Religion, I’m told, is dividing into two streams. One tells you what you must believe. In the other, people tell you what they no longer believe.

I must be in the second. I no longer believe in what English Literature classes call the “pathetic fallacy.”

Dictionaries and encyclopedias more or less agree on its definition – “the attribution of human emotions or characteristics to inanimate objects or to nature.”

Most writers, in my experience, take it farther. Nature is expected to reflect human emotions. When you’re depressed, nature responds with gloomy skies and drizzling rain. When you’re happy, the sun comes out, birds sing, and flowers bloom.

I gave up believing in the pathetic fallacy the night (about ten years ago) we heard that our grandchild was no more.

Okay, it wasn’t a grandchild yet. It was just a small ball of cells. A few weeks before, our daughter Sharon had told us, ecstatically, that in-vitro fertilization had succeeded. She showed us a watery photo of some bubbles floating in a brownish fluid. “Those are your grandchildren,” she said.

I stared at them, speechless.

Sharon began referring to the three implanted blobs as Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Alas, an ultrasound revealed that only one of the three embryos had attached itself to the walls of her uterus. Huey and Louie were gone. We wondered who they might have turned out to be, had they lived.

Dewey, however, had grown to more than a quarter-inch diameter.

Then Sharon called in tears. The latest ultrasound “didn’t show any more development,” she sobbed.

No more Dewey, either.

Joan and I tried to console Sharon. But we didn’t do very well. We needed consoling ourselves.

I went out for a walk in the darkness of the night. I looked up at the stars, glittering brilliantly against a black sky. They had not changed. They stared pitilessly, implacably, back at me.

And I realized that the universe doesn’t give a damn about us.

Oh, we can affect the world around us. We can poison it, drown it, warm it, burn it, and batter it. We can modify it, nurture it, encourage it, and enhance it.

But nature does not exist to serve human needs, human desires, human emotions.

Nature does not weep because I am sad, nor rejoice because I am glad. It seeks neither to harm me nor help me. It will not send a landslide to engulf me; nor will it miraculously provide a spring of water in the desert to save me.

Nature simply doesn’t care.

Caring is a living emotion. Humans care. Dogs, cats, and possibly parrots care – about their friends, both animal and human. Perhaps trees and plants care, though I’m not sure about whom.

But mountains don’t. Skies don’t. Stars don’t.

Even if they can recognize our presence, the flicker of human life is probably too fleeting to register in their time frame.

Expecting them to care, expecting them to match our moods, reveals more about our self-centredness than about the nature of nature.