Nich

“Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.”
― Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others

“Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the gray wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still. All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy were happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light-years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope, utterly silent. It was like that. During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her half a mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back again forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement. It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos. The child sent flying by the skateboarder bounced in slow motion and lay still. There was a long pause. Pigeons froze against the gray sky. Promenaders turned to stone. Traffic stopped on Beacon Street. The child’s body lay inert on the asphalt like a piece of crumpled newspaper. The mother’s cry was lost in the space between the stars. How are we to understand the silence of the universe? They say that certain meteorites, upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrate with noticeable sound, but beyond the Earth’s skin of air the sky is silent. There are no voices in the burning bush of the Galaxy. The Milky Way flows across the dark shoals of the summer sky without an audible ripple. Stars blow themselves to smithereens; we hear nothing. Millions of solar systems are sucked into black holes at the centers of the galaxies; they fall like feathers. The universe fattens and swells in a Big Bang, a fireball of Creation exploding from a pinprick of infinite energy, the ultimate firecracker; there is no soundtrack. The membrane is ruptured, a child flies through the air, and the universe is silent.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“Once I saw the Crab Nebula through a powerful telescope. The nebula is the expanding debris of an exploded star, a wreath of shredded star-stuff eight light-years wide and 5000 light-years away. What I saw in the telescope was hardly more than a blur of light, more like a smudge of dust on the mirror of the scope than the shards of a dying star. But seeing through a telescope is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination. In the blur of light I could easily imagine the outrushing shock wave, the expanding envelope of high-energy radiation, the torn filaments of gas, the crushed and pulsing remnant of the skeletal star. I stood for a quarter of an hour with my eye glued to the eyepiece of the scope. I felt a powerful sensation of energy unleashed, of an old building collapsing onto its foundations in a roar of dust at the precise direction of a demolition expert. As I watched the Crab Nebula, I felt as if I should be wearing earplugs, like an artilleryman or the fellow who operates a jackhammer. But there was no sound.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“If Cleopatra’s nose, said Pascal, had been an inch longer or shorter, all history would have been changed.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy