A Speck in Vastness
Daniel Rourke, from Huge Entity, quotes Carl Sagan in his recent post, On the Nature of This Pale Blue Dot,
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions,
ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…
Check out his blog post. The Carl Sagan quote is much longer.
This reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions,
“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”
Technorati Tags: vast, humanity, ignorance, wisdom, carl sagan, kurt vonnegut, war, morals
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See also Gurdjieff’s chapter on time:
BEELZEBUB’S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON
by
GEORGE GURDJIEFF
CHAPTER XVI
THE RELATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF TIME
“In order that you may meanwhile have, if only an approximate conspectus of what I have just said, let us take as an example the process of the flow of Time proceeding in any drop of water contained in that decanter standing there on the table.
“Every drop of water in that decanter represents in itself also a whole independent World, namely a World of ‘Microcosmoses’.
“In that little world also, exactly as in other cosmoses, there arise and exist relatively independent infinitesimal ‘individuums’ or ‘beings’.
“For the beings of that infinitesimal World also, exactly as in other cosmoses, there arise and exist relatively independent infinitesimal ‘individuals’ or ‘beings’.
“For the beings of that infinitesimal World also, Time flows in the same sequence in which the flow of Time is sensed by all individuums in all other cosmoses; these infinitesimal beings also, like the beings of cosmoses of other ‘scales’ have their experiences of a definite duration for all their perceptions and manifestations; and also, like them, sense the flow of Time by the comparing of the duration of the phenomena around them.
“Exactly like the beings of other cosmoses, they are born grow up and unite and separate for what are called ‘sex results’; they also fall sick and suffer, and finally, like everything existing in which Objective Reason has not been conceived, they are, as such, destroyed forever.
“For the whole process of the existence of these infinitesimal beings of this smallest World also, Time of definite proportionate duration is also required, and this duration just as in other Worlds also flows from all the surrounding phenomena which are manifested in the given ‘cosmic scale’.
“For them also, Time of definite length is required for the processes of their arising and formation as well as for various events in the process of their existence down to their complete final destruction.
“In the whole course of the process of existence of the beings of this drop of water also, corresponding sequential definite, as they are called, ‘stages’ of the flow of Time are also required.
“A definite time is required for their joys and their sorrows and, in short, for every other kind of indispensable being-experiencings, down to what are called ‘runs-of-bad-luck’, and even to the ‘periods of thirst for self perfection’.
“I repeat, among them, too, the process of the flow of Time has its harmonious succession also, and this succession flows from the totality of all the phenomena surrounding them.”
By Avi Solomon on 08.01.06 4:36 pm
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