Prospero's Books

Make the path as you walk

Several years ago I sat in on a colleague's course in 20th century Spanish literature. The course pushed the limits of my Spanish, but it was worth the effort, in part because it introduced me to one of my now favorite poets, Antonio Machado.

Monday, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore quoted Machado:

Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.

Gore continued:

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures—each a palpable possibility—and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The cosmic dance which is always there

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

--Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

(Thanks to God's Politics for the quotation.)

       

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues

The best Christmas meditation I've read so far this year comes from Zoughbi Zoughbi, director of the Wi'am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre in Bethlehem, as quoted in the always inspiring Signs of Emergence blog:

Every homeless refugee, desperate for a bed for a night, understands the agony of Joseph of Bethlehem.

Every frightened teenage girl, pregnant and lost, comprehends the bewilderment of Mary.

Every executive, trying to reconcile commercial realities with moral imperatives, identifies with the local innkeeper.

Every working person, in a daily routine awakening to a sudden reverence for life, experiences the awe of the Judean shepherd.

Every ruler or intellectual, coming to the limit of human power, evinces the humility of the Magi.

Every tyrant who keeps in control by means of ruthless and harsh practices knows the insecure fear of Herod.

Every infant, born on the rubbish heap of a city slum, shares the indignity of the Holy Birth.

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues....

To dream all the time

Writer's Blog has posted this photo of a window display at New York's Henri Bendel. (Click the picture for a larger image.) The display is said to be inspired by a quotation from the French novelist Marcel Proust:

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Neither arbitrary nor absurd

Yesterday, after naming Paul Davies's Cosmic Jackpot as the Prospero's Books Book of the Year, I spent some time skimming the book again, especially the notes I have made in it. Here's a passage that stands in contrast with Richard Dawkins's portrayal, in The God Delusion, of religion and science as polar opposites:

. . . there were religions, especially monotheistic faiths, which encouraged belief in a created world order. The founding assumption of science is that the physical universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd; it is not just a meaningless jumble of objects and phenomena haphazardly juxtaposed. Rather, there is a coherent scheme of things. This is often expressed by the simple aphorism that there is order in nature (6).

Book of the Year

The second annual Prospero's Books Book of the Year is Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies.

A few sentences from the first pages of the book (especially when read alongside this blog's description, at the top left of each page) may suggest why it was chosen:

About 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on the key to the universe--a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of knowledge. This was Isaac Newton--mystic, theologian, and alchemist--and in spite of his mystical leanings, he did more than anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science . . . .

The word science is derived from the Latin scientia, simply meaning "knowledge." Originally it was just one of many arcane methods used to probe beyond the limitations of our senses in the hope of accessing an unseen reality. The particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways. . . .

The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains contains the secret rules on which the universe runs (4).

(The 2006 Book of the Year was The Museum of Lost Wonder.)