I just had the fortune of gazing up at a full moon, reflecting the light of the sun through lazy, misty night clouds. The celestial body is so far away that I can't even register it with my sense of depth perception. It is ludicrously huge and distant.
I never made the full moon appear. It was just there, unexpectedly. Nor did I play any part in engineering the sky, which appears massive and profound from this open-air space I call home. From here the sky is not a slither of blue between buildings, as it is for most in the urban sprawl. It is a vast canvas, and I can see the sun rising on one side of the world and setting on the other so much that the process has become embodied within me.
Depth, distance, size and scale is integrated into life out here. Wonder carries with it. This wider sense takes me somewhere further than moment to moment happiness - they create reverence for the cosmos by making me part of it.
Without a sense of reverence and wonder and eternal mystery, how flat our lives.
This is not to promote lack of understanding like some romantic rube. We have scientific tools that can tell us how far the moon is from the earth, or even take us there to have a proper gander at it.
The availability of these facts do nothing to remove the sheer poetic joy of the moon in this moment. For perhaps it is gazing back at me, and feels like I am some small part of its perception.
Imagine not having that sense of art or poetry.
How terrifying it is to think that we may live in a future where vast walls surround us and we lose all contact with the Cosmos which created and sustains us. Once we lose this sense we lose reverence.
And where else can that lead but to the moment-to-moment emptiness of mass-hedonism; the second-rate happiness which plagues our age and tramples the natural joys beneath its clumsy feet.
For there is a difference between the flickering light of a fire and the scientific canopy of a lightbulb. The latter is more useful, but the former is more terrible and passionate and beautiful.
The moon is high in the sky tonight, and nothing of human contrivance can match its wonder - except perhaps the conversations in the corridors of philosophers
Selim 'Selim' Talat.
