A Personal Meditation on Magnitudes

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Often people do not know they are on a road, walking towards an as-yet uknown Place just there, where the road ends. Distractions abound, interesting and attractive allures along the way, as well as intersecting paths leading away from the road. But always on the road there are intimations of the Place, making it seem more and more like a home. If only the walker would recognize the signposts – but they are of all sorts, not the usual signposts – and heed them.

I.

My first experience of awe came when I was a child, maybe nine years old (not long after my mother died). It took me completely out of myself. I had already been amazed, more than once. I had already been ‘out of myself’, when reading, or watching television, or playing baseball. But this was not that. I had no intellectual understanding of time or space, but I was, somehow, no longer here and now.

The world – more like existence itself, or maybe just my own mind – became unimaginably thicker, deeper, wider, and richer than it had been. It was my first of many lessons in perspective. Only humans achieve it, at least as far as we can tell, because it seems only humans need it.

That early catalyst was an illustrated Time-Life book on the history and composition of the Earth itself. I knew what ‘big’ meant, because I had seen tall buildings and mountains too, but I did not know that Mount Everest is as tall as twenty Empire State Buildings. (Owing to King Kong I was on personal terms with the Empire State Building, so the illustration was arresting.) But wait. The next illustration showed yet another mountain, this one rising from the bottom of the ocean, a dead volcano that was an additional four Empire State Buildings. You could see it on the ocean floor, then breaking through the surface, and finally towering above Hawaii.

Then the plot thickened. I knew what ‘old’ meant. I had an older brother and four really old (or so they seemed to me) grandparents, and I knew the Earth had been around a long time, maybe always. I knew the dinosaurs were very old, so old that there were no people when they lived (according to my father). In the book I saw that earthly age came in groups of within groups of ages, from Ages to Epochs to Periods to Eras and finally to Eons, which could last millions of years. People were newcomers, very, very new, like a second ago on a 24-hour clock. Was there no end (let alone a beginning) to all this enormousness of height and depth?

Apparently not. This ball, our Earth, had its own layers, six of them, down to a core that was like a huge solid ball, almost the size of the Moon. And we live on the ‘crust’, which was like the skin of an apple. And the whole thing was actually almost five billion years old. I had met the concept of Deep Time and of dimensions far beyond my reckoning.

The result of this knowledge was twofold. First was a sensation of smallness. I would never look at an ant the same way as before, because I was an ant. Perspective. Of course, I had known that there was a wide world beyond my neighborhood. But not on this scale. The second effect is what I can only call fascinated wonder. Rather than reducing me to insignificance, this knowledge was thrilling. One could never see it all, or understand it all, because there was so much more than one mind could take in The universe was rich.

Now, someone might say, as Browning’s Duke said of his Duchess, that I “was too soon made glad, too easily impressed.” After all, I was looking at nothing more than illustrations. But I had read some science fiction – At the Earth’s Core, Journey to the Center of the Earth: these had woven their narrative spells. These drawings were not that. Rather they were visual equivalents of scientific thinking and discoveries. So my answer to the Duke’s cynicism is that when you are overcome by exponential amazement – give in: full immersion. What had not yet popped into my head was the question: whence the amazement in the first place? Merely size? Or the degree of extremities?

Some three years later – this is when, more or less, my brother became unspeakably troubled and troubling – the cosmos arrived, and I again submitted. By ‘cosmos’ I do not mean our Solar System, which, though big, was somehow viewable, and therefore graspable. Rather, my own Big Brain Bang began with light – particle? wave? both? – or, more accurately, the ‘speed’ light, the very notion of which was stunning. Did not light simply appear, as it seemed to when I flipped a switch? Light was… ready, wasn’t it?… when we called, or (or course) when the earth rotated.

It showed me that daylight was already about eight minutes old by the time it got here, so that really I was seeing the past. Soon thereafter came the lightyear, which was exponentially unfathomable and even more so when I learned that, in cosmic terms, that really is not all that far. Being accustomed to living in the quotidian present tense, I knew that everything I saw in the sky – that even the greatest telescopes could show us – was not only not present but from very, very long ago.

My response was a mental adjustment, one that most of us make without knowing it. Since I was to learn so much more that was dimensionally mystifying this conceptual adjustment would serve me well, even unto my old, fairly well-educated age. It is this. Creation has its planes, on one of which we live, the Newtonian plane. We do now know that much of what that giant discovered and taught – about energy, motion, time and space – is wrong but that it all works for us on our plane. That is, we are too big for the magnitudes of particle physics – atoms are mostly empty space, no matter how solid the desk seems – and too small for cosmic magnitudes .for either to matter in everyday life.

