In the desert

The more I tried to listen, the more I realised that my ears were accustomed to ignoring and blocking out sounds, and that they rang faintly all the time when it was quiet. I assumed it was damage from loud music and cities. Then I went out into the desert, at Chuck’s suggestion, and spent five days there on foot. After three days in that immense austere silence, broken only by the occasional owl hoot, coyote yip, gust of wind hissing through cactus needles, crunch of hiking boot, the ringing in my ears was gone. On the fourth day, lying there in the shade of a stunted palo verde tree, waiting out the afternoon heat, with the air perfectly still, and all the birds and animals motionless in the shade, I became aware of a very faint rushing sound coming from my body, similar to what you hear in a seashell. As far as I can determine, it was the sound of my blood circulating. 

After three days in the desert, all the senses start to blossom into life, and the most dramatic change takes place in the eyes.

from an essay by Richard Grant about Charles Bowden

Image: by Wars via wikipedia

So delicately traced

Nature gave us an innate curiosity and, aware of its own art and beauty, created us in order to be the audience of the wonderful spectacle of the world; because it would have toiled in vain if things so great, so brilliant, so delicately traced, so splendid and variously beautiful, were displayed to an empty house.

— from On Leisure by Seneca (circa 62 AD), quoted by Alberto Manguel in Curiosity (2015)

The universe to the eye of the human understanding is framed like a labyrinth, presenting as it does on every side so many ambiguities of way, deceitful resemblances of objects and signs, natures too irregular in their lines and so knotted and entangled. And then the way is still said to be made by the uncertain light of sense, sometimes shining out, sometimes clouded over, through the woods of experience and particulars...

— from The Great Instauration by Francis Bacon (1620), quoted by Philip Ball in Curiosity (2012)


Photo by author

Invisibility

Even here on earth, with our senses seemingly full to the brim, we see almost nothing of what matters. Molecules, microbes, cells, germs, genes, viruses, the interior of the planet, the depths of the ocean: none of that is visible to the naked eye. And, as David Hume noted, none of the causes controlling our world are visible under any conditions; we can see a fragment of the what of things, but nothing at all of the why. Gravity, electricity, magnetism, economic forces, the processes that sustain life as well as those that eventually end it—all this is invisible. We cannot even see the most important parts of our own selves: our thoughts, feelings, personalities, psyches, morals, minds, souls.

from a review by Kathryn Schulz of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen by Philip Ball.

At the beginning of the book Ball quotes from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad:

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all sincerity are compressed into the inappreciable moment in time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

Image: Georges Seurat

1 googol AD

Today, the average density of matter in the visible Universe is a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre; by 1 googol AD, that figure will have fallen to one electron or positron in a volume far, far bigger than today’s visible Universe.

via Michael Hanlon


Image: Abel 39 by Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona via wikimedia

Seas that are open again

Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened—the gratitude of a convalescent—for convalescence was unexpected…. The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.

Friedrich Nietzsche quoted by Oliver Sacks


Photo by author: Lyme Bay, 6 April 2014

Through which we see

The light from this image is being focused in your eyes by a concentrated solution of crystallin proteins. The lenses in your eyes are built of long cells that, early in their development, filled themselves with crystallins and then made the major sacrifice, ejecting their nuclei and mitochondria and leaving only a smooth, transparent solution of protein. We then rely on these proteins to see for the rest of our lives.

PDB

Image by David S. Goodsell, the Scripps Research Institute

A shimmering succession

If [my] head were to try to encapsulate in a few words everything that is most amazing about itself, those few words would be: it has a world

-- The Kingdom of Infinite Space by Raymond Tallis (2008)

Map by Orlando Ferguson, 1893 via wikipedia