A few days ago, I idled away a few minutes in a local leisure centre car park waiting for Grandson. A slight breeze rustled the leaves of trees planted around the car park. I tried to imagine how a similar breeze had rustled through similar leaves a million years ago and will still do so a million years from now.
A familiar enough notion, but perhaps not something we often dwell on apart from quiet moments. In a sense, we can’t really dwell on it because it is well out of the range of human experience. A million years is too vast to contemplate. Yet we live in a universe which is so vast, so indifferent to our concerns, that perhaps it is best avoided except in moments of quiet contemplation.
The universe is too vast to be anything but indifferent, something many have realised for a long time. Vast and vastly indifferent. Almost as if vast indifference is some kind of universal absolute, a necessary feature of the universe without which it would make no sense.
And maybe there are times when we catch a glimpse of it, even in the breeze, in the rustling of leaves. Absolute Indifference.
6 comments:
I think I might have thought about a lot of the future when I used to read Dan Dare in 'The Eagle'...
Just recently, I started to become indifferent to whether we would actually ever need to buy another car! A lovely lady chum discussed this with me, and we both came to the conclusion that the cost of a new car would be much, much more than all the repairs and servicing we'd need on the current Scrobmobile over a probable lifetime of - say - 15 years!
This could be down to apathy mind you!
"Religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant."
(Peter Berger.)
A million?
Try and contemplate umpteen trillion of your legal tender of debt.
How many pints of best bitter, bottles of Highland Park, fish suppers, etc. is that.
Perhaps that is why our pollies don't think about it. Just sign the bit of paper and do not count the zeros. After all it worked last week, last year, so once more to the well.
Scrobs - I recently came across an old copy of the Eagle complete with a Dan Dare adventure. It certainly took me back. As for cars, I can't see us buying another either. Maybe a little runabout.
Sam - it is audacious and the more we learn about it, the more audacious it seems. On the other hand, we need a certain amount of audacity.
Doonhamer - I don't think they can count zeros now there are always more than the fingers of one hand.
I'm not sue politicians can count zeros once there are more than the fingers of one foot.
dearieme - officials probably never show them zeros, only m or bn or something similar.
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