Читать книгу A Wilder Time - William E. Glassley - Страница 16
ОглавлениеBeauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.
—George Bancroft
ALL THAT WE SEE IS SURFACE. What we perceive as experience derives from light reflected, a product of events that have flowed to the present and become, in a moment, a shape seen. Life teaches us to extract texture and form, weight and warmth from that impression.
But what is it that silently rests below that cosmic skin, composing the thing we sense? We reach toward the stars to understand why the sun rises, why winter comes, why we must die. And yet, what we find in each answer and insight is a deeper question, an underlying complex of mysteries that serve only to feed our imagination. With these fragments, we construct a body of knowledge about the components of our world, each of us building a unique framework that becomes the context for our individual lives, the thing upon which we hang notions of meaning.
Through this process, we have come to realize that life is an unstoppable force that endlessly evolves, eventually achieving the emergence of mind from stardust and time. And yet, despite the stupefying significance of this revelation, we also see that, from a cosmic perspective, we are a trivial event. We are a speck on a flowing river of entropy that still gushes from an unfathomable beginning nearly fourteen billion years ago. We’re enthralled by a story we suspect the stars possess, but we remain unable to grasp its outline. We wander over landscapes, looking for histories the stones sequester, hoping there will be in them a flicker of an insight that will expose something worth cherishing.
