“Rest assured there is no deeper than rock bottom”, said Professor Arkengaard. And Professor Arkengaard is at all times mistaken, which is a fine gauge as to the veracity of statements about the world. Whatever Professor Arkengaard says, the opposite is probably true.

To illustrate his mistake, rock bottom is the sub-stratum of the sea bottom, the layer below the sand. And you can in fact go deeper than that layer. Lower yet you will find the Earth’s crust, the upper mantle, the mantle, outer core, and inner core. So one can in fact go deeper than rock bottom. An alcoholic mistreating his wife is still able to drop their child from the fourth floor. This is a very real possibility. A politician dumping his country in an abyss can still be re-elected. You can always go deeper still.

Under the Earth’s crust we find nigh unfathomably thick layers of rock with the taste of magnesium. An uncomfortable location in which an invulnerable person could dig deeper and deeper, towards the core of the Earth, and the core of that core, until the perfect middle has been found where deeper can only mean one thing: back to the surface. In that sense, to sink deeper is to lift oneself up, though in the meantime experiencing a hellish uninhabitability. Perhaps it would be better to make a standing rotation when things get heated. Rock bottom is not a place you want to pass.

“Professor Arkengaard, how can one know the world? How can we step outside our worldly bondage to see with true objectivity what it is we are part of?”
“Vandal! The world is round and that is all your very small heart needs to know.”
“But the world is oblate and I need to know more.”
“Then go and find out what it is you need to find out. Enter the world, enter the books. Gather experiences. Talk to people, seek the revelation, study and reason and imagine. Waste all that time, to return in 30 years as a pitiful man made modest, knowledge having brought you no further to certainty of anything, which is to say, you’d be back at square one.

And I did go in search for thirty years. And I did find everything and I did return with nothing. But Professor Arkengaard, who is never right (which is a fine gauge as to the veracity of statements about the world), was wrong. Because the nothing with which I had started was an entirely different nothing from that with which I returned.