Seeing transcendence in people and in science

“I’m no longer interested in other worlds or spiritual planes. I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption. In people, I’ve seen even more.”

Once every few months of whenever the mood strikes, I take the long way home from the lab I run in Princeton just so I can step into that church… I never bow my head. I never pray, never wait to hear God’s voice, I just look. I sit in blessed silence, and I remember. I try to make order, make sense, make meaning of the jumble of it all. Always, I light two candles before I go. 

These are the final reflections of the main character, Gifty, at the end of the wonderful novel, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. 

Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford, who at the end of the novel is a Professor at Princeton. Her parents immigrated to the U.S.A from Ghana and she grew up in Alabama, just like the author. Gifty's choice of research topic [which involves experiments on mice] is motivated by her life experience including her brother's struggle with drug addiction. 

The narrative naturally engages with a wide range of issues, including the immigrant experience and the associated prejudice, racism, poverty, dislocation, and alienation that are too often encountered. It considers family relationships, particularly the bond and tensions between a mother and an adult child. It gives a picture of what it may be like to be a young woman of colour in an elite institution. Then there is sexuality, white Pentecostal churches in the USA, science and religion, mental illness, drug addiction, a personal face on the opioid crisis, and the philosophy of neuroscience, including the mind-brain problem,... This does seem like a long list of issues but the author manages to engage with them in a natural and meaningful way as part of a coherent narrative.

Although transcendent is in the title, there is not much explicit discussion of it in the novel. Nevertheless, I find it fascinating that transcendence is where it ends.