But wait, there’s more, as they say in infomercials. The vastness of the night sky, with its stars, constellations, nebulae, and all the planets and transitory flying objects that go with them, all of those magnificent mountains of multi-colored light that our telescopes have revealed, dynamic swirls at distances from us and to heights and temperatures that, here, on this plane, defy analogy – all of it is but 5% of what is there. Dark energy and dark matter, largely impenetrable and unknowable, are actually what is ‘there’. In fact, we are at the thinnest margin of reality, the sliver of a sliver.

And to make matters – that is, us – even more marginal, we know that, contrary to the bigness of the universe, the nano-sized particles that constitutes even the darkness is virtually without that one force – the weakest of the four basic forces – that rules our lives, namely gravity. We do indeed occupy a middle-earth.

Within us is the randomness of sub-atomic particles that jump hither and yon, simultaneously unknowable in their location and in their rate of acceleration (because we are watching!), capable of ‘spooky action at a distance’ (for example, a perfectly mimicked coordination of two particles several lightyears apart), containing enough energy to blow up whole cities, so infinitesimally small that… well, that on our plane we need not bother. But on the outside we are the ‘infinitesimals,’ even though our minds can travel between the two enveloping planes, or perhaps not quite. In the second century A.D. the mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy wrote his Almagest. In it he was wrong about the Earth being the center of the universe, but he was right about this: our ball is so small that, mathematically, the entire globe is nothing more than a point.

I never puzzled over my fascination with magnitudes and their extremes. I did not yet know that awe, in my case invited by both the very smallest and the unspeakably immense, is a signpost,, and that the natural world, in its extremities, revealed them to me.

II.

My years in junior high school (this was still the fifties) were marked by confusion, fear, repulsion, fun, and – certainly not awe, but a species of it, mystification. My brother, who had been my best friend, was at first responsible for most of that. His anti-social behavior became anti-paternal then anti-fraternal. The intensity and depth of his self-destructive anger was continual if not continuous, a tsunami lasting nearly his entire long lifetime

Until then, and putting aside the raw, irreversible fact of death, the range of human conduct that I knew was limited to (a few) books, neighborhood kids and classmates, relatives, television and the movies. The sadistic Jack Wilson shooting a helpless homesteader in Shane, or the ever-conniving Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko, or the complexities of Richard Boone’s Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel suggested a breadth of character beyond real life. Or was it?

As with the illustrations in my Time-Life book, there came other images, and I saw the brutal magnitude of human extremities, a match for any cosmic black hole, and as inexplicable. I saw a film of the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima, with before and after images. Around that same time I saw images of what slavery was like in the United States, then, later, for the first time, a film documenting the liberation of Nazi death camps, showing the spectral survivors. Much later I would hear of private acts of sadism against women, children, the elderly. At first it occurred to me that the perpetrator of these horrors were not homo sapiens, but I knew better. Are these extremes in the animal kingdom? Do dogs or lions or hippos have sadists among them?

No, they do not. Only we do.

Some years ago Professor (and Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihma wrote “Defining Deviancy Down” in which he documented the fact that worsening anti-social behavior was not only being unprosecuted but becoming conventional. If he only knew. I think of the sexual dysphoria now commonly displayed: zealous, wanton, diverse. Dress, grooming, and language (especially in public discourse) have traveled along the same extreme vectors. Now, a magnitude of licentiousness is so settled that people no longer notice it, like fish in the sea who do not know they are wet. That very word, ‘licentious’ – utterly out-of-date.

And yet… I’ve read that if the nucleus of an atom was a blueberry then the whole atom would be the size of a football stadium. There is our range, and more. The benevolent behavior of most homo sapiens and our achievements can be metaphorical light years away from our horrors, as far as is our capacity for bitter cynicism from our risible credulity. Between those two capacities, though, is simple incredulity, which has its own immeasurable magnitude.

As a child, for example, I simply could not understand how we could make elevators, airplanes, and, especially, bridges. It was not that I did not believe in them, rather I could not believe that they were made in the first place. They were akin to natural wonders. Or that we could domesticate certain animals and sometimes eat what they produced, eat them, or plant seeds that would provide food, or draw on cave walls. The same psychic fog overcame me when, traveling in Europe, I saw my first ancient, towering aqueduct above a chasm stretching a thousand yards. Greater marvels still were the cathedrals that I finally visited, and climbed within. ‘Marvel’ is the key word here: wonder mixed with bewilderment. Man-made.

