That recollection rekindled my curiosity about Buber.  I started reading Maurice Friedman’s highly-praised biography of Buber on weekend trips to see Abigail, who was still teaching in New York.  Buber’s first philosophical awakening occurred during adolescence, prompted by “the fourteen-year-old’s terror before the infinity of the universe.”  Buber writes, “A necessity I could not understand swept over me:  I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or a time without beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless … Under an irresistible compulsion I reeled from one to the other, at times so closely threatened with the danger of madness that I seriously thought of avoiding it by suicide.”

I stopped reading for a moment and, as the train rumbled on, I pondered the “edge of infinity.”  I was taken over by a powerful image that was both visual and visceral.  I felt and saw space at its outer edges, rushing, expanding outward, unfurling itself with vast force and at almost instantaneous speed, without stop, neither a completed infinity nor merely finite.  The vision had a tremendous feeling of life-force, of Being unfurled, bursting forth at a reckless speed.