Tuesday, October 20, 2009

An Eternal Life

There was a person who lived an eternal life.

It got pretty boring.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Immense

M’illumino
d’immenso
So reads Giuseppe Ungaretti’s famous 1917 poem Mattina (Morning). At the risk of sounding like a language snob, it doesn’t translate neatly or elegantly into English. In short, one could say ‘I am illuminated / by immensity’ but this fails to capture the fact that the poet is actually both the subject and the object of the action: through the experience of the immense, I illuminate myself.
Basically, we find big things really impressive. The title of Ungaretti’s poem brings to mind images of the sunrise, of those first daily revelations of the sky, of those times when the horizon is most noticeable. But we are similarly awestruck by other experiences of the immense in nature: by mountains, by the ocean, and most notably, by the night sky.
Even before we knew what they really were, the glinting lights speckling the night’s dark blanket were of keen interest to us. They are the visible realm of mythology, of constellations, the zodiac, astrology and divination. ‘The heavens’ is still used today to refer to the universe above and around us; cielo, in Italian, can mean both sky and heaven. And the universe continues to fascinate, amaze and intrigue despite our scientific understanding of it. The more we discover the more we fall in love with this final frontier, this biggest of all enigmas, this vast playground of questions and potential answers. In fact, to view the stars- those tiny, tiny specks of light- as supermassive balls of glowing gases is a far more impressive way to view them than any more primitive understanding.
Head to the World Wide Telescope. Click on ‘Hubble Studies’ and then ‘Hubble Ultra Deep Field’. To make this image, astronomers picked a tiny part of the sky- one-tenth the diameter of the moon as viewed from Earth- that for all previous intents and purposes had appeared completely empty. The exposure, by the Hubble Space Telescope, took approximately one million seconds over four-hundred orbits of the Earth to reach this level of sensitivity. And you can see what they found: galaxies, hundreds of galaxies, with smudges and marks that hint at thousands more. And all this in that tiny, miniscule part of the sky. Zoom out fully and then slowly go back in, further and further away from Earth, as more and more stars, galaxies, clusters show themselves, and a universe is revealed that cannot fail to impress one it is immensity. It's not for nothing that the Hubblecasts sign off with 'once again, nature has surprised us beyond our wildest imagination.'
Blaise Pascal, the mathematician-theologian, once wrote that ‘Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed’ (Pensées, note 347, 1670). But I feel that we can see it, we can perceive the vastness of nature: briefly, at times, perhaps only in flashes of inspiration, and even then we may only comprehend a tiny part of the universe’s brilliance, but nevertheless these moments fill us with wonder. These times may come while looking at mountains, the ocean, the stars. Nature is fascinating- we are drawn to it- and scary- we are dwarfed by it. It is massive on a degree that is almost beyond comprehension. It is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and when we briefly comprehend it we seem to touch something greater than ourselves.
It also puts us in perspective. The problems, desires, wishes and actions of a single, measly human being are minuscule in comparison to the greatness of the natural world. Sure, we can and do impact our world’s environment, but in tiny ways compared to the fluctuations it has seen in the distant past. And nothing we could do (yet) could make any kind of noticeable impact the entirety of the universe. Immensity put us in our place.
This echoes, to me, calls among the religious community regarding the necessity of the transcendent. One argument states that a belief or recognition of something beyond the natural world provides an external reference point by which to regulate, judge and improve human behaviour. The transcendent provides a context for our actions, putting us in our proper place. Charles Taylor argues for a secular society that is open to the supernatural, feeling that this could lead to a world with all the benefits of modern individualism and technology, with the return of some of intrinsic meaning in the world that earlier, pre-secular times enjoyed. His concept of the ‘immanent frame’ refers to our ability in our contemporary society to live a life completely shut off from the transcendent- we never have to hear about, think about or try to interact with it, if we choose not to. Taylor argues (during an interview on Encounter) that this can be felt as either comfortable or imprisoning; this analysis suggests that the transcendent is, to Taylor, both a good thing and a little bit frightening; a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, we could say.
And so we have a concordance. The key characteristics of the transcendent- at least as it is viewed by Taylor- one can also find in numinous experiences of the ‘merely’ natural world.
Sam Sparro addresses the transcendent when he sings that ‘if you’re not really here / then the stars don’t even matter’. But clearly they do matter: they are beautiful, they are intriguing, they are fascinating and frightening, and one doesn’t need to ‘feel the weight of something beyond them’ to appreciate that (I have quoted atheists before who similarly find special relevance in experiences of the natural world).
Believers argue that we need an external reference point from which to build our ethics. Perhaps, instead of immediately substituting in the transcendent, we can use a scientific understanding of nature’s immensity in similar way: to help combat our egocentricity, to put us in our place, to increase our respect and wonder at the marvel that is our own and our fellow humans’ existence, and so build up an empathic and environmental morality.
Or is Jack Johnson right when he sings that ‘there were so many fewer questions / when stars were still just the holes to heaven’?
 
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