[...] “Is God Dead?” If the question, put this way, is less in vogue now, Camus still describes so well the way the world feels when it rubs up against our nostalgia for the old meanings: silent. And empty; the “God-shaped hole,” we called it in Sunday school, assuming this must be what the hearts of nonbelievers always felt like. In your case, I guess it would be a war-shaped hole. There are other names: closing time, the end of the party, the desert of the real. Because whatever the story was about — the God you’d get to be with later in heaven, the cause worth fighting for, your country, your art, your masculinity, your heroism (I don’t know what you did those seven times at war) — it always runs out.