Reflections – Brimmings: up from the well

After the Stars Go Dark: Thermodynamics for Mortals

Our universe is mind-boggling in its vastness and mystery. Astronomers estimate it contains on the order of a septillion stars—roughly a 1 followed by twenty-four zeroes—though such figures apply only to the observable universe, bounded by the reach of our most powerful telescopes.

Though stars appear to us as ageless fixtures of deep time, they too—like all things—have beginnings and endings.

Our universe itself burst into being some 13.8 billion years ago. It continues to expand as galaxies rush away from one another, yet it will not expand forever in any form recognizable to us. Ultimately, it will be unable to sustain the structures that make matter—and life—possible.

How it ends remains a matter of fierce conjecture. The leading scenario suggests that as galaxies drift ever farther apart, they will fade beyond visibility; their stars will exhaust their fuel, leaving space cold, dark, and diffuse—a state known as thermodynamic equilibrium, or maximum entropy.

Sleep well, however. Such an ending lies far beyond the human temporal imagination.

Our sun, a middle-aged star at roughly 4.6 billion years old, has another four or five billion years ahead of it. Before its quiet extinction, it will grow hotter and brighter, boiling away Earth’s oceans and transforming the planet into a scorched desert—an irreversible greenhouse effect.

What truly unsettles me is the possibility that other universes may have existed before our own. Classical Big Bang theory posited a singular origin—a point of infinite density from which space and time themselves emerged. More recent theories challenge this view, suggesting instead that our universe may be one episode in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction.

The mystery deepens further. Might other universes exist now, alongside our own? Many physicists think so. If space extends infinitely beyond the observable horizon—currently about 46 billion light-years in radius—there may be regions forever beyond our capacity to detect, perhaps governed by laws of physics unlike our own.

The takeaway is not randomness, but recurrence: a cosmos governed by patterned transformation—birth, death, and regeneration repeating across unimaginable scales.

The end of Earth, and even of our universe, would not mark finality, but transformation.

Our suffering arises from clinging to permanence. The Buddha may have intuited this truth 2,500 years ago: reality is not static but dynamic—endless flux, expansion and contraction. Modern physics echoes the insight in the laws of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed; and all systems tend toward entropy.

We live, then, not in a fragile accident, but in a universe shaped by the regularity of change itself.

–rj

Ken Burn’s The American Revolution

I’ve finished watching Ken Burns’ six part series, The American Revolution, and I think it brilliant, reproducing through letters, paintings, actual locale, staged reenactment, and historian insight a reasonable, balanced portraiture of the genesis of a new nation.

In watching it, I’ve found myself unlearning the version of American history I absorbed in school—one that portrayed the country as born purely of promise, while minimizing its foundations in slavery and the seizure of Indigenous lands.

I hadn’t realized, for instance, that the Revolution was in effect America’s first civil war: nearly 20 percent of the population sided with Britain as Loyalists. Atrocities occurred on both sides—burned homesteads, pillage, and widespread rape.

George Washington emerges as essential to the colonies’ improbable victory over seasoned British troops, often intuitive, and when necessary, boldly improvisational—especially in his surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton.

He also also fought with chronically scarce resources, including men and weapons. Smallpox devastated his ranks until ever practical Washington ordered mandatory inoculation for the entire Continental Army. For this, and much more, he merits the accolade, “the father of our country.”

The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence remains, for me, among the greatest ever written: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It’s also, as historian Jill Lepore points out in These Truths, proved an instrument of exclusion, its author Thomas Jefferson—like Washington—owning hundreds of enslaved people and enjoying immense wealth.

The Declaration is a document of soaring ideals and deep compromises, and we live with those contradictions still—half of America’s wealth held by one percent of the population, and inequities woven through our social and economic life.

The American Revolution, then, is best understood as a work in progress. It inspires hope that we can do better—and in some respects, we have—though much remains unfinished.

While the Revolution’s principal architects—Jefferson, Adams, Franklin—were men of the Enlightenment who trusted reason to guide human flourishing, the war itself was largely fought by working-class coalitions, many lured by the promise of 100 acres of land taken from Indigenous nations.

Burns isn’t receptive to the argument advanced by the 1619 Project—that American history truly begins with the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619, and that the Revolution was in part propelled by Southern fears that Britain would eventually abolish slavery.

We do see, however, that the Dunmore Proclamation (1775)—offering freedom to enslaved people who joined the British cause—galvanized Southern resistance. Yet Britain itself, as Burns points out, was hardly on the brink of abolition, its Caribbean wealth built on massive slave labor. Simply a political ploy, Dunmore owned many slaves, and slavery would endure in the Empire for another sixty years.

