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Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor ‘tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For ‘tis a question left us yet to prove.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

In these terrible times of the coronavirus, I feel compelled to share some of my thoughts on this catastrophe. A great deal has been written. In fact, I’ve already published an essay myself. 

The novel coronavirus is a natural disaster – that is, it came from Nature. And it is an accident. Undoubtedly, Nature did not intend to cause the human suffering we are now experiencing around the world.

Yet throughout much of history, we have personified Nature as kindly and caring. In Chinese thought, especially in Daoism, we are advised to follow the flow of nature’s rhythms for moral and physical health. So close to nature are we in some mythologies that human beings are regularly transformed into other animals and even inanimate matter. In Aztec mythology, the twin volcanoes Popocatpetl and Iztacchuatl were once human lovers, later turned into mountains by the gods. In the other direction, nature is constantly given human qualities. Wordsworth wrote that “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” Mother Nature suckles and comforts us in every culture on Earth. She was known as Gaia in ancient Greece, She was known as Gaia in ancient Greece, Terra Mater in ancient Rome, Ninsun in ancient Mesopotamia.

In my view, Nature has no intentions at all. Nature simply is. Nature is mindless. All the attributes we assign to Nature are human constructions.

Even if we reluctantly give up the idea that Nature cares about us, we have still tried to control Nature. Or rather, had the illusion that we could do so. As I mentioned in my posting of March 31, the Scottish social anthropologist James George Frazer has documented the many rituals and magic that various cultures have employed in their belief that they could control nature. The Bantus in Botswsana burned the stomach of an ox in the evening because they thought the black smoke would gather the clouds and cause the rain to come. But all such beliefs are illusions.

Today, we use our modern technology in an attempt to control Nature. We heat our houses in winter and cool them in summer. We monitor seismic rumblings in order to predict the next earthquake.  We give vaccinations in flu season. We seed clouds, to produce more water. And to some extent, we have succeeded in these endeavors. But there is a great deal in Nature that is beyond our control. And there is a great deal that is random, unpredictable, accidental – a spin of the cosmic roulette wheel. It is hard to accept accidents of any kind. But it is especially hard to accept cosmic accidents of vast consequences. Despite all of our modern science and technology – which I honor and celebrate – we are ants in the cosmos.

We live on one comfortable planet in the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy containing a trillion planets, give or take. And that galaxy is one of a hundred billion galaxies or so in the observable universe.

Even with our telescopes and modern astronomy, we cannot fathom the immensity of the universe. It would take a ray of light – travelling at such a speed as to circle the earth seven times in one second – five years to get to the nearest star. One hundred thousand years to cross the galaxy. For the galaxy shown above, NGC 1300, it would take 61 million years for a ray of light to get there from earth. We are ants in the cosmos.

Here on earth, even with our earthquakes and storms, we have no conception of the range and the power of nature. In many other parts of the cosmos, conditions of temperature and atmosphere and gravity are far more extreme than on earth and quite inhospitable to life. On planet Mercury, for example, the temperature is 800 degrees. On Neptune, it is – 328. On Uranus, the winds exceed 500 miles per hour. There are dead stars so compact that a penny on their surface would weigh over a hundred thousand tons.  In the last decade, we have discovered over a thousand planets outside our solar system, many with environments far different from Earth’s. One world is apparently covered entirely with water and has an atmosphere of thick steam. Another world orbits its central star in a mere 9 hours. (Its year is less than one Earth day.) With the recent work of the Kepler satellite, searching for planets favorable for life, we can estimate that only about one millionth of one billionth of 1 percent of the material of the visible universe exists in living form. From a cosmic perspective, we and all life are the exception to the rule.

I remember the first time I encountered the insensible power of nature. My wife and I had chartered a small sailboat for a two-week holiday in the Greek isles. After setting out from Piraeus, we headed south and hugged the coast, which we held three or four miles to port. With binoculars, we could just make out the glinting of houses on the land, fragments of buildings. Then we passed the tip of Cape Sounion and turned west toward Hydra. Within a couple of hours, both the land and all other boats disappeared. Looking around in a full circle, all we could see was water, extending out and out in all directions until it joined with the sky. At first, I felt elation. Then I felt fear. Because during the summer season, the Agean Sea is plagued by a fierce, dry wind called the meltemi, which can appear without warning in clear air and be upon you in minutes with great waves and gales. At any moment, a wall of water and wind could lunge from the horizon, wash over the boat, and drown my wife and me. I realized that there was no compassionate overseer or oceanic consciousness to prevent that from happening. To the vast expanse of water, my wife and I were just additional pieces of flotsam and jetsam.

Accidents of nature can be good as well as bad for us human beings. Random bushfires are a beneficial phenomenon of the ecosystem. They remove slow growing plants and trees to make way for other growing things and help return nutrients back to the soil. Hurricanes help distribute the earth’s heat, without which climates would be much more extreme. 

In a violent cosmic accident, 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object collided with the primitive earth and tilted its axis. That tilt, in turn, is responsible for our seasons: The amount of sunlight in the northern and southern hemispheres varies throughout the year as the earth moves in its orbit about the sun. No tilt, no seasons. And without seasons, planetary and atmospheric scientists say that the latitudes away from the equator would be too cold for habitation. Human beings, if they existed at all, could live only in a narrow band near the equator. And if that midsection of earth were like the rain forests of the Congo, agriculture would be difficult.

And, of course, there are the other wondrous natural phenomena, many of them caused by accidental circumstances, that we consider beautiful — charged particles flowing out of the sun that cause our atmosphere to glow, the random, constantly fascinating shapes of clouds, the surprising diversity of appearance of we human beings.

We are not helpless in the face of Nature. In this latest accident, the coronavirus, our social distancing is reducing the rate of infections. Our scientists worldwide are working on vaccines. While recognizing the power and capriciousness of Nature, we can still take steps to protect ourselves. Nor, do I think, we should be fearful in the face of Nature. Some balance is needed. We can balance a clear eyed understanding of the mindlessness of Nature with an appreciation for the six-sided symmetry of a snowflake, or the way that paddling the ocean at dusk causes a shimmering of little stars from the bioluminescent organisms in the water. We can balance a kind of  “natural realism” with our poetry and painting.

Above all, we should accept the role of accident and chance in this strange cosmos we find ourselves in. After all, each of us originated in the random event of one particular sperm cell out of a hundred million, encountering one particular egg out of a million – a chance occurrence with a probability of 0.00000000000001.

                                               Notes

“Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident” Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2

“nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” William Wordsworth,  “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”