The Saunterer

Thomas Dixon on the night sky and the sublime

    Thomas Dixon writes of the night sky producing the emotion of the sublime:

But when you look up at the night sky, you may not be thinking about astronomy and cosmology at all. You may instead be gripped by a sense of the power of nature, the beauty and grandeur of the heavens, the vastness of space and time, and your own smallness and insignificance. This might even be a religious experience for you, reinforcing your feeling of awe at the power of God and the immensity and complexity of his creation, putting you in mind of the words of Psalm 19: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the works of his hands.’ (Quoted from page 8 of Science and Religion, by Thomas Dixon. 2008. Oxford University Press.)

    Whatever this construct called God is, he created all in the night sky for his favorite creatures, people? Only a lunatic would believe that.
    As for heaven, lines in obituaries are surely coping devices, light years from the truth, when, as so many read like this: “Our beautiful daughter and sister fell asleep and when she awoke she was in the loving arms of her Heavenly Father. She is forever happy and smiling now, survived by loved ones who have gone on before and awaiting those of us she has left behind.”

    For Thomas Dixon’s home page, click here.

William Wordsworth on what comes from the spiritual community that binds us all

    What comes is moral being, as William Wordsworth has written:

There is a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead; the good, the brave, and the wise, of all ages. We would not be rejected from this community; and therefore do we hope. We look forward with erect mind, thinking and feeling: it is an obligation of duty: take away the sense of it, and the moral being would die within us. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. p. 327.)

    For a brief biography of William Wordsworth, click here.

Edmund Wilson on what makes a great teacher

    Who was your great teacher, and why? Here is how Edmund Wilson answered:

It was many years after I left Princeton before I realized that it was [Christian Gauss] who first taught me how to think. How strange it is that so many people have the notion that they are thinking when they are merely repeating the thoughts of others. He dealt in ideas without seeming to do so; he led and guided with so gentle a touch that one began to think almost despite oneself. The process once started, he continued in such a fashion as to instill into my very soul the determination to be a seeker after truth, the elusive, perhaps never to be attained, complete and utter truth, no matter where it led or whom it hurt. How he did it, I shall never know; but that it was he, I have not the slightest doubt. (Quoted from “Christian Gauss,” by Edmund Wilson, from The American Scholar. Summer 1952.)

    For a brief biography of Edmund Wilson, click here. For the same of Christian Gauss, click here.