Month: March 2023

After these few months of reading with first graders, I made a comment about how well they were doing. The response was, “some are doing great, and some are just reading words.” That caused me to think about many conversations with adults. Often we talk to fill the silence, not to communicate an idea. We use words and sentences which, on closer examination, convey little but disconnected words and sentences. If there is an idea buried in them, it is often quite vague.

Of course I then proceeded to extrapolate to life in general. A vague and disconnected stream of conscientiousness about how my actions are often just that, a series of disconnected activities. I think there is a place for such an activity, but I also think it should be embedded in a “Purpose Driven Life.” As with organizations, I don’t think it is frivolous to consider the question, “why do I exist?”

Do we live a life of words, or of complete sentences?

Considering our understanding of the Universe, I happened across the picture of the day and narratives about it. Guided by an AI based chatbot.

The Earth looks like an immense plain, rugged by a thousand kinds of facets and reliefs, green hills, flowery valleys, mountains more or less high, meandering rivers in the plains, lakes with cool shores, vast seas, infinitely varied countryside. This land seems to us fixed for eternity, sitting on century-old foundations, crowned by a sky at times pure and at times cloudy, extended so as to form the unshakable foundation of the universe. The Sun, the Moon and the stars seem to turn around her. From all these appearances, man has easily believed himself to be the centre and the purpose of creation, a vain presumption that he held for a very long time, as there was no one to contradict him.

Camille Flammarion, Astronomie populaire (1880)

The engraving may have been based on the following story

This fact reminds us of the story Levayer relates in his Letters. It seems that an anchorite, probably a nephew of the Fathers of the Eastern deserts, boasted of having been to the farthest edge of the world, and of having been forced there to bend his shoulders, due to the meeting of heaven and Earth at that very end.

Camille Flammarion, Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1865)

To me it is more of an illustration of the quote by Sir Arthur Eddington, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”