Although we’ve passed the solstice, the nights still trespass seriously on the days. By five o’clock the sky is already dusky and the first faint stars are pricking out. As I stand on the big rock gazing up at them, a saying attributed to science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke comes into my head. “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.” And that’s when it happens – a sudden and absolute understanding that space comes all the way down to earth, that nothing shelters us, not buildings, not trees, not clouds. Nothing. Standing on this bulge of bare rock, for one awesome and awful moment I am utterly, nakedly exposed to eternity.
We hide from such awareness. We bury ourselves in the busy minutiae of our daily lives. We don’t need to be mariners or prairie people, nor do we need to subscribe to the Flat Earth Society to imagine that the sky itself is a great protective dome, a perfect hemisphere fitted tightly round the earth’s rim, a dome filled with weathers, awash with golden sunlight or shadowed with silvery moonlight. We’ve even done our best to humanize our nighttime view by joining the dotted stars into the familiar shapes of constellations: Great Bear, Orion, Cassiopeia.
I remember as a child (in the age of letter writing) how smart it felt, when I added the return address, to start with ME at a numbered house on a named street, followed by the town, the country, the continent and then, with a flourish, PLANET EARTH. I ran out of steam at that point, but now I can add the rest of the solar system and the whirlpool we call the Milky Way. This, I’m given to understand, is made up of hundreds of billions of stars. Hundreds of billions? Can that be right? I’m in no position to argue, so I’ll just add Milky Way galaxy to my imaginary envelope and move on to the two trillion galaxies (give or take a bunch) rushing, clustered and super clustered through the visible universe, which, thanks to the stunning photographs emerging from ever more powerful telescopes, becomes more visible by the day.
Trillions? My brain balks at strings of zeroes and packs it in around the million mark. By now it’s shying like a timid horse and whinnying, time to return to the stable, boss!
I abandon the big rock and retreat to the comfort of the house with its modest street number firmly screwed in place and its lid of recycled rubber shingles securely clamped over my head. The theoretical knowledge, however rudimentary, of where we stand in the scheme of things is not at all the same as experiencing the world as less than a nano-speck of dust leashed to an unremarkable star on the outer edge of forever. Our bone-bound brains can’t cope with such a miss-match, and moments of full-on recognition like the one that brushed me briefly this evening are – fortunately? – rare.
When I set out twelve months ago to explore the world as it exists in this yard, I hadn’t thought about the world at night or the world underground. Nor had I considered the worlds that are too large for my comprehension, or too small for my human eyes.
It’s only thanks to the marvels of microphotography that I’m even vaguely aware of the mites and springtails, the hundreds of nematodes, the thousands of protozoa and millions of bacteria that inhabit every crumb of our compost-rich soil. An astonishing Serengeti. These wonderfully named animalcules swarm through land, sea, air – and us – as lively as tadpoles, enigmatic as ink blots, elaborate as rococo vases, and fanciful as the drawings of a seven-year-old. I’m not sure where we stand on the spectrum between the incomprehensible world of stars and the fathomless world of bacteria. I feel inadequate to deal with such a stretch in either direction but, as awesome as moments of clarity regarding space may be, I’m inclined to agree with Polish poet and Nobel prize winner Wislawa Szymborska who wrote, “I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.”
SEASON’S GREETINGS!
Time to take a deep breath, break out the shortbread, sit back with a mug of hot chocolate, and wish you a holiday filled with manageable numbers, quiet moments and joyful surprises.
Happy Christmas and a peaceful new year from Penny UK