Tag: learned

What I wish I’d known before I had to learn it.

First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio

PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky.

Galileo recorded his unprecedented experience in 1610 CE, a time of adventurous European discoveries in general. His detailed and methodical observations will be thrilling to anyone also observing the same celestial sights for the first time through a simple 20x (read: low-power) backyard telescope. Science historian Albert Van Helden’s superb 1989 translation reveals Galileo’s excitement and wonder on every page, and adds valuable context via explanatory bookending and notes.

That era being one of grand aspirations and flowery speech, Galileo’s grateful bow to his patron, Duke Cosimo II de Medici, is fully titled, “SIDEREAL MESSENGER, unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by GALILEO GALILEI, Florentine patrician and public mathematician of the University of Padua, with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him, about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially about four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness; which, unknown by anyone until this day, the first author detected recently and decided to name MEDICIAN STARS.” (That honorific didn’t stick; instead, the “four planets” are now called by astronomers the “Galilean moons.”)

Let us skip Galileo’s five-page introductory paean to the Duke de Medici and dive right into the first paragraph of the work itself:

In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight.

“You Can’t Avoid the Void!”

IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER WHERE or when I was, beyond that it was a high place from which I felt an overwhelming urge to jump.

I felt neither depressed nor sad nor suicidal. But I did feel scared, though mostly of the compulsion. In fact, I retained an echo of those feelings, not to mention utter perplexity, until happening across a healthline.com article which told me that such compulsions are very, very common. Normal, even.

It’s known as the “Call of the Void.” (In the original French, because the French have words for everything experientially interesting, “l’appel du vide.”) In clinical terms, it’s referred to as “High-Place Phenomenon,” and can also involve other aspects of self-harm: leaping in front of a train, steering one’s car into oncoming traffic, or sticking one’s hand into a garbage disposal. Naturally, these urges are quickly suppressed. And no one quite knows why we have such episodes – they may simply be an artifact of our neurological wiring – but it seems related to anxiety: the more anxious one is, the louder the Void calls.

We humans seem to be repelled by, yet attracted to, vast emptiness: the gulfs between stars and galaxies; abyssal ocean depths; wide-open deserts; untenanted warehouses; the view from a mountaintop. (BTW, the worst vertigo I ever experienced was while [very briefly!] standing on my head atop Northern California’s Mount Diablo – I literally felt as though I was dropping into the sky. Brrr.) Perhaps such things remind us of our insignificance. Perhaps we just don’t know what to do with (or in) them. Getting lost in immensity carries a deep discomfort; it blurs the lines we draw between Is and Is-Not. And that can be downright scary.

The most important thing to do when the Void calls? Don’t answer.

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?

Why Am I Still Here?

BARRING ANY UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, I will celebrate my 62nd birthday tomorrow.

Leading me to ask: “How did THAT happen?”

As a child of the 1970s and very early ’80s, my gentle nihilism is understandable. It was a period marked by grand-scale social upheaval and the very real threat of nuclear war. Thus, many of us, instead of making plans for the future (“what future?!” we chorused with youthful cynicism), opted to revel in an increasingly tentative present. That checkered and lazy lifestyle provided a certain spice, and “no point in tomorrow” slid me into various endeavors — some pointless, others rewarding, all instructive.

But that sort of thing can only take you so far, and having arrived largely intact (save a handful of scars and surgeries) at this particular 2024 moment is to me something of a major miracle.

Regrets? A few, mostly of the self-sabotaging variety.

Joys? Many. Many and multiform.

Plans for what’s left of my future? To become, and to continue to become, more. I like to think I’m getting the hang of it.

5 Thoughts: Make. BELIEVE.

0. READ CAREFULLY — THERE WILL BE a test later on.

1. In the book of Exodus, Moses tells the Children of Israel that G?d wants to enter into a contract with them. With one voice, and without knowing the details, the people reply, “Na’aseh v’nishma” — literally, “We will do, and we will hear/understand!”

2. Many people may argue that the formulation is backwards. How can you do something unless you first hear and/or understand it? But the Torah is imparting a great truth: that one can understand certain things only by doing them. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Make. BELIEVE.”

Sales Experience Necessary

IT HAS LONG BEEN PROPOSED in some circles that, in order to build a better class of citizens, we need some sort of national-service program along the lines of an in-house Peace Corps or revamped Works Progress Administration. “Give people the tools to literally build the country they live in,” goes the argument, “and they will obtain a greater sense of national ownership, pride, and responsibility.”

Not a bad idea, that. Here’s another:

“Everyone should work retail for a year. Especially during the holiday rush.”

I’m not joking. Continue reading “Sales Experience Necessary”

Let’s Get Real

ON THIS DAY EIGHT YEARS ago, I stepped out from under the shadow of a decades-long cannabis addiction. And I haven’t been the same man since.

Thank God.

What brought me to that point was twofold: I decided that 1) I was being selfish to the ones I most love by robbing them of my alert and unaltered presence, and 2) I just didn’t like feeling stupid all the time anymore.

Looking back, I realize that cannabis had structured my existence in some scary ways. I planned my life around it, spent my money on it, self-sabotaged with it, and turned into a raving jerk when I was deprived of it. What I didn’t know at the time was that these behaviors are all symptomatic of addiction. Continue reading “Let’s Get Real”

Fable, With Apocalypse

IN THE MIDDLE OF A flat grey wasteland, under a grey streaky sky, a handful of figures warm themselves at a snapping fire.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

One of the figures has turned to gape across the waste: a vast landscape of broken dryers and tumbledown swingsets, with here and there half a gas station or bowling alley.

“Don’t do that,” says the speaker. He takes the gaper and turns him tenderly toward the flames to warm his hands again.

“Thanks.”

“It’s why I’m here. And that” — a sweeping arm — “is why that’s there. The wasteland is only good for wasting you.”

“Thanks again.”

“Don’t mention it. Just keep your hands warm. Even when you’re the last one here.”

The Feeling

YOM KIPPUR AFTERNOONS ARE USUALLY the spacetime nexus where radical growth happens — and this year was no exception.

Let’s set the stage. After an intense twenty-or-so hours of not eating or otherwise tending to physicality, continuous guided liturgical meditation, and extended standing periods, the mind becomes…relaxed. Pliable. And open to self-generated suggestion. It’s a long stretch of characterological self-diagnosis that forces a focus on our broken, less-than-who-we-want-to-be parts. (To paraphrase an old 1960s protest song: “Where can you run / where can you hide / when the Implacable Judge / is on the inside?”)

Previous years’ personal revelations centered on egotism, religious one-upsmanship, and hiding from unpleasant truths. This year was positive by contrast, and involved feeling in my guts something I’d only ever thought about. (You’d be surprised what a little shift of perspective can do.)

Revelation #1: “Gifts are for sharing.” And revelation #2: “I belong here.” Continue reading “The Feeling”

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