Fragments From Floyd

Start from the beginning, here, at the top of the page. On the blue marble that is Earth, near the left curve of the planet is what we earthlings call the Middle East, with Africa on around a bit and just out of sight. Somewhere, on the exact opposite of this view, I sit at my computer in a place called Virginia this morning looking for perspective. And this seems like a pretty good exercise for just that end.

Look from this planet we are held to, spin on, live and die on, beyond, to the other chunks of rock and clouds of gas we call planets in our tiny wheel of galactic debris that whirls around our sun--not the largest, brightest, oldest or more energetic star in the galaxies, but exactly as it must be for us to have come to this moment, wherever on the surface we sit and spin and wonder and click the keys.

Keep going, down the page, along this continuum, taking the largest thing in our direct experience--the 7000 mile diameter of earth, and image yourself on Earth inside the circumference of our Day Star, it's firey mantle our new sky. And then, the sun, a thousand suns, into a red giant like Arcturus; and a thousand Arcturuses into the supergiant Antares, visible tonight in Scorpio.

This the largest form that aggregated matter takes in the universe, dwarfed beyond comprehension by the dimensions of space, of a single galaxy, of galaxy systems and strings, dotted across an expanding canvas, moving apart at the speed of light.

Ah, I think I'm properly grounded now, and ready to start the day with my perspectives appropriately adjusted. All that remains is to go back and read Pascal's "Man's Proportion" (Pensees 199) that carries us here:

"Let us then know our limits; we are something, and we are not everything; such existence we have takes from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness; and the smallness of our existence hides infinity from our view...

"Behold: this is our true state. It is this which renders us incapable of knowing anything for certain or from being absolutely ignorant. We wander in a vast medium, always uncertain and drifting, pushed by one wind and then another. Whenever we find a fixed point to attach and fix ourselves to, it shifts and leaves us and, if we follow it, it slips away from us and flees from us eternally. Nothing stops for us. This is our natural state, but the one most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find a firm seat, and a final, constant base on which to build a tower which will lift us to the infinite; but all our foundations crack, and the earth opens up into an abyss.

And..."finally, what is man in nature? He is nothing in comparison with the infinite, and everything in comparison with nothingness, a middle term between all and nothing. He is infinitely severed from comprehending the extremes; the end of things and their principle are for him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he arises and the infinity into which he is engulfed."