It is like an incessant whisper, like an endless rush of thought in the mind of the collective mind: a frightening sense that ours is a very difficult time to live, that reality today is too hard to bear. Such feelings are errors of intimacy – we live too close to the bone of our critical situations, we zoom the space of time too close to see the opportunity.
Ursula K. Le Guin believed that the main tool of our works of imagination, and science fiction in particular, is “getting away” – “stepping back from 'reality' in order to see it better” by revealing the “integrated complex” that is part of it and revealing “reality translated into a higher plane, a more loving impulse, than all without the help of deep religion or informed art.” And yet if it is considered that the imagination of nature will always surpass ours because we are its image, since science is the tool that we have invented to explain and translate the language in which nature thinks that reality exists, then science itself can give us this removal of the lens without the part of fiction – nowhere more than to draw us back to the wilderness to look at our miraculous life. the incredible impossibility, of life itself; what Le Guin calls “the place of our death.”
That's what physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores in a surprising way the Atlantic An essay that contemplates the luminous improbability of life, from the cosmic dice of star formation to the cellular roulette of biological conception. After writing touchingly about the poetics of what happens when we die, he directs his critical intellect to the poetics of what had to happen in order to live. Regarding how difficult it is for us to see ourselves as part of another civilization that will go the way of the Aztecs and the Greeks, he points out:
It's even harder to understand how unique each of us is, how unlikely, how lucky we are to be alive… There are far more arrangements of human DNA than there are atoms in the universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different person. One of those many arrangements that can happen to each of us.
The reality of any one person, you see, is the astonishing victory that accompanies every reproductive effort – about a hundred billion to one, numbers so large that we bleed out of control. It gives an amazing view:
If you took a very long ruler from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would have been other people who might have been there, but never were. Each of us won a lottery with a hundred thousand different players.
If hope is the act of believing that the impossible is possible – believing that a wild bet can be a winning bet – then each of us is a living axiom of hope. Alan writes:
To be alive at all is the rarest stroke of luck we will ever have. Yet it is very easy to ignore it, to take it for granted. We wake up in the morning, drink coffee, make breakfast, send the kids to school, go to our jobs, go through our schedule, worry about deadlines, check things on our to-do list. And we forget that underneath it all is something very rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is less likely to depend on miracles… From the past, billions of years ago, until the distant future, billions of years to come, the universe will not see one of you again.
We don't have a right to life, this gift of unlimited fortune, but we do have a responsibility to it – what poet and astrologer Rebecca Elson so aptly calls “the responsibility of wonder.” Against the background of our impossibility, even the subtle stance of privilege becomes absurd, unnatural; the only way to stand is enough to kneel in “cosmic overwhelm,” saying over and over a short prayer: “Thank you.”
