The Deepest Human Life by Scott Samuelson

Author:Scott Samuelson [Samuelson, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-04-02T22:00:00+00:00

7

The Terrifying Distance of the Stars

Distracted from distraction by distraction

T. S. ELIOT

Let’s go back to a cloudless night in the Middle Ages and look up at the sky. Though the constellations tingle on our retinas the same raw image as ever (give or take a star), they actually look very different, for that delicate dance of light has to be processed by the help of concepts—or, in the absence of concepts, the improvisations of myth. Remember, the earth is not yet a satellite of the sun, the beams of the stars don’t yet have to travel light years, and the twinklings we see aren’t yet the tail ends of beams whose original sources self-pulverized a million years ago. C. S. Lewis, imagining us in medieval times, explains,

Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one expected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything—and so what?1

So what? Well, if we’re sensitive to the tinglings of reality, we’re apt to say with Pascal about our modern cosmos, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”2 Whereas the medieval stargazer feels small in comparison to the skyscraping constellations, the modern stargazer is inclined to feel a creeping worthlessness in comparison with universes on universes, the vanishing littleness of it all. I sometimes wonder if it was the change in astronomy that unleashed our modern anxiety, or if it was our anxiety that pressured us into a new model of the universe.

. . .

Blaise Pascal—born June 19, 1623, at Clermont in Auvergne—lost his mother when he was three, and was raised along with his two sisters by his loving father, a tax commissioner. Like Descartes, Pascal was a genius in any and every sense of the word. By the age of twelve, he’d deduced by himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid. When he was sixteen, he published a treatise on the “mystic hexagram,” in which he laid out what is still known as Pascal’s Theorem.

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