to write, and then we bundled up and negotiated her steep front steps for our daily walk, she leaning heavily on my arm, and me trying to support the weight of fragile cargo three times my age but about my size. As we inched past art galleries and bakeries, I realized pretty quickly that my actual role was that of a storyteller.

So, I told her about the boy from Chapel Hill I had fallen in love with while working on Cape Cod for the summer, and about a Midshipman from the Naval Academy I’d gone out with a few times, before heading to the Cape. I told her about the letters my very Southern boyfriend wrote from his frat house at UNC, and how I was looking forward to him coming up to Maryland for Thanksgiving.

Weirdly, Mrs. Molloy followed each Chapel Hill update with a complete non sequitur: “And what about that Midshipman?” Maybe she was wise enough to know my long-distance relationship was going to be a challenge, but her strange loyalty, her advocacy for this other boy I barely knew, made me wonder if she was a fan of the Armed Forces or knew something I didn’t know. So, on the day I shared that without warning, Chapel Hill had broken my heart, her response was predictable and practical: “And what about that Midshipman?”

 For the first time, I took her advice and invited the Midshipman to Thanksgiving instead of the Confederate, and the rest of that story is three children. 

One spring afternoon, Mrs. Molloy and I were in her study—rust-and-blue oriental carpet, hardcover books to the ceiling, organdy curtains softly obscuring a bay window—she sitting on the overstuffed sofa, me in her desk chair–and she lit up a cigarette. She usually smoked in the garden, but on this day, as I watched, she tried to light the wrong end, then ignited it somewhere in the middle, stuck it between her lips, and continued our conversation with the smoldering cigarette bobbing about. This was odd, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know how. It was her house, she was my employer, and above all, I didn’t want to embarrass her. 

But as I watched, she started listing to the side, slowly, like she was kind of melting. Like she was a tree, felled by the last blow of the ax. Yet she kept talking and smoking as if everything was normal. 

As a child, I had learned to normalize everything—if there was an elephant in the room, I’d explain how that might not be so odd: circus in town, exotic pet on the loose! So, as she listed, I leaned, and just kept talking, covering for her, until, still acting as if everything was routine, she lay completely horizontal on the couch.

The word ‘stroke’ never crossed my mind. It was simply beyond my range of experience, and she seemed fine in every other way. I must have gotten the housekeeper for help, though I don’t remember. I may have just propped her back up like a Webble. 

I usually worked on Thursday afternoons, but that Monday in Seventeenth Century Literature, Professor James, who also lived in town, pulled me aside to tell me Mrs. Molloy was dead. I didn’t cry. I normalized the news. 

I think I had a Cinderella fantasy: that this woman with no children had cared for me, and that, knowing I was only in college by the grace of multiple scholarships, she might possibly leave me some financial help to further my education. That’s what I mean by she could have done better than a girl whose affection was corrupted by hope. She did leave the college $10,000.

She left me a begonia. 

Why am I telling you this, and why am I telling you now? Because I’m back on campus in the same room where I was so naive, I didn’t know how to say, Wait, what??? And I’m learning about consciousness even as I have to acknowledge that I have gone through my life pretty unconscious. Blundering along. And for that, I just can’t stop being sorry. 

Sorry.

I set my begonia on the sunny window ledge of my room in Minta Martin Hall and loved it in Mrs. Molloy’s honor for several years. And I’m still trying to separate out whether I can be sorry enough for the mistakes that I’ve made to absolve them, or whether that’s what the fuss is all about. 

Absolution is not required.

You did the best you could. “A” for effort, beloved classmates. And maybe the best that you could do was always the goal on your cosmic syllabus. You didn’t fail; you fulfilled.  

I read this prayer years ago, and perhaps it’s how consciousness came into the world –that moment when life became aware of itself for the first time, a blank slate of pure potential. 

Maybe that first cell woke up and said: “I’m alive!” And then with all the hope of you and me in its nascent awareness added–

“God, help me accept the truth about myself.

 “No matter how beautiful it is.” 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.