Once In A Lifetime, Perhaps, One Escapes

It Is Surely One Of The Curious Paradoxes Of History That Science Which Professionally Has Little To Do With Faith, Owes Its Origins To An Act Of Faith That The Universe Can Be Rationally Interpreted, And That Science Today Is Sustained By That Assumption.

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.

Lights Come And Go In The Night Sky. Men, Troubled At Last By The Things They Build, May Toss In Their Sleep And Dream Bad Dreams, Or Lie Awake While The Meteors Whisper Greenly Overhead. But Nowhere In All Space Or On A Thousand Worlds Will There Be Men To Share Our Loneliness.

Animals Are Molded By Natural Forces They Do Not Comprehend. To Their Minds There Is No Past And No Future. There Is Only The Everlasting Present Of A Single Generation, Its Trails In The Forest, Its Hidden Pathways In The The Air And In The Sea. There Is Nothing In The Universe More Alone Than Man. He Has Entered Into The Strange World Of History.

Man Would Not Be Man If His Dreams Did Not Exceed His Grasp... If I Remember The Sunflower Forest It Is Because From Its Hidden Reaches Man Arose. The Green World Is His Sacred Center. In Moments Of Sanity He Must Still Seek Refuge There.