I came across this week’s poem in a beautiful article on The Lost Art of Leisure.
It gnaws at me.
I traded Astronomer for philosopher when reading this and it moved me. It reconnected me to the ancient philosophers. Not just your Cynics, Stoics, Academics and Peripatetics, but the Pre-Socratics — those philosophers so close to Reason’s dawn that their work was part poetry, part mythology, part religion, part science, and part philosophy. Our first, Thales of Miletus, was a source of awe for predicting a lunar eclipse. And so with Elson, I feel we’ve come full circle.
After perusing the poem, I did a little reading about Elson. A brilliant scientist who contributed to seventy scientific publications before she died of cancer at only 39. My reading of the poem now marinates in that all-too-human tragedy.
The movement of the poem is disenchantment. It is a movement from awe, beauty and wonder into the labyrinth of the mundane, lost in the quotidian, Fallen from enchantment.
I think about last week and how I couldn’t meet Pascal’s challenge to sit in a room quietly. They say Heraclitus spent a week in solitary darkness (a shitting hole if memory serves) and it changed him. Descartes used to sit in the dark sauna and think his revolutionary thoughts (no wonder the poor soul perished in the Swedish cold). But I can’t sit in this auld farmhouse alone for a few hours without craving some external source to feed my hungry mental vacuum.
And what about that turn from the nomadic, adventuring philosopher (“to the philosopher, nothing is impersonal” — Nietzsche), drunk on life and the world? What about the great believer of my youth? I am industrious. I, too, have bred enthusiasms. But I, too, have bent my face to the ground “And only count things”. My cosmic tent has dried up.
Starlight became too sharp.
How I hunger for the desire for starlight again.
And most of all: “responsibility to awe”. That is the great reminder that comes to me out of this. As a philosopher, I feel it: the vocation to honour that responsibility to awe.
Of course, this is the journey of life. I hope I’m not presuming when I imagine this arc is the human one: Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained.
We Astronomers by Rebecca Elson
We astronomers are nomads,
Merchants, circus people,
All the earth our tent.
We are industrious.
We breed enthusiasms,
Honour our responsibility to awe.
But the universe has moved a long way off.
Sometimes, I confess,
Starlight seems too sharp,
And like the moon
I bend my face to the ground,
To the small patch where each foot falls,
Before it falls,
And I forget to ask questions,
And only count things.