A good read. I only wish I had the intellectual prowess to have something to add.
I will say, once you really digest it, it becomes impossible to look at the crescent moon at night and not immediately triangulate the position of the sun, even though the sun is not visible. Truly internalizing your place on this "floating sphere of rock and water" is as close to a religious experience as I have had.
But I'll never walk on the moon, and I'll never see an earth-rise. I am convinced the moon is a ball of rock, but my mortality and inability to go and see tenders my heart towards those who firmly believe in other 'unconfirmed' ideas, say, that the moon is a bowl of fire or that lightning bolts are Zeus having a go on some poor soul. It makes me sad and afraid in a way the young, strident, physics loving, atheist me in the past could not understand.
> How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
We do owe something to the supernatural, for killing it. I just don't know what. Love? Then again, maybe we owe something to Socrates, for killing him.
I will say, once you really digest it, it becomes impossible to look at the crescent moon at night and not immediately triangulate the position of the sun, even though the sun is not visible. Truly internalizing your place on this "floating sphere of rock and water" is as close to a religious experience as I have had.
But I'll never walk on the moon, and I'll never see an earth-rise. I am convinced the moon is a ball of rock, but my mortality and inability to go and see tenders my heart towards those who firmly believe in other 'unconfirmed' ideas, say, that the moon is a bowl of fire or that lightning bolts are Zeus having a go on some poor soul. It makes me sad and afraid in a way the young, strident, physics loving, atheist me in the past could not understand.
> How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
We do owe something to the supernatural, for killing it. I just don't know what. Love? Then again, maybe we owe something to Socrates, for killing him.