Mere
Feynman:
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms.
Nothing is “mere.”
I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part — perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.
The stars are lawless. And they nowhere decree what we ought to weep for, fight for. Love and terror, nausea, grace — these are born in us.
So I say, with Richard, “Nothing is mere.” I say this arbitrarily, since you could just as well say “Everything is mere,” or “The 35% merest things are mere,” depending on where you set the threshold. But arbitrary things matter quite a bit.
(The word “arbitrary” originally meant “according to one’s will.”)
Kierkegaard:
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what then would life be but despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches — how empty and devoid of comfort would life be! But for that reason it is not so[.]
[H]e sees in secret and recognizes distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing.
But everything moves you, and in infinite love. Even what we human beings call a trifle and unmoved pass by, the sparrow’s need, that moves you; what we so often scarcely pay attention to, a human sigh, that moves you, Infinite Love.
This world is a precious place. And the generations do rise up, one after another, like the leaves of the forest. And no one sees in secret, and no one counts the tears, and it will all be forgotten someday.
But not yet. And because I love this place, I intend to do what I can to keep it around.