12 April, Canyonlands NP, Needles District

Camping backcountry in a dry river wash (don’t worry, no storms in the forecast) without my usual blue canvas folding chair, so this will be short. Writing by headlamp as the moon rises. As the earth turns she casts shadows of the needles from one wall of the canyon against the other. Beautiful! Was it Chesterton who remarked on the great advantages of living on an oblate spheroid? In any case I wonder how it possibly could have taken so long to figure out the roundness of the earth given clues like this. But then again, I know I underestimate how much history goes into the ease with which I recognize such facts. The spherical earth, the phases of the moon, why Venus follows the sun so closely. Or why this rocky place is shaped how it is. Great things, and they have not come easily to the human race. I think of George Eliot’s remark in Middlemarch that medical practitioners once had to dig up corpses or buy them from the hangman in order to understand anatomy. I don’t have much against the Enlightenment, really, and if I rail against it from time to time it is mostly from contrariness, or, if you will, a certain complacency about what it has given me. It did take some things too far: it confused the world with the mind, and believed there was nothing beyond what the mind could compass. Alas, Descartes, it wasn’t your fault; it was the times. The world had been big and scary for so long. But I guess what I’ve been coming to realize out here is that it seems the world is somehow at its most beautiful when it’s big and scary, at least just a little.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 12April2006 )