I know it is natural to be afraid of the night.
Afterall, our major sense is vision and our very survival is frequently linked to our being able to see. And, of course, some of us have overactive imaginations and mine can come steaming out of nowhere and be going full blast in no time. Especially when I get up at 3 am on a February morning and head for the tiny observatory, tea and flashlight in hand. The world is silent. The neighbor’s lights are out. The hillside half-a-mile across the river, sparkling with lights during the early evening hours, now is dark. On such a night I sometimes have had to make a conscious effort to overcome primal fears. I try to show them into some cluttered corner of my mind, open the door, and step out before they can send me back to bed, or to the soft chair in the corner of the library.
And when you add to our hard-wired night fears, the learned, more abstract, night fears – the fear of the unknown, yes – but more the fear of the too well known . . . The kind of fear that rips your soul out and dances on it, for you know in great detail about the vastness of the universe, and the sense of aloneness this knowledge can create is matched by no other. Our science tells us truths we can’t turn away from. It reports cold facts – thrives on them, and these facts suggest that we are a meaningless accident – a cosmic after thought – stuck on a strange planet, orbiting a rather humdrum star, which is one of billions, a number too large to make any sense of . . . and yet, our galaxy of a hundred billion stars or so is, itself, just one of billions.
I have some slight idea of what a billion is, but I’ve never experienced it. I know it would take me 11 days to count out a million pennies – and roughly 32 years to count a billion. I like to impress Observatory visitors with that to get them thinking. But it can scare me when I start to really grasp it. I’ve been to Horseneck Beach, sat in the dunes on a sunny day, and picked up a handful of dry sand, letting it sift slowly through my fingers, aware of the myriad of individual grains – and I know that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand, not on this huge beach where I sit alone, but on all the beaches of our planet, Earth.
Pondering such realities it is easy for us to give in to unyielding despair. I think that’s why many of us turn away from it. We hide from the dark, We turn on the lights. We avoid the night. We avoid the universe. We wrap ourselves in a security blanket of simple, every day concerns. Don’t do it. For here is the night’s precious secret.
The night is not really dark! It is full of light – and that light tells us wonderful things about our universe, about ourselves, and our place in it.
So I repeat, as loudly and clearly as I can, don’t do it. Don’t shut out the night.
Everything I am writing about is part of a huge shout, not against the night, not against that abstract knowledge we call science which has been building for four centuries, but for it.
I have become a creature of the night – no. more than that – I am a champion of it. I am an evangelist, eager to spread knowledge of what is revealed to us in the lights we only can see when it is dark – the lights of the moon, planets, stars and galaxies that reach us across distances and time that are nearly unimaginable. I say “nearly”, because I think there are ways to approach this knowledge that give us experiences that are meaningful and that bring some meaning to things we might assume are ineffable.
And I think what this knowledge leads to is unyielding joy, not despair – a knowledge built on 400 years of science that shows that we are not some cosmic accident, but in fact we are central to the universe. In fact, I would argue that we are nothing less than the universe becoming aware of itself.
Is that a wild flight of fancy? A poets romantic dream? No! I can’t muster all the arguments to make my case in just these few sentences and I won’t try. Besides, I don’t believe these are things you can learn from me and I don’t want you to learn them from me. I want you to develop your own vision by experiencing the night. I’m not a preacher. But I do intend to be a signpost. I do intend to point to ways in which you can build a learning environment for yourself where wonderful things can happen. I know I don’t have the answers. But I do have a sense of what direction to look to find the answers. I can’t make things happen – not for myself, nor for you. But I know for myself I have been able to create an environment where I suddenly have an epiphany – where experiential knowledge enters the soul through the finger tips – where in Einstein’s fine phrase, we stand “rapt in awe”
I do believe the scientific evidence is strong that the universe was formed approximately 13 billion years ago. I do believe the cosmologists and astrophysicists and mathematicians when they tell me that the early universe was relatively simple. That it contained mostly hydrogen, and a bit of helium. I do believe the physicists when they tell me that everything that ever was, still is and all that is, is part of all that ever will be.
The evidence is profound, for it reveals us – the intelligent, tool-using, self-aware bipeds on this planet – to be precious. I know no other word for it. Our planet itself is precious, for it consists of the rarest of building blocks. Carbon, the essential building block for life on Earth, is itself a rarity created during the death throes of an ancient star.
You see, the basic force in that initial universe was gravity – it still is, of course – and gravity brings things together. Like so many things, I hasten to add that we know what gravity does – we still don’t know what it is.
But gravity brought the hydrogen atoms together until there were so many in one place they formed huge stars – incredible, hydrogen-bomb-making machines where collisions of atoms near their centers formed helium and released energy which we would have seen as light. But we didn’t see the light from these stars. We weren’t there yet. These stars were – are – our true grandparents. In a very literal, scientific sense, we emerged from these primal stars. They were huge. They burned much brighter than the stars we see today and they lived life in the cosmic fast lane.
They went through their lives in what in cosmic terms are very brief time periods – millions of years – not billions as stars do today. And they went out with a bang. Not a simple bang, but a very complex, very creative bang in which most of the other basic building blocks of the universe as we know it – and of us in particular – were formed.
Yes, we are star stuff. Rare star stuff. The stuff that was formed in small quantities in the intense death throes of huge, primal stars. All those special atoms – the very rare and unusual ones that make up our planet – the very rare and unusual ones that are now in your body and mine – were once inside the fiery, nuclear hell of an exploding star.
So we are star stuff. I won’t argue here about whether this was intentional. Believe as you choose to believe. Believe there was a plan. Believe there was intelligent design. For me that isn’t the issue. I can’t determine it one way or the other. But it does seem obvious to me billions of years of evolution have led to us – that we are the children of the universe in as real, as literal, as scientific a sense as you can get. And that in a metaphorical sense we children are now looking up and beginning to see our parents and grandparents for the first time. We are becoming aware of the universe that formed us – and we now know that as we look to the stars, we are seeing our past and our future, our history and our destiny.
And so I don’t fear the night, I embrace it with joy. In Einstein’s wonderful words, I stand “rapt in awe.” And I seldom miss a chance to explore it – to let the faint light from those distant stars and galaxies, fall on my upturned eyes. I welcome those little packet of energies – those incredible time travelers bringing messages from afar – as they enter my eyes and trigger synapses in my brain.
There are those who think miracles occur when the common order is suddenly and inexplicably disrupted. I think the miracle is that there is, indeed, a common order and we are here to perceive it. So I look at the night and I see not the darkness, but the light – the light that comes in such a vast range of forms and brings us all these messages from other place and other times. What a precious gift it is and how fortunate we are that we have scientists who are constantly pressing the limits, trying to decode those messages.
Hi Greg —
What a fine essay.
Hope to see you soon, thanks for the invitation for Sunday night.
Steve
Mighty Quill,
This is indeed a beatiful essay . beautiful imagrey. As always you are my soul’s spirit.