Should we not marvel at micro-surgery? at computers – in our pockets? at fully-functioning prosthetic limbs? at humans on the moon? Perhaps, somewhat like the fish who does not know it is wet, we are too immersed in our marvels to see them. We no longer apprehend the size of an achievement, the distances that the acquisition of knowledge has crossed. That distance is often the size of an intellectual Everest.

Often in class I would ask my students what they thought was the greatest intellectual achievement of our species. Discovering fire or the wheel were popular answers, or the microchip, or the discovery of quantum physics. To their mystification I would reject all of those. “Language,” I would say, “then the alphabet,” which may or may not be true. Epochal, but achievements – or something else?

We can recognize the magnitude of achievement in the sports world – home runs, knockouts, speed in the 100 meters, weight lifted, points scored. Surely, under the circumstances of the 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens must rank far above any other track star in history, even though, now, his records are broken by high school runners. When in 1962 Whitey Ford broke the record for most consecutive scoreless innings pitched the World Series, I (then fourteen years old) was stunned to learn that the previous record was held by Babe Ruth; yes, that Babe Ruth, who hit more homeruns in 1920 (54) than any other team except the Phillies.

The same applies to the entertainment world. Who ever could match, say, the intensity, conviction, versatility, and sheer charisma of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Maria Callas, or James Cagney (often copied, rarely acknowledged)? And then there is Ella Fitzgerald, standing still, without a fancy wardrobe or background dancers, thrilling with wonder each heart who hears her. Alas, we all easily note great financial wealth, some seemingly beyond all powers of acquisition even in several lifetimes, yet there it is, in one person (pick one). But here I must confess that wealth, no matter its magnitude, does not awe me, or even vex me, though the depth of greed that in many cases fueled the acquisition does, as do some of the means of that acquisition.

But is there a sort of wealth that we can never have enough of? I’ve mentioned sadists, so now I will ask, Who could have imagined a Mother Theresa? That magnitude of devotion, utterly selfless, profoundly sacrificial, is far beyond the ordinary, or even the extraordinary, human ken. Of course, people have been unaccountably brave, have risen to the occasion, but how many have done so for a lifetime?

III.

The leap – the distance covered – from no language to speech (and then to writing, a surrogate for speech) is of a sidereal magnitude. Nothing in nature comes close; nor does anything man-made. Rather it is what many have called the Logos, that is, ‘word’ (or ‘reason’). It is what the Gospel writer John tells us there was in the beginning. It is the root of human consciousness. In addition to the natural world, to technology and the chasms of human character, there is what we have done with our Logos. Evolution cannot explain this gargantuan leap.

Neither can it explain Dante, Chaucer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Bach. Even computers, which can tabulate, cannot explain Bach. When asked how he sculpted his masterpieces – the Battle of the Centaurs or the Pietà – Michelangelo answered (I paraphrase), “first I find the best chunk of marble I can then all I do is chisel until I get to the statue.” ‘Genius’ is our fallback label, but what is that other than a way of naming someone orders of magnitude beyond the rest of us in mind and imagination?

I was already familiar with the cosmic scope of human emotion, which reminded me of the range of temperatures from Death Valley to the South Pole. Still, I found that the range of human intellect and imagination – and by the time I entered college I was an inveterate reader, including of fairy tales – was as impossible to calculate as are the stars in the Milky Way.

When I was eleven years old I awoke from a dream knowing that I had to write about a voyage to Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. I obsessed. I cannot describe the relief I felt when I read that it had already been done. In college I finally read The Divine Comedy, (and would go on to teach it): from the saintly to the satanic, with imagistic detail far beyond the observational powers of normal, or even of abnormal, people, and with a visionary landscape, from Hell to Heaven and to that Beyond, that defies any cinematic special effect – and all in a verse-form of supreme musicality.

But first (to me) came Chaucer and Shakespeare – and along with them something else, something even more unlikely. This one ‘something else’ simply overwhelmed me, because, like that over-rated movie, it really is “everything, everywhere, all at once,” and it comes from our core, from our Logos. It is Rhetoric, “the faculty of observing in the particular case the available means of persuasion,” as Aristotle defined it.

