Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick
Points of Honor, Literary and Otherwise
– STUFFING SENTENCES TO CARRYING CAPACITY.
– Never starting a blog post (or sermon) with “I.”
– Punctuality.
– Creative segues.
– Repeating verbatim whatever someone wants said to another.
– That only what I actually heard appears inside quotation marks.
– One-sentence ledes.
– Snappy ledes. (“If you can do that, you’ll never be out of a job,” quoth a mentor.)
– Keeping an open mind, especially when it’s difficult.
– Never speaking in absolutes. (Present list excluded.)
– Crediting my sources.
– Communicating as accurately as I can. (Challenging, but aspirational.)
– Pushing through my shyness. (Also aspirationally challenging.)
– Being kind to cashiers, sales clerks, waiters, and tradesfolk.
– Saying “Take your time” whenever necessary.
– Waving at passing cars.
– Not speculating.
– “Killing my darlings” (per Wm. Faulkner, via Stephen King).
– Making an effort to pet stray cats.
– Greeting passersby with (at least) a smile.
– Concisifying.
(And yours?)
A Short Course in Flabbergastery
IN HIS EPIC, THREE-VOLUME Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, the astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr., proposes the following metric:
Let one astronomical unit (the mean Earth-Sun distance) equal one inch. On that same scale, one light-year, or 63,360 astronomical units, equals one mile; in our model, that puts Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor, just over four miles away.
See how big space is? But let’s go further.
In October 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope peered 13.1 billion light-years into one tiny slice of our all-surrounding nothingness (see Fig. 1). On Burnham’s scale, that’s 78,067,190,880,000,000,000,000 miles — or roughly the distance from Earth to just beyond the boundary of interstellar space.
And if your mind is still insufficiently blown, think on this: Except for a handful of relatively close six-rayed stars, the smudges of light you see in Fig. 1 are all galaxies.
GALAXIES. Each containing hundreds of billions of stars, a good many of which are just like our Sun.
Wow. Right?
Contemplating such vasty depths may challenge our sanity. But I also think such a meditation is good for the perspective.
Because in all that unending emptiness, there is only one of each of us: unique, ephemeral, irreplaceable. Enjoy yourself if and while you can — and don’t forget to floss.
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
— Thos. Jefferson
Come Dance With Me
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Here’s What I Know …
… AND WHEN I SAY “KNOW,” I’m not talking about “faith,” “opinion,” or “reasoned analysis,” but an intimate, visceral, experiential knowing. (Torah has a word for it — דַעַת — “da’at,” which can also refer to intimacy of the sexual variety.) So here’s what I know, in the same wordless way I know that I’m sitting at a desk typing these words to you:
1. The Universe is sentient.
2. This sentience cannot be fully described in words, including these.
3. This sentience can be directly apprehended.
4. Given this sentience’s unitary nature — as well as that every atom everywhere emerged from the Big Bang — all divisions are illusory, solely arising from the all-encompassing immediacy of our own ego-experience.
And that’s all I know. (And of course, I could be wrong.)
Any questions?
Shock Absorber
THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 6, 2024 gave me the biggest and most horrific shock of my sixty-two years.
I won’t go into why, because half the country already knows why, and those processing the same emotions could use fewer words rather than more.
And yet, I do have something to say.