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.John Dee, the Elizabethan geographer and mathematician, dreamed up a great idea, which is just what we need.You shoot a mirror up into space so that it is traveling faster than the speed of light (there’s the rub).Then you can look in the mirror and watch all the earth’s previous history unfolding as on a movie screen.Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea.They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swing of the Severn Bore.They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them.They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir-forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every ten years.When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded ten feet.Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?People say that a good seat in the backyard affords as accurate and inspiring a vantage point on the planet earth as any observation tower on Alpha Centauri.They are wrong.We see through a glass darkly.We find ourselves in the middle of a movie, or, God help us, a take for a movie, and we don’t know what’s on the rest of the film.Say you could look through John Dee’s mirror whizzing through space; say you could heave our relief globe into motion like a giant top and breathe life on its surface; say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: What would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes.Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood.Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity.The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead.Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt.The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back.Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings.The ice rolls up—mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale—the ice rolls back.A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand.A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow.Slow the film.You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting.Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in an hour.New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock.The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched, shadowless figures of ghosts.The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys like slag, and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid.Slow it down more, come closer still.A dot appears, a flesh-flake.It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes.This is your life.Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine.Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecules’ loops.Freedom cuts both ways.Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate as the shape of the air in time.Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fiords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.“Every religion that does not affirm that God is hidden,” said Pascal flatly, “is not true.”What is man, that thou art mindful of him? This is where the great modern religions are so unthinkably radical: the love of God! For we can see that we are as many as the leaves of trees.But it could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy.If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.In nature, improbabilites are the one stock in trade.The whole creation is one lunatic fringe.If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.The question from agnosticism is, Who turned on the lights? The question from faith is, Whatever for? Thoreau climbs Mount Katahdin and gives vent to an almost outraged sense of the reality of the things of this world: “I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them.What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” The Lord God of gods, the Lord God of gods, he knoweth….Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine.Humanists seized on the expression, but it was hardly news.We knew, looking around, that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to a conclusion.But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his simple machine still hums; but if the thinker’s attention strays for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether.And, as I have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any way simple
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