The Creations of Men

            How magnificent they are, the creations of men.  What a rich world of treasures and beauties, books and symphonies, films and festivals we live in.  Such greatness lies in the monuments that are dedicate to our Gods and saints as well.  Even our inventions, which often do as much harm as good, are blessed with a type of divinity that only evolution could summon.   

If I were a great man, I’d build towers to the sky, write novels as long as The Magic Mountain, and paint portraits of every beautiful woman I see.  I’d stand up in the face of tyranny and give speeches that could release fear from the hearts of men.  I’d write sacred verses full of wisdom and pass them on from city to city.  I’d be an Olympic champion who could run for miles upon miles, or a powerful slugger who could launch baseballs to the moon.  I’d build ships, cars and rockets, so that I may explore the infinite number of worlds beyond our own. 

But if I were truly a great man, I’d settle down and start a family.  I’d pass my God-given talents on to my young ones, and love every inch of their bodies, as I would my wife.  The years would pass by slowly in the loving warmth of my home, where the fruits of charity, compassion, and grace bloom so abundantly that the Tree of Knowledge wouldn’t allow any room for poisonous serpents.  For the greatest thing a man can give is his love, even if his talents soar higher than a mountain. 

Imagication: Diversity in the Universe

At our present time, the boundless frontiers of space are being magnified and mapped by the eyes of scientists that are not but a nanometer relative to the size of their galaxy.  Such infinitesimally small creatures are not living without an ounce of humility when it comes to the reverence of the universe that created it.  That we should ascribe this grand design to the genetics of chance and not quantum creationism- whether by the route of conscious imagination or unconscious projection- can only mean that we’ve stripped the tangible of its soul and deemed it a material vessel of our thirst for reason. By doing this, we have robbed the universe of its freedom and only made it a source for recording information, information that helps us find ways to improve our species, while selfishly filtering out the type that benefits the environment around us. 

Listen friends, we’ve discovered a galaxy that is a hundred times as dense as our own.  It is the densest galaxy in the known universe, and it could fit approximately 100 stars in between our sun and the one closest to it, Alpha Centauri.  Imagine what it would be like to live on a planet that orbits one of these stars.  The stars at night would shine so big and bright that the night sky would appear to be a shimmering cavern of ice crystals.  The darkness of deep space may not even be able to penetrate its density.  Instead of blackness, empty space would take on the various shades of luminosity propagated by these stars, blinding in their magnitude and requiring thicker eyeballs for us to see from.  Perhaps this planet’s atmosphere is also thick in ozone, which would turn even the night sky into a color higher on the visual spectrum, instead of the light blue we see on Earth.  Multiple stars would be able to be seen during the daytime as well, making the sunrises and sunsets difficult to distinguish between ordinary hours.  Would there be any way to differentiate night from day on this planet? 

Something as swarming with color as a dense region of a galaxy like this filled with nebulous gas should inspire us to yield to the chaos from which we are born.  The more evidence we find that challenges conventional physics, the more we will be forced to abandon our expectations and embrace the infinite.  Reason has been corrupted into the destructive ability to desecrate infinite potential, chop it up into little pieces with calculus, and use it to optimize our resources.  The more we discover, the more we will recognize the diversity of matter and welcome the prospects of interstellar biodiversity that comes with it.  What other abominations of matter are we prepared to witness?  We’ve already found that it is raining diamonds on Neptune and molten glass on HD 189733b.  On a planet where it rains glass, might its terrain look like the swirly mutations that come about when glassblowing?  Walk into a glassblowing museum and imagine that all its artifacts could resemble the landscape of an entire planet.  That would only be one example of the multiplex forms that matter can take. 

We should not think the universe made our planet special by supplying it with all the mathematical necessities required to sustain life on one of its planets.  There are many other planets out there in which the requirements of life approach those of Earth, and some may even exceed them.  If we had been born on another planet, its evolutionary restrictions might have deterred us from becoming humans, and instead we’d have become whatever environmental adaptation that planet required of us.  And so, as with inorganic diversity in the universe, we are likely to find a high amount of organic diversity out there as well. 

Ah, the universe and its mysteries.  What we can see is only an illusion, bounded by our senses and the remoteness of our observations.  Like a fly trapped in a room, we are limited in our perspective and cannot see the bigger picture, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we can.  Indeed, this why the universe is not round, as we expected it to be.  The universe is not round for the same reason that men thought the Earth was flat. 

The Written Word

A single book can change our lives, our dreams, our aspirations.  It can show us things in our imagination that we’d never been capable of seeing.  When we read a book, we are seduced by a world where intangible things have the power to mold who we are and what we believe in.  No single book has the power to change who we are permanently, but they all have the ability to re-shape our ideas and conceptions throughout the course of our lives.  The only requirement is that our minds be open enough to allow their words to cast these spells on us, spells that may only be temporary as we grow older.     

The miracle of reading is that the author takes us on a roller-coaster of thoughts that span the entire realm of the cosmos.  Great chapters are similar to moving speeches: their soliloquies take us on journeys to places we've never been; and, being without any of the interruptions of shared communication, for once allow us to escape from our heads and let the possession of another’s evolve the matrices of our minds.  While the conceptions in our heads may not be identical to the author’s, each individual conception of the same story or idea is like a never-ending cycle of creation.  Each of these conceptions are like little stars on a big black night, glowing with delight among the darkness of despair and ignorance.  They may appear to be the same from a distance, but from up close they are subtly different in ways that define the type of star they are.  Our reason for interpreting a piece of literature (and all art, for that matter) the way we do is largely dependent on the environment we were raised in.  It can also be due to pre-conceptions about what we already know or believe.  Therefore, every star in the universe of a book's pages can be likened to being born out of the interstellar dust that is generated by the minds reading it.   

