Plato once imagined a world of atoms, tiny particles to small to accurately imagine, impossible to ever see. He explained that these were the fundamental building blocks of our universe, that nothing smaller could exist. While bits of rudimentary materials science had dabbled in chemistry and engineering, he was busy considering things on a much smaller, more detailed scale. One wonders if he sheepishly doubted the absolute limit of size he’d set forth, believing the world to be much, much smaller than even he could imagine.
Centuries later, we refer to Planck’s Constant, and the Planck Length as the smallest possible unit of granularity in our universe. Plato had every bit as much reason to believe his atom was the ultimate basis for all matter, and we brazenly declare that nothing smaller than the Planck Length could possibly exist, that we’ve found the deepest resolution of reality itself.
Paleontologists watch the grand sweep of history over millennia, and tell their stories, huge sweeping swaths of time in which ice ages occupy a sentence, and all of human history an afterthought. They measure and imagine, and when we read their stories we imagine with them, and try to learn from what has been on this planet before us. We sigh, and content ourselves with scratching the surface, because that is literally all we are currently capable of doing, pricking tiny holes and scratching shallow inscriptions in the surface of our home. We are humbled to note that men of irresistable power and their immortal empires, after a blink of an eye, are rubble and dust, with hungry seekers finding little more than crumbs hinting at their once mighty existence.
Historians craft a different sort of story. Theirs is a world of names and dates, a curious interplay of political forces and intrigue, documenting wars and treaties, rises and falls, intermarriage, campaigns, kingdoms and martyrdoms, documents and fragments, a flurry of dots connected after the fact by so many forensic magicians. We take delight in our occasional discoveries that someone’s cousin or lover was important, if not then certainly now. Because the power of hard science with its facts and figures plays weak second to documentation and substantiated allegation, men are tempted from time to time to lately bestow honor or dishonor, nobility or ignominy. We silently wonder what part we might play in the greater scheme, and whether our name will be mentioned a thousand years from now.
Biographies draw us in more quickly to a world more recent and more personal, a tasty hybrid of personal storytelling and an attempt to incorporate it into a broader context. The human predilection for focusing on abstract hard facts in lieu of tangible life lessons is evident in the Bible. Consider how many books are devoted to the chronicles of the kings of Israel and Judah, with a scant 31 chapters devoted to the lessons they learned. We find ourselves glancing at the annals of the kings of America and Europe, but only the oddball beatnik reads the likes of Ghandi or the Dalai Lama. There are lessons to be learned from contemplating the scope of a man’s life, single-dose mantras that generally boil down to “follow your dreams”.
In reality, much of history does in fact come down to following your dreams. If one thing is frightfully apparent, it is the ephemeral nature of a human life, as tangible as a dream upon waking. The only thing history guarantees us in cold, harsh terms is that our quietest whimper and earth-shakingest roar will be equally erased before ten thousand years are past.
Individual journals can provide close-up snapshots of daily life, although we again find ourselves limited by the bias toward history. One might argue that the journals of the Whitmans are not so informative when they mention the distance the traveled on a given day, or the number of souls saved, as to encourage later settlers to not abuse the natives.
But the main consideration here is that reality is a fractal. Before we’d even discovered Plato’s atom, we’d discovered molecules. Leptons and hadrons were next, and even quarks may be made up of smaller bits. But no smaller than what Max Planck will allow. Probably. There is always more detail to be discovered, whole odysseys to be indulged at the controls of a magnifying glass, alien landscapes living under an electron microscope.
Patterns emerge in the sweep of epochs and eons, histories and biographies. And always, no matter how much more closely we look more detail and more beauty emerge. We can find beauty in following the course of the Bible, take lessons from its progression from Adam’s Fall to Christ’s Redemption. We can follow the path of Christ, and see a trend pointing toward the value of the individual. But we can look closer, and other truths emerge, such as the value of family and loyalty when we read of Ruth and Naomi. Even from individual stories multiple principles can be derived.
If the sweep of history has its strange beauty, if the stories of great leaders carry their truths, how much beauty is there to be found at the 1:1 level of detail, in the living of life itself? There is no comparing a parable teaching us to cherish those who are close to us, to the smell of your lover’s hair, or the unfettered abandon in the embrace of your children. You can read a thousand stories of great men stumbling over their own hubris. But look sharp! You may only get one chance to stumble over your own.
And this is the terrible truth of reality television, that we find the daily goings-on of others so terrifically fascinating, without catching the blatant lesson to go out and live our own stories. Executives, living their own dreams, see millions of viewers. Meanwhile, millions of lives are put on pause to soak in canned micro-biographies meant to sell detergent and movie tickets.
I’m fading fast, and struggling to find the end to encapsulate what I was feeling moments ago. It’s night, the house is terribly quiet, my children are in bed, and my own bed is cold because I’ve chased my beloved off to go see a doctor so she can be over her bronchitis. There are traces of snow on the ground outside, and the air is crisp, without biting too badly. My kids have got their nightly hug and kiss in bed, which reminds me that I spend more time than I’d like teaching and chastising, and not as much time as I’d like snuggling and playing. I strike a delicate balance between ruining their future with a pleasant and carefree childhood, and the knowledge that there’s a sea of stories of those who lost their children early and find themselves wishing their final moments had been just a little gentler.
Early tomorrow, long before the sun comes up, I’ll get out of bed and drive to work to collect debts and help keep the economy moving, not because the bank has any real need for a particular payment, but because tomorrow as a result of my prodding and insistence, someone will finish the day having met their obligation, hard though it may be, instead of having given up on one more thing. I’ll have spent the morning with several friends, hard-working genuine people in the same line of work.
And frankly, I’ll sleep much better having got this down on paper, and no longer rattling around my head.
Live your dreams.
