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I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away and their light takes so long to reach us. All we ever see of stars are their old photographs. I am two hundred and twenty-seven million kilometers from the sun. It's light is already ten minutes old. It will not reach Pluto for another two hours... I am watching the stars. Halley's Comet tumbles through the solar system on its great seventy-six-year ellipse.
I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories. Through space, through time! I am trying to give a name to the force that set them in motion. A man goes to the doctor. Says he's depressed. He says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. The doctor says "The treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him, that should pick you up." The man bursts into tears. He says "But doctor... I am Pagliacci." In my opinion, it's [Life] is a highly overrated phenomenon. Mars gets on perfectly without so much as a microorganism. See: there's the south pole beneath us now... No life. No life at all, but giant steps, ninety feet high, scoured by dust and wind into a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the pole in ripples ten thousand years wide. Tell me... would it be greatly improved by an oil pipeline? Thermo-dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.
But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.
Dry your eyes... and let's go home.