understanding
-
Detestable
In the gallery, under spotlights ages wood and plaster painted with the colors of royalty, of the bourgeoisie and the wannabes. It was the expensive sample platter. I could see the deepening of time in the creases of the folds of wooden drapery and smell the quaint fastness of France under King Louis who soon…
-
2015: A Choice of Futures
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book titled 1984, Spring: a Choice of Futures, similar in format to his earlier nonfiction book Profiles of the Future about mankind’s options for that hallowed, once future year. I yanked the title for my essay as it is most apt to describe our current state of flux here on planet Earth. We have…
-
“I Hadn’t Cried in Twenty Years”
Walking through the science museum in Kensington, you stop once more in front of the stack of wrought iron and intricately machined cogs and gears of Mr. Babbage’s computing engine and wonder what he would think of this modern world of vacuum tubes and television. Often, as you’d wander down the marble halls, you’d look…
-
Cosmos Again
The finale of the new Cosmos series filled my heart with the purest sense of the numinous. Out there, in the gaseous clouds and the cosmic background radiation, among the billion billion chunks of ice and rock and the equally enormous numbers of other worlds, exists the wide universe. We are just toddlers come onto…
-
Evolving
I hate it when people say they don’t “believe” in evolution, as though evolution was a silly suggestion and not a law of nature. The path that evolution has taken us is to one of being able to comprehend this vast and awesome cosmos without resorting to fairy stories or magic books. The world is…
The Numinous Cosmos 