Status Updates From Figuring

I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.

[Margaret Fuller]
BY GENIUS BELONGING TO THE WORLD. It strikes me, this existential ecology, as the simplest, most perfect measure of an actualized life—far fuller than fame and success, more generous than personal love and its greedy affinities, more precise than happiness and its confused aims.

Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.

It was during that selfsame benefit, broadcast nationwide, that Kennedy rose above his moment, above all moments, to make his most enduring offering to culture:
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.

We are congenitally blind to the lasts of life—a survival mechanism of the human psyche driven by the same stubborn dissent from impermanence that drives our dreams of immortality.

Carson understood that the time of insects and the time of stars exist along a shared continuum, with the human animal, so grand in its ambitions and yet so perishable in its finite allotment of time, perched midway between them, beholden to both. A world without insects would be as dark as a world without stars, shorn of the shared stardust that makes a world a world.

Silent Spring sang hymnal proof of Whitman’s conviction that true democracy is accomplished at least as much—if not “doubly as much”—by “fitting and democratic sociologies, literatures and arts” as it is by political laws. Carson had course-corrected government by employing the art of literature in the service of socially wakeful science.

Perhaps, after all, we aren’t divided so much into mind and body as into mind and mind. And few forces can propel humanity forward more reliably than the cleaving together of kindred minds in solidarity to a shared truth.

Beneath the placid surface of her [Rachel Carson] composure in the face of nonexistence roiled a volcanic restlessness to bring into being something without which the world itself could not go on existing—an island of difficult, lifesaving truth amid the ocean of civilizational delusion.

Nobody was talking about this moral dimension of science. Nobody was placing a hand on humanity’s shoulder and turning us away from this destructive hubris, shaking us into awareness, into humility, into wakefulness to the fragility of a miraculous world that flourished long before we trampled it with our arrogant footsteps and should continue to flourish long after we have gone.

In her final years, Meitner issued a bittersweet lamentation for the era that had ended with the atomic bomb and its hideous hijacking of science:
One could love one’s work and not always be tormented by the fear of the ghastly and malevolent things that people might do with beautiful scientific findings.

[Lise Meitner]
“Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep joy and awe that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.”

[Atomic bomb]
It had all begun one November day twenty years earlier, not with the impulse for destruction but with the purest impulse of science—that hungry fusion of wonder and curiosity with which we seek to understand the universe. It had begun, of course, long before that, for every beginning is an arbitrary point stabbed into the continuum that binds all events and all ages.

the kind of “craziness” that comes from veering from the convention-paved path into that liminal Uranian space where love exists beyond category, beyond the cultural and biological imperative, beyond what even the most precise and poetic language can hold.

From this sandbox of physics and psychology emerged the birth of synchronicity—an ordering system for similarities and acausally connected events that the observer experiences as having a meaningful connection on the basis of his or her subjective situation, a meeting point of internal and external reality.

Carson became the Whitman of science...

[Rachel Carson]:
I spent my years of graduate work at Johns Hopkins. Whatever else I may have learned there, this was the unforgettable lesson: we do not really know anything. What we think we know today is replaced by something else tomorrow.

The paradox of terror is that it contracts our scope into a smallness of attention that frantically filters in only confirmation of our grounds for fear and filters out our grounds for hope.

It was a revelation that science could be a literary subject, that it could speak—nay, sing—to the common reader with melodic might, so gracefully and graciously rejecting the false trade-off between the authority of science and the splendor of literary art. Rachel Carson would model for generations of writers the dignified refusal to give up either in the service of the other.

Writing couldn’t have been a mere “passion”—it must have been for her [Rachel Carson], as it is for many of us who write, redemption, self-salvation, a lifeline. In science she must have found the consolation of the wider lens that humbles the temporal turmoils of any single life against the eternal cosmic backdrop of all life

fragments of truth cohere into a unified sense of meaning, and the task of the artist is to bring that meaning to light.

We are different people in different situations, each of our dormant multitudes awakened by a particular circumstance, particular chemistry, particular stroke of chance; each true, each real—a composite Master of our being.

Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history—personal, political, civilizational—from the trunk of life. Both are highly selective—memory retrospectively so and motive prospectively.

We are never one thing, our slumbering potentialities stirred into being by situations in which chance and choice conspire to make us the people we are said to have been.

the mathematician G. H. Hardy would write:
To have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.