I’m currently researching a paper on Ron Rosenbaum, a New York journalist of whom I’ve long been a fan.

Rosenbaum, who is a columnist for the online magazine Slate, writes on a wide variety of subjects, from pop culture to the nature of evil (which some consider the same thing). He is perhaps most well-known for “Explaining Hitler,” a fascinating book about the different attempts to explain how Hitler became arguably the most evil person in history; it covers everything from Holocaust deniers to people who think it’s morally wrong to even try to explain him, lest such an effort end up excusing him.

What most fascinates me about Rosenbaum’s writing is he often discusses ambiguity, the vagueness of much of life. He’s dealt with the concept in matters great and small, from those Hitler explanations to events in the life of the late comedian Andy Kaufman. In fact, the paper I’m doing focuses on his discussion of ambiguity in three magazine pieces he wrote: “Oswald’s Ghost,” which is about Kennedy assassination buffs (Rosenbaum calls himself a “buff buff”); “Kim Philby, the Spy Who Created the Cold,” about the relationship between British spy Philby, who was a mole for the KGB, and the writer Graham Greene; and “The Strange Death of Danny Casolaro,” about a journalist whose pursuit of a sort of unified-field theory of conspiracies eventually drove him to suicide.

All three are fascinating stories, but I’m particularly intrigued by “Oswald’s Ghost.” On one level, it focuses on a little-discussed sidelight of the Kennedy assassination. Almost more interesting than the question of whodunit – for all the discussion, nobody’s ever really convincingly and definitively refuted that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman – but who Oswald actually was and what his motives were.

But the article also contains finely drawn, evocative character portraits of various assassination conspiracy buffs, who range from the thoughtful to the creepy. One of the creepy ones offers to show Rosenbaum a film of a second autopsy done on Oswald, years after he was buried, an offer Rosenbaum declines.

One of the most affecting passages is about Penn Jones Jr., one of the more interesting assassination buffs, and his assistant, Elaine Kavanaugh. Rosenbaum recounts a conversation he had with the two of them in which Kavanaugh, who was barely old enough to remember the actual killing, talks about her love for Kennedy.

“It is then that I realize that these people are not buffs,” Rosenbaum writes. “They are mourners. Their investigation of the assassination is their way of mourning, a continuation of his last rites that they can’t abandon. Unlike the rest of us, they haven’t stopped grieving.”

I interviewed Rosenbaum for the paper and bounced another theory about the buffs off him. My theory, borne out by another passage in the story in which Kavanaugh talked about her difficulty with her mother, is that many conspiracy buffs are driven by a certain hunger. Their own lives are full of unsolvable, painful ambiguity, and perhaps, I told Rosenbaum, their search for certainties in the Kennedy assassination serves as a distraction from the unresolvable ambiguities in their own lives. Rosenbaum said he’d never thought of that, but it was “perceptive.”

I don’t think that’s true of just conspiracy buffs, though. I think so many of the obsessions people cultivate are an attempt to find some real certainty, somewhere, in an uncertain world. There are so many things we will never, can never, know. We’re just ignorant of what the future or fate holds for us. But often as not, our past is as much of a mystery. If you look back on the arc of your life, you can see where little coincidences and decisions made by other people put you on a certain path. But sometimes, the geneses of those coincidences, and the motivations of those who made those decisions, will remain forever murky. There are just things you’ll never know; you may believe them with all your heart, you may feel they’re true, you may feel it deep in the bones, but you’ll never really know.

That’s a scary thing. If you can’t ever know, you can’t ever be sure you’re doing the right thing. The lucky – some would say the deluded, but I think that’s too judgmental – have a sense of faith, whether in the Almighty or in their own gut, that keeps them from being tortured by not knowing. But others can’t handle ambiguity, don’t like it, and they engage in the mug’s game of searching for certainty, somewhere, anywhere.

That can be dangerous. At its worst, it can make you slam airplanes into buildings. Totalitarian movements are filled with people who have found someone with All the Answers. If you don’t want to think too much, it’s an easy way to live. It also makes it very possible for some sharpie to turn you into anything from a prize chump to a mass murderer.

But even at its most harmless, the search for certainty can give you an illusory view of the world. The thing is, your faith may be strong, your beliefs may be iron-clad, but in the end they are faith and beliefs; they are not facts. If facts were as easy to come by as beliefs, nobody would ever have to argue about anything.

We are, all of us, shadow-boxing in the near-dark. There is much we cannot see, and what we can see may not always really be there. The best we can hope for is that we land the occasional punch, that we nail reality every so often. But the fact is, to paraphrase John Mellencamp, reality always wins. We just don’t always realize it.