ABSTRACT
Somewhere in my turbulent and apathetic teen years, I developed a fascination with evolutionary timeframes, and with the universe generally. As I write these words, they sound almost like a confession, and, in many ways, I was saved. My salvation was helped along by great storytellers like Stephen Jay Gould, whose essays on natural history I discovered in high school. Though Gould, at the end of the day, dismissed science and religion to their separate chambers, the tales he told were deeply moral and they spoke to the crusader in me. I also fell under the spell of a still-young, black turtleneck-wearing Carl Sagan whose Cosmos (book and TV series) I knew virtually by heart. Around age 17, I acquired a small telescope. By an incredible stroke of beginner’s luck, the first time I pointed it at a patch of the night sky I vaguely knew to be traversed by the planets, I hit upon a fuzzy yellow vibrating disc. I turned the knob and the fuzzy blob resolved itself into a perfect miniature planet: a tiny golden ball with a clearly defined ring. Saturn! I laughed as I recalled Sagan’s account of how early astronomers described the planet as having ears. That description was perfect. Now I was an astronomer too. Then, as now, my science education was somewhat spotty and self-taught. I
generally avoided “hard” science classes, but in my senior year of high school, I summoned the courage to take chemistry. I was completely charmed by the periodic table of elements which seemed to me so imminently reasonable and comprehensive, yet strange and fathomless. When I think back to this period, what most surprises me is that my wonder at these foreign realms of astronomy or chemistry had little connection to nature per se-in the sense of being out “in” nature-and even less to do with what is today my chief concern, personally and academically: the state of the natural “environment.” As far as I can tell, my environmental consciousness evolved along a different path than my interest in science or the cosmos. The particular enchantment I felt in those days bore little connection to my immediate physical surroundings, yet I experienced it as a kind of sensory immersion or physical transport. What I remember vividly is the smell of my chemistry textbook when I cracked it open in the pre-dawn darkness to cram for a test. (Occasionally, I come across a book that has that exact smell and experience a wave of nostalgia.) I recall a certain headiness that came with the realization that I actually understood the equations. Strangely, I have no memory
of chemicals or chemical reactions-their explosions, odors, or colors-though a large portion of class (my least favorite part) was devoted to lab work. I had little interest in the hands-on or shared experience of chemistry. Similarly, the feeling I recall, and often have today when gazing through a telescope, was a disembodied or disconnected awe. A telescope takes one away from Earth, often in ways that are welcome-especially, perhaps, for (all-too-embodied) teenagers. The whole cosmic encounter requires mediation by tools and is, to some extent, impossible without them. As captivating as they are, one does not really “experience” celestial objects. These early encounters, in other words, lacked the immediate sensuousness of a summer rainstorm or the dusty crunch of autumn leaves underfoot. Yet my memories of that time remain potently visceral. Probably youth was a factor. Biologist Ursula Goodenough, who is today a
vocal proponent of a grand scientific-spiritual narrative called the Epic of Evolution, recalls having had “a lot of trouble with the universe” when she was young. On a camping trip at age 20, she gazed up into a vast starry sky and experienced a kind of existential freefall so intense and frightening, she writes, that “I had to roll over and bury my face in my pillow” (Goodenough 1998, p. 9). She eventually learned to manage the “poignant nihilism” and “bleak emptiness” brought on by thoughts of the cosmos by means of an arrangement she calls her “covenant with mystery.” It was okay, Goodenough decided, at last, not to have answers to ‘Really Big Questions’ (Goodenough 2010, n.p.). To me, Goodenough’s arrangement with the cosmos sounds more like an
uneasy truce than a covenantal embrace. But then, I never had much trouble with the universe. Looking back, I suspect that part of the power I sensed during solitary moments with my telescope or chemistry textbook was my own. Perhaps turning from the cosmos to chemical elements and back, or from the history of biology to the breathtaking scale of the universe, I also experienced what Big Historian David Christian calls “the play of scales”: the intellectual and aesthetic excitement and vertiginous thrill of moving from micro to macro-realities, and of sensing the possibility of their harmony. Probably my early-positiveencounter with the cosmos has relevance for my having ended up, though by a circuitous route, in religious studies (no flight from mystery here), while Goodenough went on to compose genetics textbooks and advocate for a scientific cosmology that puts the whole universe in good order.1
