The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest

Author:Steven Forrest [Forrest, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-30T17:33:06+00:00

Adolph Hitler and Mohandas Gandhi. Monoliths. Symbols of good and evil. These two loom like colossi in the collective mind, casting stark shadows across the far more ambivalent lives most of us lead. Baal, Ra, Apollo—their temples are fallen. No lambs or sparrows burn and bleed for them any longer. We worship men and women, paying homage in newsreels and editorials.

Gandhi and Hitler. What do they have in common? Eyes? Ears? Headaches? As much as we may resist seeing it, those two are brothers in a far deeper sense than flesh alone. Both men shaped history. Each one touched the awareness of a generation, weaving into it his own dream, his own vision. Each man became a symbol of personal power. And each wielded that power in a way that the world will never forget.

All of us dream. What is it that takes one person’s dream and so magnifies it that it warps history? What drives a man or woman out of safety and anonymity to become a world shaper? Whirling in the icy black edges of the solar system, minuscule and ominous as a plague virus, tiny Pluto holds the answer.

Standing on the frozen methane plains of this celestial outpost, the sun is so distant that it shines only with the light of a bright star. That observation is symbolic: from Pluto we actually experience the fact that the sun is nothing special, that the earth is a dust mote, and that we are microbes vainly scratching out a moment’s existence. How can we accept that? How can that perception be absorbed without destroying us? Only through a fundamental transformation of being. Failing that, Pluto forces us to stare into the ultimate meaninglessness of our existence. Nothing matters. How could anything matter? We are only parasites awaiting extinction in an indifferent universe.

To face Pluto is to face the elemental futility of life. The planet was discovered in 1930. It is no accident that we were discovering existentialism around the same time. Pluto ushers us into the theater of the absurd. It confronts us with galaxies and supernovas, with endless aeons of time. And it looks us squarely in the eye, pronouncing the final verdict: “You are nothing. Your life is a joke.”

To live with that brutal truth we must leap beyond the melodramas of personality. We must identify with something larger, more timeless. In that desperate flight from absurdity there is only one path of escape: we must leave our stamp on eternity. We must change the world.

Pluto is the planet of vast dreams, of visions, of conquest and transformation. Driven by emptiness, haunted by anonymity, it rips through our safe routines, thrusting into consciousness a sense of mission, a sense of destiny. Mere survival is insufficient. Merely to live is nothing. We die and in moments we are forgotten. Like Gandhi, like Hitler, we must carve our initials on the tree of history.

Indian independence and nonviolent rebellion were not Gandhi’s ideas alone. Hitler did not invent Nazism. If

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