#565 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Tuesday January 24)
Friends,
In previous Musings, I’ve cited iconic first lines and last lines from books and movies. What follows is one of my favorite beginnings to a novel. Its mix of the despair and hope perhaps is reflective of the duality of our current times and the road ahead. We all know the initial phrase, but its impact is more meaningful when considering the entirety of the quotation:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
– A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, 1859
BOY, ARE WE MOVING FAST!
A couple of weeks ago I shared the first picture of the Earth from far away—a lonely blue ball hurtling through space.
Steve Mossholder decided to provide a little perspective on the speed with which we hurtle through the emptiness of space: “A fun calculation for high school level geometry is the estimation of the velocity. Assume that the earth's path is a circle, and not an ellipse (oval), centered at the sun. Assume the radius of the circle is the old, well-known grade school figure, of 93 million miles. Assume that the earth completes the path in 365.25 days. Use the equation rate x time = distance. Calculate the circumference (distance travelled: C = 2 pi x r), divide by the time (days to go once around), and you have the rate. This rate will be in miles/day. Do the conversion of units to arrive at the rate in miles/second. Allowing for the approximated figures, the earth has a velocity of a little more than 18.5 miles per second.”
YOU CONVINCED ME—I’M WRONG
After suggesting last week that it’s no big deal to say “I want to shoot myself,” to make a point, I got a number of responses. Many supported my view that this is simply an inoffensive colloquialism. One response, however, did not. Joey Behrstock convinced me in his response that it’s hurtful (and perhaps even hateful) to use such phrases. His example is that I would never say this to someone who has considered suicide or has had a family member consider suicide—and that, of course, is correct. Since I would never say it to them, how could I say it to anyone, not knowing their state of mind. He’s right.
I still stand by my other point—that it inappropriate and hurtful for a listener to admonish the speaker publicly. There is too much “education” being done in a manner that may make the person doing the correcting feel noble, while being abusive or humiliating—in a small way—toward the speaker (a not-so-micro-aggression…).
Have a great day,
Glenn