THE DAILY ASTRONOMER

Walk with the Astronomer


"The last time I wept, took a timid step, beheld the world uneasily, sought  external affirmation, desired acceptance, disdained rejection, railed at  indifference, or cursed at snobbery was three whole minutes before I  resolved to live in space-time.   Ever since, I have remained here, in constraints of flesh  and bone, of limited mobility, and confined to finite domains.    But, I  expanded my view: expanded it back to the initial singularity and forward to  the unseen trillions of years not yet unfurled.   Suddenly, as though  conjured, the cosmos revealed itself:  not the remote town; not the  superpower nation; not even the confluence of ground and sky stitching  together the horizon.  The unfathomable whole: the cosmological webbing  reducing galaxies to sparkles and scintillations; the cohesive system  governing the descending water spirals in basin drains as effortlessly as it  presides over the construction and implosion of civilizations.   Everything  and nothing..vacuums and star cores....and we humans composed of its  dust....pure sorcery...I know what you're thinking....full of  myself...pompous ass, narcissistic..need to be knocked down a few pegs until  I occupy a place more suiting for someone else's comfort level....plenty of  volunteers....There is no shortage of those all too eager to diminish me...all of us together.....the one true genius of our species is mutual crippling.      And, of course, we have an  abundance of intoxicating palliative offering transitory cessation of pain  as they hasten our deterioration.

"Look at me, regard this horrid, unsightly disaster of ill-fitting parts who  stands before you.  Know that, like Edward Rochester, I am not my ruins.  And, I am beyond your perception, just as you extend beyond mine...or could  if only you'd so as I have done.   I live in space-time.     Yes, my good  sir or madam, you behold me with concealed amusement, drawing in your lower lip to suppress laughter. Meanwhile,  I lurk about the shadows of the Kepler  Moon crater; I gather with Protagoras, Hippias, and Callias; I am at 22,000  miles and turning with the spinning Earth;  You see me in the food aisle,  and I recline on a sun-heated plateau in the late Jurassic; you notice me, a  blight on the landscape lumbering down the avenue, as I watch the last  sunrise over Atlantis; carving the eye of Horus; meandering through the foggy thoroughfares of 1874 London.   Yes, I am that ne'r do well, poor  fellow....I am the rotation of exponential curves around the x-axis; the twists and contours of life's double helix; foam and tidal flow on scorching  sand drifts;  I impress beyond my abilities; I am not as clever as I think I  am; I look like I was built by a committee, conceived under duress; improved in defiance of public opinion occasion for correction; a cause of derision; a moment of awkward disquiet; a joke; a freak; a fraud..

"I soar with Giordano...that which others saw from afar, I leave far behind  me...like everyone else, I am, as Nabakov described, a vertebrae tipped by a divine flame.    You asked me at the beginning why I am so rapturously happy......I tell you, because I now know my life span is one microsecond long,  geologically...by living in space-time I have become impervious to all intolerance; you can neither alter me with insults nor impair me with disapproval.  I will not spend what I don't have to accumulate materials I don't desire to impress people I don't like.  I will not yield to that which seeks to destroy me.   I am an out cast and, by virtue of my isolation, I am as free as I can be in a field of gravity."

"I am here, but not here.....as we've walked along this forest path on this morning of awakening spring, I  have attended the Globe  theater; pursued fireflies with my eight year old self; solved the four  dimensional tesseract puzzle in a 32nd century Martian alley; crafted models of the  Castor star system; traced out the Fibonacci sequences in pine cones;  gone  back to the precise moment we started this walk and consecrated the starting point with incense I collected from Egypt.

"I am the astronomer...the wanderer of worlds....tomorrow I shall be my  current self trebled...and the next day, trebled again..expansive and  untethered....And, though I will one day perish unknown and outside the  consideration of most, I can tell you that just as assuredly as they'll  deliver an obligatory eulogy, they'll will most certainly not bury a just fragment of me....so, Edward, let's keep walking.  We have miles to go and I never want to sleep."