James Lileks had another masterful little bleat yesterday, demonstrating once again why he is the best writer in the blogosphere (something we first noted in “Shabbat and the Stars”). Here is his latest Bellovian effort:
I’m one of those guys who thinks that science class should set aside a day or two for metaphysical speculation — not instruction, but speculation. So, guys, what do you draw from the remarkable procession of life on this planet and the boundless mysteries of the universe above? Is this random, or not? If not, who? How? Why? It’s an interesting conversation . . . .
Now and then (G)Nat likes to look at pictures of space, and I showed her this one, which always fills me with awe and no small amount of terror:
That’s a tiny patch of sky, and it’s as swimming with galaxies as a Dixie cup of Mexican tap-water swims with bacteria.
It’s hard to look at that and think you matter a whit, but then when you turn back to earth you see all things that tell you that you do matter, and I suppose someone can come up with all the cerebral chemicals that rush in to restore self-worth and love and other delusions of biology, but I don’t buy that. You can either look at that picture and think we have company, in whatever form you wish, or decide that we are alone, and as someone once noted, either fact would be quite remarkable. I’d like to think that magnificent sight is all staves and notes, and after we die the melody is revealed.
Lileks’ bleat reminded me of the answer that Saul Bellow gave to Martin Amis when he asked him, late in life, if he believed in the afterlife. Bellow’s answer (as given by James Atlas in “Bellow: A Biography”) was this:
Well, it’s impossible to believe in it because there’s no rational ground. But I have a persistent intuition, and it’s not so much a hope because it would be better to be blotted out entirely – call it love impulses. What I think is how agreeable it would be to see my mother and my father and my brothers again – to see again my dead. But then I think, “How long would these moments last?” You still have to think of eternity as a conscious soul. So the only thing I can think of is that in death we might become God’s apprentices and have the real secrets of the universe revealed to us.
Shabbat Shalom.