The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe
“Pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow from a chemical reaction?”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” the anthropologist and philosopher of science Loren Eiseley wrote in his poetic meditation on life in 1960. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
The history of our species is the history of forgetting. Our deepest existential longing is the longing for remembering this cosmic belonging, and the work of creativity is the work of reminding us. We may give the tendrils of our creative longing different names — poetry or physics, music or mathematics, astronomy or art — but they all give us one thing: an antidote to forgetting, so that we may live, even for a little while, wonder-smitten by reality.
“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.”
By Maria Popova
We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.
In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathizer George Sylvester Viereck sat down with Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) for what became his most extensive interview about life — reflections ranging from science to spirituality to the elemental questions of existence. It was published in the Saturday Evening Post on October 29, 1929 — a quarter century after Einstein’s theory of relativity reconfigured our basic understanding of reality with its revelation that space and time are the warp and weft threads of a single fabric, along the curvature of which everything we are and everything we know is gliding.
Albert Einstein by Lotte Jacobi. (University of New Hampshire Museum of Art.)
Considering the helplessness individual human beings feel before the immense geopolitical forces that had hurled the world into its first global war and the decisions individual political leaders were making — decisions already inclining the world toward a second — Einstein aims in his sensitive intellect at the fundamental reality of existence:
“I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.”
When asked about any personal responsibility for his own staggering achievements, he points a steadfast finger at the nonexistence of free will:
“I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.”
For Einstein, the most alive part of the mystery we live with — the mystery we are — is the imagination, that supreme redemption of human life from the prison of determinism. With an eye to his discovery of relativity, he reflects:
“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, funded by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would totally tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.”
[…]
I am enough of an artist to draw freely from the imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Recently, while cleaning out some files, I came across a news story I saved from 2009. It still resonates today with the same common sense logic and awareness that remains elusive among the masses, and frustratingly absent from public policy, political power groups, and corporate accountability. 12-13 years ago.
Sure, things have improved. But the proportion of outrage and individual virtues in comparison to the broad scale changes needed in oil reliance, automotive design, and all around energy production industries, remains too small to make a difference thus far.
A related link from 2015 I included at the bottom describes the problem as described by climate scientists, in even more stark terms than Friedman.
This planet is on the short side of the math, and that’s always been due to the blindness or denial of what the problem to solve actually is.
The last two Q & As in this interview say it best. >MB
Q&A: Columnist Tom Friedman on Climate Change
In his bestselling book “Hot, Flat, and Crowded,” New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman argues that countries that pioneer renewable-energy technologies will increase their national security and prosperity at the expense of those that cling to fossil fuels. He spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Sharon Begley: (Article continued below…)
Begley: A Gallup poll found that 41 percent of Americans—a record high—say concerns about climate change are exaggerated. Why is the public so resistant to the findings of climate science?
Friedman: What’s ironic is that that poll comes out at a time when more and more studies are suggesting that climate change is happening faster, bigger, quicker and with more powerful impacts than we anticipated just a few years ago. For whatever reason, climate change was presented as a political issue, and because [of that] there had to be sides … Also, there is a real aversion among scientists to popularizing things, so sometimes they’ve been a little diffident about making the case strongly. And part of the problem is that the most vocal global advocate on climate change has been Al Gore. For all these reasons it’s not surprising that the average person would be confused.
In the 1970s, the country was making progress toward renewable energy. Then things came to a screeching halt. What happened?
We were too successful. We imposed draconian mileage standards on cars, and it had a very big impact. At the same time, there was a global oil glut, and oil prices collapsed after Jimmy Carter left office [removing the economic pressure to move away from oil]. Ronald Reagan came in and instead of keeping up the initiative to have more solar energy, have more wind power, invest in energy efficiency and continue increasing mileage requirements for cars, he put the brakes on. Reagan proudly stripped the solar panels off the White House roof.
In “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” you use the phrase “dumb as we wanna be” to describe Americans’ attitudes toward energy and climate. What examples did you have in mind?
