There's a reason why we call him Daniil Daniilovich

Daniil Daniilovich - Daniel son of Daniel, has a knack for living up to his name.  Sometimes it feels like a bit of a joke, entirely at my expense, which the rest of the world finds endlessly hilarious.  Very much in the way that he acts and - more frighteningly, thinks - reminds me of myself at a much younger age, but his flowering seems to be occurring much earlier, and much more vibrantly. One might say things coming back to my world with a vengeance...

This afternoon, Ian was reading to Daniel from some clever little book for precocious children, a poem modeled around "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," presenting an odd  vignette of the cosmos emerging out of nothing when Santa sneezed.  The poem was laced with references to real categories from the world of physics, obviously designed to give children the core ingredients of understanding the physical components of the universe while embedding it in a humorous yarn.

I took the opportunity to point out to the boys that the premise behind the more serious core of the poem - the idea that everything in the physical universe emerged out of a physical void - is actually very close to the Biblical account of Creation - that although there wasn't "nothing," since there was God, there nonetheless was nothing physical, and God created everything out of that physical "nothing."

At that point - without missing a beat, Daniel raised a question:

"But isn't nothing something?"

"No."

I didn't stop  to think about that one; I had already gone through that kind of rumination ad infinitum in my own youth.  But what struck me was that Daniel asked *exactly* the kind of question that another Daniel, who begat him, would have asked, and with instantaneous speed and efficiency.

I'm sure if you asked me, as a teenager, if nothing were something, I would say yes.  In my own youth, I had all kinds of "perspectives" like that.  I remember picking fights with various ideologues in Harvard Square, just to see if I could win...  An earthy old cook that I worked with on Saturdays when I was 17, after one particularly colorful riposte in an exchange we were having, said, "You always have an answer for everything, don't you?"  Yes.  The best was probably when I was 18, and I questioned my own existence.

But the difference between Daniel the Older and Daniel the Newer is that I started this pattern somewhere around 13.  Young Daniel is a strapping lad of 8 years, and he is already proposing that nothing is something, without any prodding.

It is for this reason that my brother called him, "The most aptly named child in the universe."  If I were Philip of Macedon, he would surely be young Alexander, ready to turn move a Greek empire to the banks of the Indus.