The discipline has a nearly three-thousand-year history and has been used to describe and expain everything from oratory to literature generally to architecture and prayer. Argument, style, performance, psychological proofs, the organization of parts (of everything, everywhere) – all these and more constitute Rhetoric. Any reader of this meditation, under its proper name or some other, has studied it, and for two thousand years it was the mainstay of education.

Virgil, Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare were steeped in it (and, given the speeches of his Iliad, I would argue that Homer was, too). Chaucer could not stop commenting on it, sometimes facetiously. (See his Nun’s Priest’s Tale, about a too-talkative rooster and his wife – and that fox!). Rhetoric is the architectonic tool that reveals the scope of Chaucer’s achievement, from detail to world-view, from character to culture – of a magnitude more to be marveled at than the energy contained in the nucleus of an atom.

And there it all was, too, in Shakespeare, to whom a wonderful teacher, Mr. Ado Bolles, introduced me in the seventh grade. It was The Tragedy of Julius Caesar which, as it happens, has rhetoric as a central theme (as does Love’s labour’s Lost and – but enough). Shakespeare spent uncountable schoolboy hours poring over rhetoric texts, including in Latin (Cicero!) and so with it has given us the heights and depths of human joy and travail. His sonnets alone – a small, though by no means minor, portion of his work – make the point, penetrating, of heart, mind, morality, and the soul, and all in a form as strictly circumscribed as that genius is unbounded.

Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, among tens of thousands of others – whom I will never read, along with music and visual art that I will neither hear nor see. The fifteenth century saw its Big Bang of Books (and so of literacy). Ordinary people could own them, and I have. And what I’ve owned and read is but a sliver of what I hunger to read, and never shall – galaxy upon galaxy. Further up and further out.

IV.

The distances, densities, and energies of the natural world, the mega-variations within homo sapiens along with our preposterous technological marvels, and the expansive expressions of our humanity from that sliver we occupy – our Big Bangs – continue to awe me, even now in my dotage.

Some time ago I debated an atheist who was then the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine. When I raised the question of awe, he answered that he felt it, as much when he pondered the Sistine Chapel as when he beheld the universe. “Really?” I asked. “Why?” His answer fell back on size, beauty, and the complexity of design. “And so,” I said, “that Michelangelo had a really incalculable genius. No accidents in that ceiling, eh?” He saw my point and changed the subject. I would have gone on to ask about the six numbers so crucial to creation that if any one of them, in the first nanosecond of the Big Bang, were changed even infinitesimally the whole show would end; in fact the curtain would never have risen.

My religious (Catholic) belief was as strong as my religious reading was shallow: the Gospels and barely anything more. Then two lands rose, almost at once, from the sea. The first, a huge island, was an article that described the work of a writer I had not heard of, C. S. Lewis. The second was like a whole continent rising that brought me home emotionally, where I belonged, I mean here in our space-time. This was the woman I met on a blind date (dating never having been on my CV). We are now in the fifty-sixth year of our marriage. (I cannot do justice to Alexandra, though in trying I will, I’m afraid, make references that only a few old-timers will recognize. Sometimes she makes Sybil seem under-populated, but if I had to boil down her multitudes I would say: imagine an x-axis stretching from Vivien Leigh to Margaret Dumont and a y-axis running from Gracie Allen to Marie Curie.)

Lewis solved the abiding mystery, especially in his mystical Perelandra. What I thought of as awe he called Joy, a longing sweet though painful that could never be satisfied by anything in this spectrum of space-time. There it was. Through Lewis I came to clearly see the path opened from the greatest magnitude down to the mathematical nano-point that is my self. In a letter he wrote:

            Is the Christian belief not precisely this; that

            the same being which is eternally perfect…

            already at the End etc etc, yet also, in some

            incomprehensible way, is a purposing, feeling,

            and finally crucified Man in a particular place

            and time? So that somehow or other, we have

            it both ways?

 – from beyond the eschaton, where distance disappears, to the here-and-now, the explanation for all those awe-inspiring magnitudes the wonder of which alarmed me, and, above all, pulled me out of myself. Now I know where the signposts are pointing.

If that is a lesson, then this is its summary, from the novelist and philosopher Walker Percy. He writes, “Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God.” Elsewhere he proffers a choice; he means me. We can possess/a clear/problem or we can participate/in a rich/mystery. That’s it. Not really a choice at all.

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