What a tremendously exciting universe we live in! I just took some of the evening's trash down to the curb (pickup is later this morning), and when I got out from under the three large trees in our front yard, two maples and a magnificent oak, I looked up and saw Orion spread out above me in the east-south-east in a beautiful, clear night sky. In the west the moon shone silvery white and truly lit up the neighborhood. In that moment it was very very good to be alive.
Once I had dealt with the trash and recyclables, I walked away from the house down the street toward the cul-de-sac where there are no trees and the sky is open. I could add the constellations Sirius and Gemini to the stars I could see, and behind me the moon. I love the stars, I love astronomy.
I bought the Great Courses astronomy course with 99 half hour lectures. I got stalled in the 40s, but the teacher is good, though I cannot remember his name at the moment. Maybe it is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
As I was looking at Orion, spread out perfectly above me, I started thinking about change, for the constellation is as apparently the same this morning as it was when I discovered it as a child sixty or more years ago. Mary and I came to Berea in 1967. In 68 or 69 we bought a wonderful plot of land in a newly created, half finished subdivision. There were 16 lots; 7 had houses. The ones that didn't were wild fields, no trees of any kind. We bought the #3 lot, then we used the lot as collateral once it was paid off in order to build the house. We planted the trees, the maples, the oak, white pines in the back, a majestic silver maple, a fast growing tree that now towers over the backyard. I love trees (think of Tolkien's Ents!), but the only thing I regret is that when they grew, they obscured the stars. I used to be able to follow the sun's south-north north-south movement each year by where the sun came up over the ridge 3 miles to the east. I knew exactly how far south it would go in the winter, how far north in the summer as it travelled the ecliptic through the zodiac.
Meanwhile, as the land changed radically here, in the heavens there was no perceptible change in Orion, Sirius, or Gemini. Shakespeare knew the two realm universe, the trans-lunar realm of permanence, an image of Heaven, and the sub-lunar realm of change, life and death, growth and decay. Dante's Divine Comedy perfectly describes the ancient / medieval two realm view. To understand how our ancestors saw the universe, I recommend C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image. Change, mutability, and permanence: while we may understand the physical universe better than they did, we lost a great deal ontologically when we discarded the old view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and our imaginations are the poorer for it. We threw out the image of permanence, and now find ourselves lost in an unimaginable vastness that is essentially a closed system, a small box measured in light years, where there is no exit, only death.
I love the medieval / renaissance literature, especially Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, and I know what they saw and felt, what they experienced when they looked up at the heavens. The images permeate their works. Tonight I felt it again when I looked up and was surprised by the magnificence and majesty of Orion. Just because we have walked on the moon (that too is exciting and not to be down played!) does not mean that the moon loses its value as an image of beauty, peace, tranquility. Actually, even with all our scientific knowledge (we have a vehicle on Mars, moving and sending us pictures! How can we not be stirred by that achievement?), Dante's and Shakespeare's grasp of the real value of the universe we inhabit is imaginably greater than our own, for we do not even understand the significance of the discoveries we have made, and we do not bother to read Dante and Shakespeare any more, unless someone forces us! Alas!
To see for a moment the imaginative value of our scientific vision, consider what mathematics mean really, and consider the precision involved in getting a space craft into orbit around a planet that far from us, and then landing it on that planet. Just what does precise really mean? What about microscopic? What about our understanding, with our imaginations, of the meaning of cold and hot. Ice? Absolute zero? A candle flame? The heat of the surface of the sun, 10, 000 degrees? These numbers are not simply scientific facts, data, they are also possibilities for the imagination. Space? You want to experience space as an image? Try to imagine what a trip to Mars might mean (900 days for a round trip, apparently). Loneliness? Imagine what being there alone might mean (Mars is 35 million miles at its closest; imagine being that far from home!). If that thought does not send a chill down your spine nothing ever will.
The universe is charged with meaning, with possibility, if only one were willing to awaken to the surrounding richness of being.