Oct 302013
 

Onward, world. “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.” So old John Adams maintained. Such revolutions of perspective in our own day were most deeply effected in the Civil Rights Movement and the landing of the first man on the moon. (The cultural shift of the radical sixties Left is an older game of social priorities that clatter back and forth between the poles of received authority and gamesome anarchy.) All the astronauts speak movingly of a shift in their sense of things when they see the “big blue marble” for the first time. Lewis Thomas likened the globe to a single living cell, its parts are so deeply interdependent; all human endeavor and wisdom balancing like a drop of dew on a single blade of grass, “glad and grim/observant and atheist held in a single prayer.” This essentially poetic insight, though, is a gift adrift when we refuse to see in it both possibility and humility: our smallness and our greatness at once.

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