EmailThe Lonely Race
There are bodies and there is the void, in which these bodies are and through which they move. -Lucretius
Some enlightenments happen only in the dark. Last night I left my home and drove a few miles out of town on a mountain road, to look at the stars. Though I know it happens nightly, and though I had gone to the mountains precisely in order to see it, stepping from my car I was startled to look up and find that someone had rolled back the great blue ceiling of the sky, uncovering a dark and vast world undreamt of by day. Stripped of the sky, the land lay naked against the immensity of the universe. I could see silhouettes of leafless trees only a field's length away; through their branches, the fathomless depths of outer space. In the valley below was visible the cluster of city lights from which I had come. It appeared as if, merely by driving thirty miles beyond it toward the horizon, one might fall off the planet into the chasm of space. Against the backdrop of stars and space, the silhouetted land looked like a moonscape, the glowing city like a far-flung civilization out of science fiction—a strange rendering of the familiar locale. By day we are residents of towns and states and countries, but night reveals a different citizenship. Gazing up through the world's open roof at the worlds beyond, with awe and uncertainty we confess ourselves inhabitants of infinity.
The light of a thousand stars shone down on me, but I could not see the ground at my feet. Ordinarily we think of darkness and light dualistically, as complementary opposites like the yin and yang. This view is based in our experience of equal cycles of night and day. But the night sky reveals the true balance of opposites. Darkness is the proper element of the universe, and light an occasional interruption in that otherwise continuous fabric.
Coldness too is the rule of the universe, and heat the exception. According to physics, coldness is the absence of heat, the nothing to heat's something, and heat is the result of the motion of particles. Since the universe is mostly one gigantic absence of anything, it follows that it is cold by simple default. There is nearly nothing in it, and so nearly nothing to heat it up; no particles, and therefore no warming motion of particles. Only around the few glowing bodies that intermittently break up its magnificent emptiness may an eddy of warmth be found in the universal chill.
There is a wonder in the contemplation of these desolate spaces, the wonder of the sentient mind to find itself alone in a great theater of nonbeing. The probing eye scans in vain for any stir of activity overhead; in whatever direction the spinning earth turns, we look outward into motionless calm. The stars stay suspended in relative eternity, and though they burn with the roar of a billion infernos, only deep silence echoes down through their empty mansions. We are friendless in this vacant landscape of space and time, the sole inhabitants of creation. Some people dream of other races in other worlds, far across the yawning gulfs of light-years, searching the skies for us as we for them. Yet these circlers of unknown suns, if they exist, are as distant to us as the dead, for no neighborly greetings they cast into the night will ever make it across the great divide.
It is startling to reside in the middle of nowhere, and one's thoughts turn naturally to the question of life's origin. What marvelous circumstances, or what great or perilous journey, could have brought us to so obscure an address? Plato taught that we are strangers in the universe, children of eternity lost in the province of time.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
-WORDSWORTH
To the spiritually-minded the question of origin is a question of God, and many have searched the encircling deeps for our missing maker. One imagines that somewhere beyond the edges of infinity, on the other side of the darkness, if only we could get there we would find him, the deus absconditus. "God is at home," wrote Meister Eckhart, "we are in the far country." Creation has been conceived as a great exile of life from its source, a casting off of the created from the light of divine presence into the outer darkness of individual existence. To the workaday consciousness, such an idea is as dim and doubtful as a dream, but under a midnight sky I can easily believe it, easily imagine the human race as a lost colony washed ashore on these earthly sands from a forgotten fatherland, far across the lonely ocean of outer space.
Tennyson called the stars "cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand / his nothingness into man." I have never shared the common sentiment that the vastness of the cosmos demonstrates our insignificance. The thought of us alone amid never-ending space inclines me more to admire than to disparage humankind, for such an extraordinary setting casts the human enterprise itself as something extraordinary. Unexpectedly, we arrive in a world we did not choose or make, we are born into the unarguable givenness of our existence. Taking stock of our new home, we find it a flying ball of water next to a floating ball of fire, suspended in an ether of universal darkness. There is not another living intelligence to be met with anywhere, and no blueprints for living to be found: no divine guidebook, no instructional notes from an elder race, no owner's manual stapled to the earth's surface. The only furnishings throughout our roomy but spare accommodations are the dim and inaccessible lights of distant objects. We are left to find our own way and figure things out for ourselves. And somehow, amazingly, we have done it. We have cut a path as we go, we have used the resources at hand and invented what we lacked, we have made a life for ourselves. Homo sapiens—this little leaf blown in on the cosmic winds—is the supreme entrepreneur and the great opportunist. Not pausing to weep for his solitary fate or to curse the God who abandoned him, he sets himself straight to work as if this strange planet were his chosen real estate, and through centuries of accumulated labor and ingenuity he builds a great society for himself: a civilization under the stars, shining like the lone lantern in a perpetual night. If there is reason to speak of human greatness, it is not, as the Renaissance humanists believed, because man is infinite and therefore can do everything, but because man is nothing and yet has done so much. Some people complain that reality is dull and devoid of wonder, but they have thought little about it. Science fiction has added nothing to these facts but to people other worlds with races as wondrous as ours, and to give us ships that can sail the empty black seas in order to find them.
Under the stars I feel intensely small, but I cannot really say I feel insignificant. This obscure earth, this inconsequential pebble circling an average sun, is being's home in a wilderness of oblivion, and in that title bears a worthy distinction. Under the stars I like to go for a journey in my imagination. Aiming at Rigel or Vega or Aldebaran, I leave my earth-bound body behind and travel the uncharted light-years in the starship of my mind. I ride past the silent galaxies and soar on the solar winds, across the circuits of time, past the rim of the known universe to the outermost edge of creation. When I get there, I look back along the measureless path I've come, to see the earth below. I see a blue speck amid infinite blackness, and what I think about is not human significance or insignificance, but the lonely miracle of being alive.