Perhaps, after all, we aren’t divided so much into mind and body as into mind and mind. And few forces can propel humanity forward more reliably than the cleaving together of kindred minds in solidarity to a shared truth.
Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history – personal, political, civilizational – from the trunk of life. Both are highly selective – memory retrospectively so and motive prospectively.
It is a beautiful impulse to contain the infinite in the finite, to rest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb towards higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.
I will die, you will die the atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around a shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shores seeds and stardust.
Decrying the sublimation of women’s minds to domesticity, Fuller asserts that “a house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body” and admonishes that “human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion.
The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth – soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.
Boredom is not only an adaptive emotion but a vital one with its related faculties of contemplation, solitude, and stillness. It is essential for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.
Nobody was talking about this moral dimension of science. Nobody was placing a hand on humanity’s shoulder and turning us away from this destructive hubris, shaking us into awareness, into humility, into wakefulness to the fragility of a miraculous world that flourished long before we trampled it with our arrogant footsteps and should continue to flourish long after we have gone.
Above all, Somerville possessed the defining mark of the great scientist and the great human being – the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers, remaining receptive to novel theories and willing to change one’s mind in light of new evidence.
But interpretation invariably reveals more about the interpreter than about the interpreted. The gap between intention and interpretation is always rife with wrongs, especially when writer and reader occupy vastly different strata of emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication.
Whatever we may mean by the word “love,” we earn the right to use it only by doing the hard work of knowing and being known.
However divided we may feel within ourselves, it is the sum total of our warring fractions that make us who we are – fragmentary but indivisible.
Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite – like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity.
In science as in romance, the unknown is disrobed sheath by sheath as fervid fantasies imagine the possibilities conquerable by knowledge – fantasies that far outstrip the reality eventually revealed as knowledge progresses.
Questions of meaning are a function of human life, but they are not native to the universe itself – meaning is not what we find, but what we create with the lives we live and the seeds we plant and the organizing principles according to which we sculpt our personhood.
What solidity of sentiment it takes not to let an awareness of the moment’s impermanence dilute its richness, its sweetness, but purify it and saturate it with the utmost “fullness of being.
Can any author ever imagine just how far literature reaches into unfathomed horizons of culture, what it transforms and whom it liberates?
Some of our dormant multitudes come awake with a catlike stretch, slowly and lazily over years of personal development. Others leap into being with the jolt of an alarm sounded by a particular event or person who has entered our lives at a particular moment – rarely anticipated, almost never convenient, always transformational. On those rare, momentous mornings, one looks into the bathroom mirror and greets – sometimes grudgingly, sometimes gleefully – the gladsome stranger of oneself.
We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong – perhaps truth is love and love is truth.
Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.