Orion magazine has a meditation on the vastness of the universe that’s worth thinking on.
“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.”
Whatever we believe in–God, children, nationhood–nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp.
July 11, 2007 at 12:20 pm
The fact that more and more people can’t see the night sky is a problem, since they will never have a chance to regularly contemplate this vastness, nor be properly humbled. — EB