Reading requires patience, concentration, and a genuine interest in the subject being read about.  When we are spoon-fed what to read, whether by our parents or our teachers, then the words spill off the page, drained by tears of boredom.  We should never be told what to read; we should be allowed to choose for our own pleasure, or else the words won’t stick in our minds and our opinion of literature will be tarnished.  The greatest minds the world has ever produced were minds that explored the written word with ceaseless abandon. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

In the Alps of Bavaria there is a place of wonder and wisdom. Its remoteness welcomes those that are ill, both from treatable diseases and psychological malaises brought about from living in industrial civilization. Hans Canstorp is a member of this latter group, and he visits the mountains initially to see his cousin, but finds so much peace and comfort in their solitude that time slows down and swallows him inside their location. 

The Magic Mountain is a meditation on time, elevation, genius, sociology, biology, and metaphysics at the beginning of the 20th century, just before the thunderbolt of World War 1 went crashing down across Europe. It’s the coming-of-age story about a young man caught between the ideologies of two talented debaters: Settembrini, a poster child of the Enlightenment, and Naptha, a fascist Jesuit. Like the lost corridors and unpredictable weather patterns of the chaotic mountains, their discussions dish up a storm of contradictions that rattle our minds with the ambiguity of confusion. But somewhere lingering inside the ongoing war between love and reason, a magical philosophy breaths clarity into the minds of those patient enough to persevere through the novel’s length. The mountains know this philosophy, and it is the destiny of our protagonist to find it. 

Although we must go through long stretches of disinterest and inactivity, we are served several golden nuggets of literature scattered in between them. “Research” is what I believe to be one of the greatest chapters ever written- a meditation on the parallels between biology and the cosmos. “Walpurgis Night” is as seductively memorable as “The City of God” is intellectually stimulating. “Snow” is the most famous of them, an atmospheric skiing adventure that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. Finally, the book ends with “The Thunderbolt”, an invasion of the senses from the Underworld. 

Fans of plotless literature and challenging structures should enjoy this. If you’re looking for a light read filled with bare-chested warriors, flaming dragons, and cheap romance, then stop what you’re doing and run. 

God Wants You to Evolve

Eons ago, we were nothing but stardust in space.  All our atoms were dispersed among celestial objects that drifted through the universe without any sense of direction or form.  When God created the Earth, He made the conditions right for these stellar remnants to arrange themselves into the building blocks of life.  We were given electricity to move our bodies and consciousness to think for ourselves.  Thenceforth, every modification of His became a stage in His desire for all creations to become greater beings.  It didn’t end with fishes; it didn’t end with birds.  Nor did it end with the dinosaurs, the roaring lion, or the crafty human.  We are only but a link in the chain of His design, the result of a systematic blueprint that changes under the laws of nature and the blemishes of destruction.  By the limits of the natural laws He creates, a wild platter of disorder re-arranges the puzzle that keeps us together.    God wants you to evolve.  He wants you to glorify His image in a being greater than you already are.  He wants you to adjust to your environment and adapt with the shifting sands of eternity.  Nothing is ever preserved in time.  We are like pieces of clay that are constantly being remolded and improved upon from the generations that stood before us. 

Hark, ye bells of the future!  Look to the glory of God, and that is beauty.  All creation is beauty, whether it be in the heavens or upon the Earth.  Look to the sky, that fabled interior of God's mind, and that same malleable expanse can be found in the mind of your own, bursting with the same powers of creation that He cast you with.  The same stories drawn in the heavens can be imitated in the heavens of your own.  You were given this power, and you must do what you can to govern it well.  Make beautiful things and waste not in excess, for the path of excess only leads to the tower of wisdom when you are able to balance the order and the chaos within you. 

When looking at a creation of your own, does it not seem to you that your appreciation of its beauty is an admiration for the wildness that accentuates the symmetry of design?  And doesn't this symmetry, this order, make the untamed details of it all the more pleasing?  Look at an icy mountain, like that of Denali in Alaska, or think about the most beautiful woman you ever laid eyes on.  A single stain on the face of these symmetries can render them unworthy of your praise.  Likewise, the asymmetry of a ship, or the uneven tiles on a marble floor, can spoil even the most well-maintained objects.  Beauty doesn't care how hard you tried to create an excess of something.  Beauty is the perfect balance between order and chaos. 

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

At the beginning of a long line of Great American Novels, there is The Scarlet Letter. It is the earliest in a group of publications that scholars of literature have deemed worthy of "The Great American Novel". Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man, Blood Meridian and American Pastoral are some of its successors. I don't think it's on the same level as some of these other novels, but it certainly helped put American literature on the map. 

The Scarlet Letter takes us all the way back into the 1640s, when the colonization of America had just gotten underway. It’s set in a Puritan community, where a woman commits adultery with an unknown man and must face the social consequences of her actions. She births an impish child with the man, and her husband is dead set on finding and getting revenge on whoever it is that has wronged him. 

The depth of character exploration in The Scarlet Letter is its greatest strength. Each chapter lets us venture inside the mind of one of its four main characters- Chillingworth, Hester Prynne, Pearl, and the minister- so that we may be shown their psychological dilemmas in brute form, whether they be the absolving of guilt, the seeking of forgiveness, or the desire for retribution and repentance for or against sinners, the community, and the church. Hawthorne shows us that while we may be wrong in our actions, mercy will be given to us after we’ve faced their consequences for long enough, and forgiveness is the greatest healer of wounds in our hearts. It seems pretty straight forward, but the iconic symbolism gives it some extra juice.