On July and rainbows

Were it not for TAM, I would just as soon forget this month ever happened. Still, I’m not bereft. The sadness of the current time is tempered by my sense of  how deeply I love and how deeply I am loved. And that’s a good thing.

Still,  I can hardly stand the news, especially that of the antics in Washington.

So, I’m reading. And fiddling with my photography. And tending my garden. And laughing over margaritas with Sweetie. And teaching Nina to roll over. And reading.

Currently, it’s Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. This snippet from the first chapter, The Anaesthetic of Familiarity sent me scrambling for my pen to mark it:

It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.

Here it seems to me, lies the best answer to those petty-minded scrooges who are always asking what is the use of science. In one of those mythic remarks of uncertain authorship, Michael Faraday is alleged to have been asked what was the use of science. ‘Sir,’ Faraday replied. ‘Of what use is a new-born child?’ The obvious thing for Faraday (or Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was) to have meant was that a baby might be no use for anything at present, but it has great potential for the future. I now like to think that he meant something else, too: What is the use of bringing a baby into the world if the only thing it does with its life is just work to go on living? If everything is judged by how ‘useful’ it is – useful for staying alive – we are left with a futile circularity. There must be some added value. At least part of life should be devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it ending. This is how we rightly justify spending taxpayers’ money on the arts. It is one of the justifications properly offered for conserving rare species and beautiful buildings. It is how we answer those barbarians who think wild elephants and historic houses should be preserved only if they ‘pay their way.’ And science is the same. Of course, science pays its way; of course its useful. But that is not all science is.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes to a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked – and I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

Off to read some more.

Advertisement