Do we live in an empty universe?  Is the universe really without a heart?  Norwegian poet Karl Ove Knausgaard may think so.  In his poem, God's Light Snow, he portrays the northern lights, that visually remarkable phenomenon of the Arctic which his land knows so well,  as conveying " . . . a sense of being at the very edge of the world and looking out at the endless, empty universe through which we are all careening."
     For the poet, the northern lights point us to the edge of the world, the end of the starscape, the terminus of what can be known, only to remind us that despite our material engagements, we are doing no more than careening through an empty universe, that however astonishing the lights may be, in the end they are mere snippets of flash and wonder astride an otherwise pointless existence.  We may want to look beyond them, but we cannot really do so, for there is nothing to see.  Vacuity reigns.
     If emptiness is the undertow of existence, then why do we see so much hope in it?  Do we really strive to grasp at the edge of what we know just to see that it means nothing?  Are we satisfied with this?  If the universe were really empty and we simply careening through it, we live forever in contradiction, wondering and marveling when we really have no right or cause to do so.
     It's hard to have heart in an empty universe.  It's hard to have heart without a God.