Earth Stove, R.I.P.

The old Earth Stove in my Little House getaway out back may have breathed its last, the cost of repairing/replacing the disintegrating pipe is prohibitive… at least until I win the lottery or become a lot less frugal. All things must pass. Alas.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CmZpzWUptSJ/?igshid=NWQ4MGE5ZTk=

Bookish wisdom

Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" has been on my reading list ever since Barack Obama went out of his way to meet the author and discuss it with her. I finally started it, and just encountered an uncomfortably humbling insight many of us (I hope) can relate to:

"I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp."

Gilead: A Novel" by Marilynne Robinson: https://a.co/bicXECY

How Vast Is the Cosmos, Really?

Life is an accident of space and time. 

There are billions of planets in our galaxy, and billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Those numbers are impossible to picture, but NASA's newest space telescope is helping us see the universe's depths in unprecedented detail. Still, there's one big mystery that humans might never be able to solve: How vast is the cosmos, really, and what does it contain?

If humans were to find evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, it would be a scientific marvel, but also an emotional and spiritual one, the physicist Alan Lightman noted in an essay earlier this fall. Our questions would multiply: "Where did we living things come from? Is there some kind of cosmic community?"

Lightman explains why life in the universe is likely really, really rare. "We living things are a very special arrangement of atoms and molecules," he writes. But these questions aren't just about other planets and galaxies; they're also about us, here on Earth, and why we may want to believe that our lives and our stories are one of a kind. What follows is a reading list on why things are the way they are—from life on Earth down to creepy coincidences at the coffee shop—and how we deal with the unknowable.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader...

The joy of (real) reading

Sleep hasn't come easy lately, at the back end. "Do you struggle getting out of bed in the morning? Marcus Aurelius  can help." Thanks, Mark. But my problem isn't getting out, it's staying in.

The upside of that: the undistracted peace and stillness of pre-dawn is a fine time to read. Not scroll.

Jenny Odell is right, scrolling generally lacks a meaningful  experiential context. And she's right to invoke Marie Kondo. Scrolling rarely sparks joy. Real reading often does. Did. Can again.

…In the past few years, in part because of how frayed my mind felt, I started avoiding my Twitter and Instagram feeds altogether. From this remove, I sat down and wrote out on paper what it was that I really wanted from these platforms. The answer ended up being a sense of recognition among peers, connection to people with shared interests and whose work I admire and the ability to encounter new, unexpected ideas. As opposed to algorithms, I wanted these new things to be recommended by individuals who had reasons to like them, like the weekly set on my local college radio station by a D.J. whose wide-ranging taste I'm at pains to describe, but reliably enjoy. Really, I think I just wanted everything to have a little more context...

Back to my holiday stack. Currently on KSR's "High Sierra" and "New York 2140"…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/opinion/twitter-odell-time.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time

Happy dissolution

Cather only wrote for two or three hours a day. She said, "If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die," she said. "I make it an adventure every day."

Willa Cather's headstone reads, "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." After her death, poet Wallace Stevens said, "We have nothing better than she is."

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-december-7-2022/

"I stand at the seashore..."

Atoms with Consciousness: Yo-Yo Ma Performs Richard Feynman's Ode to the Wonder of Life, Animated

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison...Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/04/22/richard-feynman-yo-yo-ma/

Saving Radnor

https://www.instagram.com/p/ClvzXgPDSAP/?igshid=NWQ4MGE5ZTk=

Charles Darwin, His Beloved Daughter, and How We Find Meaning in Mortality

...Love, Loss, and the Banality of Survival

In the spring of 1849, ten years before On the Origin of Species shook the foundation of humanity's understanding of life, the polymathic astronomer John Herschel — coiner of the word photography, son of Uranus discoverer William Herschel and nephew of Caroline Herschel, the world's first professional female astronomer — invited the forty-year-old Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) to contribute the section on geology to an ambitious manual on ten major branches of science, commissioned by the Royal Navy. Darwin produced a primer that promised to make good geologists even of readers with no prior knowledge of the discipline, so that they might "enjoy the high satisfaction of contributing to the perfection of the history of this wonderful world."

In submitting his manuscript, Darwin wrote to Herschel:

I much fear, from what you say of size of type that it will be too long; but I do not see how I could shorten it, except by rewriting it, & that is a labour which would make me groan. I do not much like it, but I have in vain thought how to make it better. I should be grateful for any corrections or erasures on your part.

A perfectionist prone to debilitating anxiety, Darwin was vexed by the editorial process. But in the autumn of 1850, just as the manual was about to go to press, trouble of a wholly different order eclipsed the professional irritation: The Darwins' beloved nine-year-old daughter, Annie — the second of their ten children and Charles's favorite, fount of curiosity, sunshine of the household — fell ill with a mysterious ailment...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/02/12/annie-darwin/