Autumn thoughts
As some may surmise, I’m a secular humanist. I don’t believe in fate or destiny, but in choice and personal responsibility. When I see evil I point to the person who did it… not to a revised version of cloven-footed Pan. I don’t seek salvation; I strive for personal evolution.
And yet…
It astonishes me how few people (the ones who statistically must believe in an entire bestiary of supernatural things) actually appreciate beauty in the world they really live in.
It’s like Wordsworth in his poem “The World is Too Much With Us.” When I went to the beach as a kid, I gazed on the ocean and imagined Triton rising, blowing on his wreathed bugle, commanding the ocean to form a watery staircase to Mount Olympus where I could snack on ambrosia alongside Aphrodite.
At the same time, I looked at the ocean and realized what it was – two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. Some iodine. Fish and mammals and crustaceans and mollusks and the occasional sunken galleon. I had an understanding of how the ocean formed. I knew about continental drift – Japan hitting California, South American impacting China. New mountains forming. The topography of Earth altering and forming new seas without names.
A few years ago I was driving on a snowy road and glanced at a park. Plumes of vapor were shooting off of the snow mounds there. The atmosphere and humidity had conspired to produce a remarkable alchemy — so that the ice seemed ablaze. I pulled into the park and went for a walk. It was like being on an alien world. Solar radiation causing jets of carbon dioxide to burst out from beneath permafrost, a silent chorus of energy transformation and chemical wonder.
I was the only person who pulled over to watch. By the law of averages, most of the other drivers and pedestrians believed in angels and magic and psychic powers… yet there they went, cruising by a VERY REAL image of beauty and awe.
Just recently I went to the Caribbean. Stepped off the boat into a red-and-gold tropical morning. Distant green mountains were wreathed in mist. Two gulls had a furious squawking match over a scrap of cracker on the soggy pier.
And all around me, nearly every other tourist, were people texting on their phones or chatting noisily on their phones or listening to music through their phones. Etiquette hasn’t yet developed to match the almighty cell phone – we see that everyday. But it’s more than that: Statistically most of my fellow tourists believed in magic and mysticism and yet they moved like sleepwalkers up the pier, chatting about TV and personal gossip while failing to see a real world with real magic.
And these same people would likely say that rationalists don’t have their eyes open.
I’m glad to see the world as it really is, without blinders and blindfolds and blind faith. Society loves to flip to binary and invent two sides to everything. You are either a dreamer, they say, or you’re a rationalist.
You can be both.
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Now watching: Gran Torino, Au Revoir Les Enfants, The Great Escape, and The Day of the Jackal.
Now reading: Across the Sea of Suns by Gregory Benford
