I've been reading Mona Simpson's A Regular Guy and there's a lovely part in the book where the main character acquires a Matisse. He then gets so attached to it that he cannot stand the thought of it mattering as much as it does and proceeds to give it away. This is the second time that Henri Matisse has entered my life.
The first time was through a friend ( who is no longer a friend, unfortunately) and it was a very specific piece- Icarus. I fell in love with it. I don't know if it's that deep, vibrant blue. Or those exploding yellow stars. Or that wonderful, free falling, almost dancing figure with that beating red heart. There's something so beautiful and tragic about it.
Based on the story of the adventurer who aspired to reach the sun and in trying to attain his dream failed so spectacularly that he must be celebrated. But it's never really failure is it if you dared to dream and dared to defy the gods as it were.Dared to defy your 'humanness'.
Perhaps it meant so much to me then because it came into my life at a time when I was setting out to explore my own life.I was testing the waters.The universe was throwing things my way that were unexpected. It was significant I think in a way that was not yet clear to me and wouldn't be for some time to come. But now, almost a decade later I look at it again and it moves me. The artist who had so much to create that neither pain nor disability would stop him. He found ways to negotiate both. Isn't that what the story of Icarus is anyway? Indeed the story of humanity as a whole in a sense. For all our frailty we must defy the gods. We must - we are compelled - to reach for the stars. We look at the birds and we are compelled to fly. And we have. We have flown and we have traveled among the stars .We are looking at worlds beyond our gaze. We are not perfect but that which is perfection in us is beyond compare- don't you think?
We no more know why we've been put on this "pale blue dot" " floating along like a smote of dust on a beam of sunlight" , than when we first began wondering about these things. But here we are.
So, there, those are my reflections for a Thursday night. I'll leave you with the following lesson in perspectives from the incomparable Carl Sagan:
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at
it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone
you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their
lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of
confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and
forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every
hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer,
every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every
supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species,
lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
 |
| Source: Here |
Based on the story of the adventurer who aspired to reach the sun and in trying to attain his dream failed so spectacularly that he must be celebrated. But it's never really failure is it if you dared to dream and dared to defy the gods as it were.Dared to defy your 'humanness'.
Perhaps it meant so much to me then because it came into my life at a time when I was setting out to explore my own life.I was testing the waters.The universe was throwing things my way that were unexpected. It was significant I think in a way that was not yet clear to me and wouldn't be for some time to come. But now, almost a decade later I look at it again and it moves me. The artist who had so much to create that neither pain nor disability would stop him. He found ways to negotiate both. Isn't that what the story of Icarus is anyway? Indeed the story of humanity as a whole in a sense. For all our frailty we must defy the gods. We must - we are compelled - to reach for the stars. We look at the birds and we are compelled to fly. And we have. We have flown and we have traveled among the stars .We are looking at worlds beyond our gaze. We are not perfect but that which is perfection in us is beyond compare- don't you think?
We no more know why we've been put on this "pale blue dot" " floating along like a smote of dust on a beam of sunlight" , than when we first began wondering about these things. But here we are.
So, there, those are my reflections for a Thursday night. I'll leave you with the following lesson in perspectives from the incomparable Carl Sagan:
 |
| Pale Blue Dot (Source: Here) |
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
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