France entered the conflict in 1777, driven not by idealism but by a desire to avenge its humiliation at Britain’s hands and to reclaim lost influence. Without French military and financial support, the colonies almost certainly would have remained British dominions. By this point, the Revolution had become a global conflict, fought on many fronts.

Part V turns to Valley Forge, outside Philadelphia—the de facto capital of the newly united colonies. There the Revolution reached its nadir: troops half-starved, poorly clothed, ill-housed, and undersupplied as a brutal winter descended, the Congress unable for months to pay the troops. Many died. Many deserted.

With Spring, the French presence is felt, dividing British resources. By 1781, the British suffer massive defeat at Yorktown through a combined force of American troops and the French fleet, blocking British escape. A peace treaty, however, would not ensue until 1783.

The war left the new nation weak and divided, its economy wracked with inflation, huge national debt, and resentful farmers who bore much of the burden, leading to the insurrection in western Massachusetts of 1000 farmers before it was put down by militia. The nation’s weakness would lead, however, to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 defining American governance with its checks and balances under The Constitution.

Women and slaves were, nonetheless, still omitted from the democratic franchise; indigenousness lands seized with violent alacrity.

Washington emerges the series hero, not only innovative on the battlefield with few resources, but committing to democratic rule in resigning his military commission at war’s end.

The series’ central insight is that while the Revolution promised a nation unlike any other, that promise survives only through continual reengagement.

It merits wide viewing: a masterpiece deserving of the highest praise.

—rj

A Legacy of Righteous Minds

Existence exerts a randomness in its distribution of fate. The wicked, as Job tells us, often live long, escaping their misdeeds with impunity; the just and talented, curtailed lives amid their greatest promise.

The list of those I deem the “righteous,” those who’ve especially influenced who I am, the values I embrace, and my hopes for a better human future taken from us early, their age at death indicated in parentheses, includes Princeton sage Walter Kaufman (59), biologist Stephen Jay Gould (62), astronomer Carl Sagan (62), science fiction writer Octavia Butler (58), essayist and novelist George Orwell (46), political sage and philosopher John Stewart Mill (66), and, not least, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (44).

I’m tempted to write a series of extended separate tributes to each of them in Brimmings, but will limit my commentary for now.

I was in my early twenties. a college student just out of the military, when I somehow came upon Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic (1961), which I’m re-reading now. He was the first to admonish me to accept only the empirical in the quest to discern the probable, to find courage to change course, and live daringly: “The question is not whether one has doubts, but whether one is honest about them.”

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould impressed me early with his clear cutting, scintillating prose endowed with grace, teaching me that science is not simply pursuing the factual, but a way of thinking that enlarges one’s humanity. Life is by-product of chance and contingency: “Human beings arose, rather, as a consequence of thousands of linked events, none of which foresaw the future.”

Astronomer Carl Sagan demanded the imprimatur of evidence for any accepted belief. Rationality demands we not cloister ourselves in cultural hand downs—that extraordinary beliefs merit skepticism: Compromising truth invites demagoguery and superstition’s advance: “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”

African-American Octavia Butler has been a remarkable recent read, writing eleven science fiction novel standouts resonating urgency in confronting systemic collapse of ecosystems consequent with climate change. Her Parable of the Sower, a must read, has proven chillingly prescient. Change is life’s inevitability, morally indifferent, demanding adaptability to survive: “Human beings fear difference, and they fear it so deeply that they will not only oppress but destroy what they see as different.”

George Orwell, well known for his clairvoyant 1984, has always impressed me with the clarity of his writing, achieved through disciplined study; his wariness of manipulative despotism and its verbal deceit stratagems such as ’doublespeak,” timely and precise in their warnings of euphemism and abstraction: “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

John Stewart Mill, “the saint of rationalism,” remains a seminal influence, ahead of his time, a champion of classical liberalism and its advocacy of the minority’s right to dissent. He taught me about nature’s indifference and logic’s necessity in a world absent of revelation. I return to him repeatedly for wisdom and inspiration: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins has long been my most esteemed poet with his vibrant “sprung rhythm,” latent with emotion, a passion for nature and for those who suffer—so many—life’s inequities. His poetry sings, reenacting experience via the sensory, capturing the essence of all things. As a Jesuit priest, while not resolving the problem of suffering by resorting to a cozy theodicy or relying on sentimentality, he helps render its endurance: ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”

I am forever grateful for their stalwart witness to life’s truths. Their lives argue by example rather than system—that meaning isn’t guaranteed by justice, nor extinguished by its absence. Fate distributes arbitrarily; conscience does not.

