In You

In an interview, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked, 'What keeps you up at night, Neil?' I expected his answer to be his usual soundbite of 'the questions we do not yet know to ask'. But his answer was this: if the universe is expanding at a constant speed, what we see when we look up at the night sky is only a piece ripped from a larger universe which has now expanded so vast that its entirety has escaped our field of vision; what we perceive as a whole at the present, could actually just be a portion of a whole. He's worried that there might be a piece forever lost to us, and he imagines a time in the future, when future people would look up and see only their own piece of universe, not knowing their heavens belonged with ours.

 

This struck me as the musings of a man who knows so much that he knew he knows only very little. And now the implications of the theories he knows are challenging his truths. And yet, because he is a scientist, he respects what he doesn't know, and he is comfortable with how little his significance is, or how fleeting. I find it especially poignant that someone of his caliber would situate himself as almost worthless from a cosmic perspective, and quite literally, too. Against the universe, he is less than a speck, like all of us.

 

In college, we read Pigeon Feathers by John Updike. I remember it to be a (very long) short story about a boy, David, who is asked to get rid of the pigeons which were considered pests in their farm. While relieving himself in the outhouse, he comes to thinking about his mortality. Already, his discovery of a book has shaken some core ideas he had assigned to be true about his existence. His young mind panicked at the thought of falling into the dark chasm under where he squatted in the outhouse. If he fell (into his poop below), nobody would hear him scream, and perhaps nobody would even think of looking for him, and he will be swallowed into the darkness. David's thoughts follow him through his tasks, and while he was burying the six dead birds he was able to shoot with his rifle, he noticed how the feathers of each bird were intricately positioned. They were in 'a pattern that flowed without error'. The feathers stiffened in the right places when the birds braced for flight, and they were soft and fine where the birds needed them to be soft and fine. Here was his epiphany: if the universe granted these pests so much attention that even their feathers had divine detail, then he should be fine, for he was a boy and not a bird, and surely the universe would take care of him, too.

 

David's crisis is a familiar crisis, and it recurs as the subject of so many great literature: in the course of our lives, our smallness will terrify us.  We only have to look up at the night sky, and our insignificance will be made clear.

 

Many have romanticized our littleness against this unimaginable vastness. In our ‘quest for meaning’, we have appealed to the notion of consciousness, and to our capacity for love, or for language. We wove into our souls beliefs in a purpose, destiny and divinity. Because philosophy is tedious, we seek refuge in the arts. We paint and dance, and write verses that celebrate-- and mourn-- our existence.

But for me, one of the best to address this crisis is an astrophysicist.

 

In one of his lectures, Neil deGrasse Tyson counted on his right hand the elements that make up the universe, and on his other hand, the elements that make up the human body. 'You are stardust,’ he concluded. ‘The stuff that makes up the universe is the same as the stuff that makes up You. You are the universe', he said.

 

 'And the universe is in you.'

 

 

 

Written July 5, 2020