There are so many. I was trying to convey this idea that we thought we could sit back and delay everything until we got around to it. As a result we fell behind in the renewable-energy industries that are going to be the next great global industry. I believe this industry, which I call ET—energy technology, the search for abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons—is going to be the IT of the 21st century. One of the problems with the term “green” is that the definition was imposed by its opponents, by the Rush Limbaugh crowd. They named green [as] liberal, tree-hugging, sissy, girlie-man, unpatriotic, vaguely European. What I’ve been trying to do in this book is to rename green as geopolitical, geostrategic, geo-economic, capitalistic, patriotic. The country that owns green, that dominates that industry, is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, competitive companies, healthy population and, most of all, global respect. I want that country to be the United States of America. This isn’t just about electric power. It’s about economic power, it’s about national power.
You’re critical of efforts to get people to make small, symbolic gestures to use less energy. What’s wrong with that?
The danger is you think that if you change your light bulbs [to compact fluorescents], you’ve solved the problem. My motto is, change your leaders, not your light bulbs. Because what leaders do is rewrite the rules. They rewrite the rules of what utilities can burn as energy. They rewrite the car-mileage rules. They rewrite the rules of whether a nuclear plant can be built. These are the only things that give you [change at the scale we need]. Without scale change right now, in terms of climate we’re really cooked. You know, I come out of the world of covering foreign policy, and that trained me to look for where the leverage points are. I don’t think the leverage points now are in more consciousness-raising.
In the past, the public was ahead of politicians on issues such as civil rights. Is that the case with energy and climate?
It’s all about how you frame the issues. We’ve done polling at The New York Times, and if you ask people, would you like a carbon tax or a [higher] gasoline tax, they say no, no. But then you say, would you like a tax that combats climate change over the long term, [and they say,] yeah, I could see that. And would you like a tax that relieves us from living under the thumb of petro-dictators, [and they say,] yeah, I’d like that. I mean, what is it we’re trying to do? [To change things so] that there won’t be such a thing as a “green car,” there will just be a car, and you won’t be able to build it except at the highest levels of efficiency. There won’t be such a thing as a “green home,” there will just be a home, and you will not be able to build it unless it is at the highest standards of green energy, efficiency and sustainability. You’ll know the green revolution has been won when the word “green” disappears.
Ms. Lockwood is the ideas editor at the website Rest of World and the author of the forthcoming book “1,001 Voices on Climate Change,” from which this essay is adapted.
Devi Lockwood spent five years traveling the globe talking to people about changes they were seeing to their local water and climates. Here are some of the stories she heard.
Tuvalu
A little more than 10,000 people live in Tuvalu. Generations ago, Polynesians navigated here by the stars, calling the sprinkles of land in the vast blue of the South Pacific home. With 10 square miles of total area, less than five miles of roads and only one hospital on the main island, Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest countryin the world. Disney World is four times larger in area. Tuvalu’s capital city, Funafuti, sits about 585 miles south of the Equator.
By some estimates, Tuvaluans will be forced, by water scarcity and rising sea levels, to migrate elsewhere in the next 50 years. This mass exodus is already happening. Large Tuvaluan outposts exist in Fiji and New Zealand.
I came to Tuvalu with a question: What does it mean for a whole nation to become uninhabitable in my lifetime?
Tauala Katea, the director of Tuvalu’s meteorological service, sat in his office near the airport and tilted a monitor to show me an image of a recent flood when water bubbled up under a field by the runway. “This is what climate change looks like,” he told me.
“In 2000, Tuvaluans living in the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka crops were suffering,” he said. “The root crops seemed rotten and the size was getting smaller and smaller.”
Those two starchy staples of Tuvaluan cuisine are grown in pits dug underground. This crop failure was the first indication that something was wrong. The culprit was found to be saltwater intrusion linked to sea level rise.
The last 20 years have marked a period of significant change in the Tuvaluan way of life. Thatched roofs and freshwater wells are things of the past. The freshwater lens underneath the island, a layer that floats above denser seawater, has become salty and contaminated. Each home now has a water tank attached to a corrugated iron roof by a gutter. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and also used to wash clothes and dishes and for bathing.
Imported food is now commonplace. During my month in Tuvalu (from December 2014 to January 2015), I learned what climate change tastes like: imported rice, tinned corned beef, a handful of imported carrots and apples, the occasional local papaya, bananas and many creative uses for custard powder.