—rj

My Passion for Literature: Reading’s Gifts

My fierce love for books has its ancient beginnings as a seven year old, sprawled on a Philly tenement floor, enthralled with a Christmas gift, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Moments ago I rediscovered this passage from France’s Michel Houellebecq, who has this special capacity to rattle the cages of accepted opinion—daring, provocative, forthright—writing novels you simply don’t walk away from.

I had read his Submission several years ago, an initial novel that launched his fame. His take on literature, a dying indulgence in a digital age, is poignant with meaning for me, for literature has surely been among life’s greatest gifts to me:

“…the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend” (Submission).

I have not found a more eloquent articulation of my own passion for literature and think often of what I would have missed had I not been introduced to literary reads—above all, to see past the literal text and be transported into a galaxy of resonance where words could mean beyond themselves, open new vistas, shaping life, capable of numinosity, a sense that life exceeds appearances, infinite in its labyrinthian corridors, a non-ending conversation with what is, has been, and will endure.

Touch is Fundamental to Our Well-Being

Touch is fundamental to our well being.

But then I have known those who shun being touched, viewing it as infringement. Not touched much when children, they reject it as adults.

I like what I see at airports—loved ones saying hello or goodbye, affection sealed by an embrace, often accompanied with a kiss.

Research says that massaged babies thrive, put on weight faster, do well in school, and are successful as adults at work.

We have five senses, all important, but touch tells us we are loved.

The handshake may be our greeting ritual, but proves perfunctory compared to being hugged or kissed.

Our latent memories of touch begin with those first days on our mother’s breast and later, as children, tucked into bed, granted safe slumber with a forehead kiss.

There are children, too many, who have no memory of such bliss and, like a shadow, it follows them down life’s corridors. They grow up angry, lonely, wary.

“Touch is far more essential than our other senses,” says psychologist Saul Schanberg.

I like essayist Diane Ackerman’s take on touch—“Among other things, touch teaches us the difference between I and other” (A History of the Senses).

I like when poetry transcends prose:

“I’ve heard the phenomenon is called skin starvation
and it’s the reason infants are laid naked
on their mother’s breast the moment after birth.
Because touch is how we greet one
another in almost every language and say:
you are here
and I am with you and we are not alone” (Joy Sullivan, Instructions for Traveling West).

What Happens When I Read James Baldwin

There are many excellent Black writers, deserving of their fame, but it’s James Baldwin I keep returning to for his wisdom, sensitivity, and eloquence.

Whenever I read him, I find cleansing—a washing away of grievances, the soothing salve of empathy for those visited by life’s unfairness, the unanticipated gifts of seeing with new eyes and walking in another’s shoes.

Reading Baldwin, I find connection. Suffering is never isolated; it is universal:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people” (The Price of a Ticket, 1985).

—rj

Something Larger Than Itself: Baseball as Metaphor

It was the 7th inning of last night’s Dodger-Blue Jays World Series game, the Dodgers leading 5-4. I needed sleep, so gave up watching, but nonetheless fervently hoped the Jays would pull it out against baseball’s best team money can buy and perennial champion.

I’m glad I left the screen early. The game went 18 innings! The Blue Jays lost.

For me, baseball is metaphor for something larger than itself—each batter in existential challenge, one against a field of nine. In short, the odds of getting that hit aren’t likely, and yet batters do come through, sometimes winning a game.

As I waited for sleep to descend, I thought of how tonight’s game reflected my America, facing the hegemony of an encroached political dynasty. Would things ever change?

I fell asleep, expectant.

And so with our nation.

I refuse to give up hope. There’s yet another day, another game to be played. Sometimes the unexpected happens—the underdog breaks through. That happens in life, too. We get that hit. We score that run.

As poet Joy Sullivan tells us,
“i know nothing about baseball, but something in me breaks with joy when the runner rushes in, body flung & reaching, & the umpire lifts his arms out like a prophet or a mother & makes him safe.”

—rj

Confronting Our Fears Grants Happiness

This morning I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm. Many of you are familiar with his books, wise in counsel, encouraging mindfulness engaged in the present, not burdened with trauma from the past or worries about the future.

I reached for Hahn, my amygdala working overtime, given the White House maelstrom.

Hahn reminds me that we are linked to an infinity beyond ourselves. We are all connected: sun, water, forest, and sentient animal friends.

