WINTER 2002George A. Crispin
Woodbury MM
ne of the advantages of being retired and teaching part-time at a university is that one gets to use the university facilities. The gym, the recreation center, the faculty dining room, concerts in the auditorium, they are all available. One facility, for me, is a consummate form of boundless entertainment, education, and joy. It is the library.
For a retiree, who has time to do with what he chooses, the library is a veritable fairyland, the proverbial “kid in a candy store” phenomenon. Thousands of books, magazines, newspapers, reference sources, and more, all catalogued and accessible now on computer. Thousands of stories, poems, articles, compendiums of information, more facts on any one subject than one can absorb, all waiting to be experienced. One can wander for hours through this museum of information, a smorgasbord of knowledge, and be lost in the rapture of tasting one choice bit of reading after another.
So it was a few weeks ago, on my ritual walk through, experiencing that transcendent intellectual high that removes one for a couple of hours from the often harsh realities of life. Then I saw it. The most amazing picture on a magazine cover I can remember seeing. The picture was that of a galaxy 250,000 lightyears removed from our Milky Way taken recently by a new observatory in Canada.
It was real, a photograph. Not a painting, nor an artist’s imagined rendition, but a real photograph. This phenomenon is actually out there. I had never seen so many stars. Like the dots on the ceiling tile of a large room, billions of points of light, each one a star, some like our own, each with the possibility of a planetary system. I stood transfixed and transformed. I had never seen anything so majestic, so immense, so off the scale amazing. The power, the scale. How far is 250,000 light years? Light travels 186,300 per second, over eleven million miles a minute. How far in a year? A century? How far in 250,000 light years? My mind reeled with the thought. The experience of seeing this picture stayed with me for the rest of the day, and more.
As time passed I started thinking. All experiences need to be put into perspective. But what could encompass this experience? What perspective? It is wondrous how often some small, seemingly unimportant piece of information can float back into one’s con sciousness when it is needed. I remember reading that there are as many brain cells in the human brain as there are stars in our galaxy. The thought occurred: Why must we go 250,000 lightyears to experience a transforming phenomenon? Life-changing miracles exist at our doorstop and all around us. What if each brain cell could light up, and what if the inside of a lighted brain could be photographed? Would we not have a picture not unlike the galaxy 250,000 light years away? The only difference is size and distance, not the grandeur of what we are experiencing.
As spectacular as it is, the galaxy far off in the outer reaches of space may not be the most spectacular in the universe. As wonderful as it is, it does not surpass the mind that photographed it that resides with us, right within our cranium. Those billions of points of light, our brain cells, perhaps a galaxy of our own, capable of composing a musical score, or a poem, or an equation. A library is a good place, but we do not have to look far to find transcendent phenomena. We carry them within us.
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