Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
The death of a dear friend of mine, combined with today’s solar eclipse, has left me in a contemplative state of mind. I knew this friend mainly as a writer and a teller of wonderful stories. But like most people who write and tell wonderful stories, there was a lot more to him than that. I can’t swear to it, but I think he was a physicist by training, with a fair dollop of math thrown in. He taught high school science, not because he had to, but because he loved it. (After reading a story of mine with a beautiful scene in which the full moon sank in the west, he said with a wry grin, “Ya know, the full moon never sets.” And he was right. It was a simple fact about living on Earth, and I had never noticed it. I had to change the scene.) [A little note added later…What Jeff actually said was “…the full moon never sets at night.” Huge difference. My apologies. See my addendum, “A Little Repair.”] You might expect a person with those creds to write science fiction, but no. He wrote wonderful, quirky, romantic novels in which apparent coincidences — astronomical events, the numerology of dates, chance meetings — turned out to be crucial. He wrote a character who sent the woman of his dreams a valentine that could only be seen through a microscope. To the best of my knowledge, he never published a word.
Like most good books, Jeff’s taught me things I didn’t know, made me aware of my own ignorance, and kept me humble. I love the way books sometimes hit me in the forehead like the palm of my own hand. I’ve been reading a book this week that has had just that effect on me — Salt, by Mark Kurlansky. I never talked about salt with Jeff, but if I had, he might well have said, again with the little grin, “Turns out the word ‘salary’ comes from the Latin ‘salarium,’ a stipend paid to Roman soldiers so they could buy salt.” He was a collector of fascinating tidbits like that.
The truth is, until I read this book, I didn’t think much about salt myself. Salt is an aspect of everyday life, like the moon, I guess you’d say. The only interesting adventure I ever had with salt was when I was a kid, visiting my grandparents in Seattle. Grandma sent me out to the garden with the salt shaker and instructions to pour it on every slug I could find, resulting in endless hours of grotesque entertainment. Salted slugs, I discovered, dissolve into a bubbling puddle of slime. This rather disgusting factoid does not appear in Kurlansky’s book. But almost every other known fact about salt *does* appear in it. I didn’t realize this, but unlike slugs, we literally can’t live without salt. This is true of all mammals, though carnivores get most of their salt from the meat they eat. I knew, in some dim way, that horses will walk for miles just to lick certain salty rocks. It’s not just horses, though. It’s cattle, too, and don’t forget deer, elk, and buffalo. Most animal trails lead to either water or salt licks. Until refrigeration, salt was the only way to preserve food, and also the only way to keep sailors sailing and cavalries moving. As a result, salt mines and salt works have been at the center of a great many wars and conflicts.
I highly recommend the book. But what I have in mind for tonight’s Odd Company is only related to salt in the sense that salt is one of the world’s natural wonders, just as a total eclipse is a natural wonder. Consider how unlikely it is that our moon is just the right size and is just the right distance from both the sun and the Earth to create the sight many of us in the Western Hemisphere saw today. Once you’ve seen a total eclipse of the sun, you never forget it. It’s a very physical, mystical experience. (Says I, having been present for one years ago on an August afternoon on the shore of the Ob Sea in Siberia. Waves of shadow rolled over us; the temperature plummeted; the birds flew to their roosts in the trees; the stars came out. For almost three minutes, there wasn’t a single word in my head, and the crowd on the beach was dead silent. It is a little taste of the Numinous.)
A recent article by William Boyce in The New Atlantis Magazine1 asks the question, “What is space for?” The most usual answer is the one we’ve given for millennia when speaking of any natural wonder. It’s for us. This was the answer the Chinese gave when they discovered a way to make salt from sea water, and the answer the Celts gave when they learned how to mine it. It’s the answer we gave when we discovered the New World. And it’s the answer Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are giving right now when they look up at the stars. There’s treasure up there, ripe for the plucking, and it’s for us. But look where that’s gotten us. We are one election away from leasing our national parks to oil companies. We have changed the natural habitats of so many species so quickly that we are now dealing with a mass extinction. We may soon find our own species decimated as well.
There are other possible answers to that question. Maybe space is not “for us,” any more than the buffalo were or salt is. Maybe space is just for itself, and we should leave it alone, like all the other natural wonders, since we seem to defile everything we touch. There are people who really believe this. But, to me, bestowing this type of dignity on the natural world robs us of our own. We are part of the natural world, after all. If we have no moral right to touch it or interact with it, where does that leave us? I believe it leaves us with no moral right to exist, which surely is not right.
The third and best answer Boyce offers is that outer space — like all overwhelming examples of natural glory — is among those places where we can most easily commune with and learn about Divinity and our own proper part in it. But what exactly does this mean to us as individuals? Boyce quotes Pope Benedict XVI. “The universe is not the product of darkness and unreason. It comes from intelligence, freedom, and from the beauty that is identical with love.”
By allowing ourselves to experience natural wonders — forests, mountains, canyons, the night sky, a total eclipse of the sun — in silence without feeling that we have to do anything other than open up to them, we can best experience humility, gratitude, and profound love. We are such a busy species. Just like anyone else who stops a moment to think nothing and do nothing except be aware of whatever miracle surrounds them, a great many of our astronauts have come back transformed by their experience. People who have undergone such deep transformation in the face of Nature become fiercely merciful and compassionate. Some of us need to climb mountains or travel into the path of a total solar eclipse to understand our true relationship with nature and with one another. Some of us manage to do it just by lying on a summer lawn gazing up at the stars while crickets chirp or fireflies appear and disappear like magic.
I’ve saved tonight’s music for last tonight. This old Beatles tune is a favorite of mine, and it seems especially appropriate for a day when so many of us wondered, in our heart of hearts, whether we would ever see the sun again. So here’s to the sun, the moon, the myriad stars, and Jeff.
"What Is Space For?” by William Boyce, The New Atlantis Magazine, Winter 2024