That there is no permanence.

That entropy is life’s law.

I venture that our ultimate anxiety concerns our mortality

Peace comes, however, with its acceptance and doing good for others. Our passing doesn’t mean extinction, but rejoining that eternally existing phenomena that gave rise to our being.

Fundamental to Buddhism is that there is neither birth nor death, but continuum only. The Buddha perceived this truth 2500 years ago, confirmed by the Conservation Law of Mass-Energy —that mass is not created ex nihilo, nor destroyed into nothing. It simply changes its manifestation.

A cloud never really dies in becoming rain or snow.

We must confront our fears, not deny them, if we are to find peace, not seek escape in accumulation or media overload.

While I find the history of religion to be no less than a bloodbath, I think of true Buddhism as a way of life rather than a religion. It posits no deity. I completed an impressive course from a Dutch university several years ago that introduced me to its major tenets and, especially, to mindfulness enhanced through meditation.

I’ve been subsequently amazed with brain imaging results that show serious meditators experience neural changes at several levels, including an increase in gray matter density and cortical thickness in the hippocampus, responsible for learning, memory and emotion.

What impresses me most is that amygdala activity, the brain area responsible for our anxiety, is decreased, often after just eight weeks of consistent practice. I’m all for less anxiety.

With this new brain imaging technology now available, science is just catching up with the intuitive truths of Buddhism. I know of a Princeton professor who has dedicated his research to studying the liaison.

Several years ago, I undertook training in Transcendental Meditation. I didn’t really catch on how to do it effectively until last year when I read Yongey Mingyur Ripoche’s The Joy of Living and learned specific techniques. Unfortunately, I have failed to practice it consistently. I need to mend my ways.

The late film director David Lynch did meditation twice daily, busy as he was, never missing, until the end of his life and wrote a book about it, Catching the Big Fish, which I’ve read.

I am grateful for my time out with Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, a refresh on those values than quiet our anxieties and grant us peace.

Wishing all of you well, I trust my affection for all of you vibrates into a day of happiness.

—rj

My Journey Through Books: From Childhood to Lifelong Learning

I’ve been a reading addict since childhood, when as a young boy I’d walk a mile—sometimes more—just to lose myself in a library’s cool hush, seated at a table, surrounded by shelf-lined books inviting adventure.

My love for animals found early confirmation in the Dr. Doolittle books I devoured. I read every one. Years later, that same fascination with the speech of creatures led me to Jane Goodall’s revelatory studies of chimpanzees—proof that empathy can grow into insight.

Another passion took root in the dusty bleachers of Shibe Park—later Connie Mack Stadium—in Philadelphia. I loved baseball with an intensity only children know, lingering outside the gates, hungry for autographs as players boarded their buses. I read passionately about my idols—Ruth, Gehrig, immortals who remain with me.

Travel books, too, called out to me. Mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath on Pitcairn’s Island transported me to the South Seas, where I imaginatively romped through Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. In later years, that early enchantment led me to consider emigrating to New Zealand. I was, in fact, approved.

Languages fascinated me. One day, at ten, I brought home books in Russian from Philadelphia’s Free Library, expecting the Cyrillic script to magically transform itself into English. That early infatuation would one day carry me across the world to Russia and the homesteads of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.

I call myself an autodidact, though I’ve graduated from several reputable universities. I started behind most students, having fled a troubled home at seventeen, enlisting in the Air Force, which sent me to Korea. Our base library was a single room, yet its shelves were somehow populated with a few classics. One off-duty evening, I pulled down a book called Look Homeward, Angel. It changed my life.

After Korea, I read everything Thomas Wolfe wrote, visited his home in Asheville, eventually enrolling as a Ph.D. student at his alma mater—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Pulpit Hill” in Wolfe’s novel. On my first campus day, waiting to register for classes, I bumped into a retired professor, who asked what brought me to Chapel Hill. “Thomas Wolfe,” I said without hesitation.

A serendipity moment, that professor had known Wolfe. Becoming lifelong friends, they traveled together to prewar Germany, where Wolfe witnessed the Nazi persecution of Jews, which he would later feature in You Can’t Go Home Again. He shared anecdotes about Wolfe, who stood six feet, six inches. His hands too wide to use a typewriter, Wolfe wrote standing up, a refrigerator top serving for a desk.

Despite the scores of books I’ve read, there remain gaps I want to fill. The books I’ve read have been my faithful companions along life’s road, shaping who I am.

Were I granted another life, I think I’d come back as a librarian. No other choice comes close.

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