This is us (on the cosmic calendar)

I don't want this story (ours or Harvey's) to end. But of course, time will march on – with or without us. Eventually without, no doubt. As Russell says, we must in the meantime turn our attention to other things.

"…In the closing second of the cosmic year there's industrialisation, fascism, the combustion engine, Augusto Pinochet, Nikola Tesla, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Alexander Hamilton, Viv Richards, Lucky Luciano, Ada Lovelace, crowdfunding, the split atom, Pluto, surrealism, plastic, Einstein, FloJo, Sitting Bull, Beatrix Potter, Indira Gandhi, Niels Bohr, Calamity Jane, Bob Dylan, Random Access Memory, soccer, pebble-dash, unfriending, the Russo-Japanese War, Coco Chanel, antibiotics, the Burj Khalifa, Billie Holiday, Golda Meir, Igor Stravinsky, pizza, Thermos flasks, the Cuban Missile Crisis, thirty summer Olympics and twenty-four winter, Katsushika Hokusai, Bashar Assad, Lady Gaga, Erik Satie, Muhammad Ali, the deep state, the world wars, flying, cyberspace, steel, transistors, Kosovo, teabags, W. B. Yeats, dark matter, jeans, the stock exchange, the Arab Spring, Virginia Woolf, Alberto Giacometti, Usain Bolt, Johnny Cash, birth control, frozen food, the sprung mattress, the Higgs boson, the moving image, chess. Except of course the universe doesn't end at the stroke of midnight. Time moves on…"

— Orbital by Samantha Harvey
https://a.co/5Rz69NL

a cosmic and mysterious thing

"To stand on another body of rock that isn’t the earth; is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it? It’s probably a childish thought, but he has an idea that if you could get far enough away from the earth you’d be able finally to understand it – to see it with your own eyes as an object, a small blue dot, a cosmic and mysterious thing. Not to understand its mystery, but to understand that it is mysterious. To see it as a mathematical swarm. To see the solidity fall away from it."

Orbital" by Samantha Harvey: https://a.co/7rlMVAp

How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith | The New Yorker

A poet whose religiosity (which "begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end") is complicated, possibly incoherent, but still fascinating from a humanist perspective. His story would have made the cut for James's Gifford Lectures.

"...During his years at Poetry, Wiman came to feel alienated from contemporary poetry and what he regarded as its self-obsessed confessionalism. Before he learned he had cancer, he'd been planning to resign from the magazine—he and Chapman, in thrall to the mythology of another pair of poet partners, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, living and writing in pastoral bliss in New Hampshire, hoped to leave Chicago for Tennessee and make Fairfield into their own Eagle Pond Farm. But Wiman's cancer treatments can cost more than a million dollars a year; handcuffed by health care, they stayed put. Then, in 2010, Wiman was invited to give a lecture at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, on the campus of the Yale Divinity School. He was so taken by his conversations with the students, the way they talked so straightforwardly about their faith and their fears and what he considers life's ultimate concerns, that when he got home he wrote a letter to Yale angling for a job.

Wiman became a senior lecturer in religion and literature, and Chapman became a lecturer in English. He is now the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts. One Friday morning this fall, at nine-thirty on the nose, he arrived in a seminar room on the Sterling Quadrangle for his course "Poetry and Faith" holding up a stack of handouts like Perseus holding the head of Medusa. He'd woken that morning full of fever and pain and nausea—something that still happens to him every few weeks, most often from colds and viruses his weakened immune system can't fight off—and had considered cancelling the class, but he wanted to clear up something he'd said the previous week, about Philip Larkin's "Aubade." Wiman had told his students that the poem spoke the truth to him as a Christian, which shocked some of them, since it famously describes religion as "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die."

For Wiman, the poem's theological power comes from its confrontation with "a kind of absolute nothingness." His handout contained a few quotations clarifying the point. The first was from the German theologian H. J. Iwand: "Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists!" The second was from a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer not long before he was murdered by the Nazis: "We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur" (as if there were no God). Before Wiman could finish with the handout, a student tried to slip in late. Wiman reminded his class of the punishment for tardiness—memorizing a sonnet—then turned to that week's readings, which were about love..."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/a-poets-faith

Remembering Carl Sagan

"Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge… It can tell us when we're being lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes."

Remembering Carl Sagan, who left us on this day in 1996: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/09/carl-sagan-science-democracy/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C1Fxd0gxeNB/

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Jane Addams

John Dewey's friend and inspiration...

Today is the birthday of social reformer and peace activist Jane Addams, born in Cedarville, Illinois (1860). When she was in her 20s, she and her friend Ellen Gates Starr took the Grand Tour of Europe, an excursion that was popular for young people at the time, in which they traveled widely before choosing marriage or school. Addams had already graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, but she also suffered depression, and physical pain related to a childhood disability, and she wasn't quite sure what she wanted to do.

Addams and Gates toured the social settlements in London, which were housing units dedicated to assisting the large influx of immigrants to the city. The social settlements were created as a response to issues created by poverty, education, and urbanization. While in London, Addams visited a vegetable market and was appalled at the sight of vendors throwing bread and food in the air as a sport for paupers. The paupers clawed and scraped for tiny morsels of food. Addams was struck by how inhumanely the poor were treated. She and Gates vowed to do something when they returned to Chicago. She said, "We have all accepted bread from someone, at least until we were fourteen." For the rest of her life, she never forgot the sight of the paupers in London, their hands raised desperately in the air for food. Even watching dance performances and doing calisthenics reminded her of their desperation.

Addams lived in Chicago's 19th Ward, which was populated mostly by immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Greece, Russia, and Bohemia. She was alarmed by the number of women who were forced to leave their children at home to go to work. Some of them even tied their children to chairs to keep them safe. She and Gates raised money from other wealthy women, and found a large mansion in need of repair. They named it Hull-House, and within two years, they were serving 2,000 residents a week.

Hull-House held classes in cooking, English language, and citizenship, and even operated a day care, library, art gallery, and a kindergarten. Addams was a firm believer that education could lift children from dire circumstances. She said: "America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live."

Addams was a prolific and ardent supporter of peace, cofounding The Women's Peace Party and serving as the first president. She was so committed to change within the city of Chicago that she took a post as the garbage inspector for the 19th Ward at a salary of $1,000 a year. She was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, and she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Jane Addams lived at Hull-House until her death in 1935. She once said: "I am not one of those who believe — broadly speaking — that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance."

Her books include Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922) and 20 Years at Hull-House (1910).

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/twa-from-wednesday-september-6-2017?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Hannah Arendt’s Gifford Lectures

When Hannah Arendt became the first woman to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures, she delivered a staggering meditation on the life of the mind, thinking vs. knowing, and the lacuna between truth and meaning themarginalian.org/2014…

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/CvSHJ-HOiGE/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023)

Historians and philosophers of the future will look to his work for insight into these inglorious times.

https://www.threads.net/t/Cu0MrvSLazY/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==