She brushes her hair inside the lobby, and he looks perfectly desperate. Then they notice each other and he goes for the door. We see the back of her hair and his weary eyes. He asks useless questions and expects amazing answers. There’s regret and there’s confusion. And when Mariel Hemingway tells Woody Allen to have a little faith in people, he nods, resigned, and feigns a smile. Perhaps he realized how utterly empty life feels at the moment when you have nothing left but belief and you can’t. That stare and that smile are the gestures of not being able to let go of doubt. And it is not a pleasurable feeling. We crave answers; we even create them when there aren’t any. This is exactly why we contain an incessant need for explanation. As for myself, I’d rather have something to believe in than not, know the answers to my questions than not. Inquiry begins out of curiosity. But doubt does not lead to certainty, but to more doubt. Questioning minds develop an interminable chain of interrogations and extract from it but a single certitude: All must be questioned.

When I first saw Manhattan I was moved by that particular moment because it captured a feeling that had been so predominant in my life: the longing for faith and not being able to attain it. I’ve felt lonely and cynical at times, for not being able to surrender to a belief. There is so much reward in faith and so little in doubt. When you have faith in things you can go to bed with the satisfaction that what you believe is what is true. I believe faith provides easy answers to difficult questions about life. As humans, we are not only able to carry out our existence but also to think about it, and our conception of reality necessarily influences the way we live life. So when it’s time to act, we take into consideration the reasons behind our existence, and if we have attached ourselves to a school of thought, then we recieve a sort of instruction manual on how to act. If we are faithful, the process that leads us to attach to that certain belief is much shorter. The only thing needed is to embrace the thought. No further questions.

Doubt, on the other hand, is complicated by nature. Doubt folds unto itself. Skepticism can reach unhealthy extremes, in which doubt doubts itself. So, what can you get from questioning everything, other than perpetual uneasiness, frustration at answers and a ton of additional questions? For a person already carrying enough quotidian preoccupations and anxieties, to delve even further into metaphysical reflections on reality is unappealing. And yet doubt, once employed, cannot be abandoned. Once I began my own process of questioning the reasons behind my beliefs, I discovered there was no return to belief without proof. Despite the fact that I had no way of asserting that whatever I concluded was in fact true in term of my beliefs on predestination, the existence of a god, even trust in people, I could go to bed with a different sort of satisfaction about my ideology and identity: Conclusions are unimportant compared to the path that leads to them. Often a great path of doubt will not close in itself but unite with another one, and we extract satisfaction not from where we get to but the way that gets us there or leads us astray.

I am completely unable to believe in a god because my doubts don’t allow me to surrender myself to a belief whose evidence is either unsatisfying or simply non-existent. I believe in disbelief. And I get nothing out of it, nothing but the satisfaction of having arrived to it. Rationality is its own reward.