Thoughts for a Friday afternoon

While driving this morning I noticed my car was pulling to the left. Though this would be a great thing for the country, is not a good thing for my car. I pulled over in the shitting-down rain and checked the air pressure and sure enough, my front tire was losing air. Since I am supposed to drive to North Carolina tomorrow, there was nothing else to do but to take it back to the Firestone Tires that had rotated these selfsame tires last week.

“No romance novels allowed!” hollered the Firestone Tires employee, before I’d even made it completely across the waiting area to the cash register. Since I refuse to enter any waiting space where I will be lingering for longer than 10 minutes without bringing along with me a book (even if all I do during that time is hold the book open and stare at the TV), I now found myself the object of intense scrutiny by the aforementioned Firestone Tires guy, as well as four or five other employees and assorted customers.

“Better not be a romance novel!” the Firestone guy hollered again, in case the guys out in the shop missed it the first time. Fortunately, the book was no romance novel, though what it was is almost worse: “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Allen, the renowned science writer.

“What the heck is this?” the Firestone guy asked, having taken the book from my hands and lifted his glasses to study the cover. “What are you, a psychiatrist or something?”

“I’m a librarian,” I thought about mumbling, then thought better of it. Instead I just smiled and laughed, overjoyed at being correctly pegged for an egghead.

After an extended conversation with the Firestone guy about the merits of James Patterson versus Michael Connelly, I was able to flee to the relative safety of the waiting area, where the news on TV alternated between coverage of Sarah Palin and updates on the hurricane about to hit the place where I’m supposed to go on vacation tomorrow. (I preferred hearing about the hurricane.)

All of which leads me to the moment when I was finally able to tune out this stuff and read the following passage in the Thomas book, hastily retyped into my blog for your Friday afternoon contemplation:

“The world with what is now the fashion to call the ‘Big Bang.' Characteristically, we have assigned the wrong words for the very beginning of the earth and ourselves, in order to evade another term that would cause this century embarrassment. It could not, of course, have been a bang of any sort, with no atmosphere to conduct the waves of sound, and no ears. It was something else, occurring in the most absolute silence we can imagine. It was the Great Light.

We say it had been chaos before, but it was not the kind of place we use the word ‘chaos’ for today, things tumbling over each other and bumping around. Chaos did not have that meaning in Greek; it simply meant empty.

We took it, in our words, from chaos to cosmos, a word that simply meant order, cosmetic. We perceived the order in surprise, and our cosmologists and physicists continue to find new and astonishing aspects of the order. We made up the word ‘universe’ from the whole affair, meaning literally turning everything into one thing. We used to say it was a miracle, and we still permit ourselves to refer to the whole universe as a marvel, holding in our unconscious minds the original root meaning of these two words, miracle and marvel—from the ancient root word smei, signifying a smile. It immensely pleases a human being to see something never seen before, even more to learn something never known before, most of all to think something never thought before…

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. We are only now beginning to appreciate how strange and splendid it is, how it catches the breath, the loveliest object afloat around the sun, encased in its own blue bubble of atmosphere, manufacturing and breathing its own oxygen, fixing its own nitrogen from the air into the soil, generating its own weather at the surface of its rain forests, constructing its own carapace from living parts: chalk cliffs, coral reefs, old fossils from earlier forms of life now covered by layers of new life meshed together around the globe, Troy upon Troy.

Seen from the right distance, from the corner of the eye of an extraterrestrial visitor, it must surely seem a single creature, clinging to the round warm stone, turning in the sun.”