Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin

Author:Susan Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504012188
Publisher: Open Road Media

TERROR

Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make possible the force of nature or history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.… The rulers themselves do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or natural laws.…

HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism

You if you were sensible

When I tell you the stars flash signals, each one dreadful,

You would not turn and answer me

“The night is wonderful.”

D. H. LAWRENCE, “Under the Oak”

He speaks of the natural order of things and the regular movements of heavenly bodies. As for her efforts to make anything different, he directs her gaze to the skies. There is no caring in natural law, he says, things are as they are. As to any meaning in these movements, he says, he cannot say, but listen, he says, to the measurements. He is rarely very much over six feet tall, he says, and there are 5,280 feet in one mile, and the average distance from the earth to the sun, he says, is 93 million miles. Think about immensity, he tells her. The planet Saturn is 886 million miles from the sun. No star is less than 26 trillion miles away from the earth. Think of the smallness of this life, he says, and the vanity of supposing significance.

He reminds her she could not exist in that void. He says the average temperature of the human body lies at 119.5 Centigrade. Do you know how hot the sun is? he asks. The temperature of the sun, he raises his voice now, is 5,500 degrees Centigrade at its exterior, and, he leans forward and shouts, 40,000,000 degrees in its interior.

He tells her how perishable she is and how little there is to perish. A speck weighing usually only from forty to one hundred kilos. But the earth weighs 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons, he says, and the mass of the sun, he tells her triumphantly, is 332,000 times that of the earth, and the stars and the gases, the stars and the gases in this galaxy alone, he crows, are as heavy as 100 billion suns.

But at the speed of light, he lets her know, mass no longer exists; she is incapable of that kind of speed, he says, she would perish at that speed. And time in the sky, he tells her, is measured in light-years. From the earth to the moon, he says, is five and one half light-seconds. From the earth to the sun, eight light-minutes. The diameter of the whole solar system, he says, is not quite one half of a light-day. This is closeness, he says, this is intimacy. Distance, he says, is farther away, unimaginably, unspeakably vast. The nearest star, he tells her, is over four light-years away. Sirius, he says, is eight light-years away. To cross this galaxy would take 100,000 light-years. Even if she could travel at the speed of light, he says, she could never survive that journey. Her life would end thousands of years before she could reach her destination.

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