Tish Harrison Warren

Death, for all of us, is a journey interrupted. I feel this acutely when someone young dies. But not only then. When my father passed away in his 70s, I felt like there was so much that still needed to happen, so many more conversations we needed to have. …

There is something deep within us that rejects the idea that the road just stops. We feel there must be more. We must be made for more: more conversations, more laughter, more breaths to take, more miles to walk along the trail. …

There is a deeply intimate and human reunion story amid the larger cosmic meaning of the resurrection account. A community of friends was broken and then, somehow, against all hope, remade.

The truth is, no one — not priests, not scientists, not the most ardent atheist, not the most steadfast believer — can be 100 percent certain about what happens to us after we die. Each week at church, when we say the Nicene Creed, I affirm that I believe in “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

I believe that after I die, somehow mysteriously but also materially, Jesus will raise me up to live on this good earth, made new. I believe this because I believe that Jesus is risen from the dead. Specifically, I believe the witness of the disciples and others who lived and died for their claim that they (and somewhere around 500 others) had seen Jesus alive again and spoken to and touched him. That’s ultimately why I believe there’s a God at all and why I believe God has defeated death. …

I hope that my longing for eternity — for joy and pleasure and friendship and beauty to last — is there because it whispers of something that is true. I hope that death feels wrong to me because it really is wrong, it really is not how things are meant to be. And I hope that this hope for more is not silly or delusional. I hope to see my friends again and that death is an interruption, but not an ending.

Laura Kasischke:

Heart/mind

A bear batting at a beehive, how

clumsy the mind
always was with the heart. Wanting
what it wanted.

The blizzard’s
accountant, how

timidly the heart approached the business
of the mind. Counting
what it counted.

Light inside a cage, the way the heart —

Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind —

How it flashed on the floor of the phone booth, my
last dime. And

this letter
I didn’t send
how surprising

to find it now.

All this love I must have felt.

The fact that Carlo Rovelli finishes Helgoland with a few lines pulled from Shakespeare, more than showing his own problem with—yes, even Rovelli is capable of this—confirmation bias, it shows that Shakespeare, long before quantum theory “changed the world,” was almost infinitely more thoughtful and accurate with his “mistaken” understanding of the world.

But don’t take my word for it.

Samuel Matlack:

It is a modern conceit that we have advanced from the poetic imaginations of the ancients to clear scientific description, leaving behind the quaint and parochial ways of speaking about the physical world. Poetic imagery, after all, is the kind of language that is the most parochial, most personal, and most dependent on our everyday experience. Its use in writing about physics is not simply a mark of ancient ignorance, nor mere embellishment in popular writing, nor just a sign of the bemused writer’s amazement at the world as physicists know it; rather, those aspects of physics that touch on the fundamental nature of the universe can’t always get squeezed into descriptive terms. This means that the widely shared ideal of describing ultimate reality purely in terms of physics is futile, at least if we mean verbal, not mathematical, description. And if poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality, this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude the more personal, parochial, poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality. […]

If we tried to imagine (if we can) a language that avoids all ambiguities, multiplicity of meanings, and ill-defined words, and that insisted on near-perfect links between words and things in the world, this language would seem to be useful for talking only about the empirically most discrete realities. We might use it for talking about physics but not politics, electrons but not ethics, matter but not mind; a descriptive language that faithfully avoids the idols of the marketplace includes “brain” but not “soul,” “useful” but not “virtuous,” “oxytocin” but not “love.”

This point highlights an important caveat. While the issue here is central to the philosophy of language — the study of how words have meaning and how language relates to reality — the underlying concern in the Chandos letter [to Francis Bacon] is less abstract and philosophical. It is the desire, motivated by deep moral seriousness, to find a form of expression that does justice to ideas about ethics, politics, and personal experience, and to think about the limits that a scientific language, tailored to the needs of science, puts on that expression. […]

We should not dismiss that modern science owes at least some of its success to Bacon’s advice to rely as much as possible on clear descriptions and careful definitions, instead of ambiguous poetic images, for expressing what the physical world is like. But a language sufficiently refined for describing the physical realities science seeks to explain is ill suited for expressing human experience. Although this should be a banal observation, it bucks what we are often told today: that science has the final word in all areas of investigation, and all explanations are in theory reducible to descriptions of the physical world. But the language of physics itself, as we will see, is often beyond translation into ordinary language, except in a very rough and poetic sense. And so physics, while sometimes presented as the ideal of scientific description that would overrule the ordinary, parochial, personal accounts of experience, depends for its verbal self-expression on the kind of language — poetic imagery — that we tend to think of as ancient and inferior. […]

The philosopher Nicholas Rescher captures the situation:

“It is instructive to contemplate … the hopeless difficulties encountered nowadays in the popularization of physics — of trying to characterize the implications of quantum theory and relativity theory for cosmology into the subscientific language of everyday life. A classic obiter dictum of Niels Bohr is relevant: “We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” …. Homo sapiens began his quest for knowledge in the realm of poetry. And in the end it seems that in basic respect we are destined to remain close to this starting point.” […]

But there is an additional kind of pretension we should be wary of when talking about physics: the belief that the words of physicists and science writers about what the physical world is like simply are descriptions of the real world. Perhaps these words are decorated here and there with a helpful metaphor or analogy to get difficult concepts across; but, that poetry aside, we often think these descriptions neatly map onto the world and thus present a clear and illusion-free view of reality. It is a belief that is easily derived from a way of thinking about scientific language as the ideal of true understanding, and about words as unambiguously linked to things and processes. That ideal doesn’t seem to apply well to the physics of fundamental material reality. At best, popular physics texts are approximate renderings of the meanings and implications of mathematical models and theories. (And what the mathematics precisely mean, and how they do or don’t describe the world, is yet another set of complications that popular science writing routinely ignores even though they have long been subjects of philosophical fisticuffs.)

All this is more than a general lesson about intellectual humility; it is also a lesson about the folly of thinking that the language of physics is the only one that discloses ultimate truth about the world. Reflecting on the difficulties involved in speaking about fundamental physics suggests that, however useful to science the ideal of clearly defined descriptive terms is, in the end we still have to rely on language that is closer to our everyday ways of speaking — rich in imprecise words, in poetic images and rough analogies, metaphors and gestures. […]

For physics texts, the fate of the monolingual applies to two kinds of people. On the one hand is the consumer of popular physics texts who doesn’t know mathematical physics and thus fails to see what’s lost in translation. On the other hand is the person [the philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark] actually has in mind, the believer in scientism: The fate of the monolingual “seems to be befalling recent scienticists [adherents of scientism], who think that nothing which is excluded from ‘scientific language’ can be real.” […]

The authority of physics is entirely justified for the kinds of explanations and powers it affords. But the idea that the language of physics alone speaks the ultimate truth about the world, dispelling the illusions produced by our everyday experience, for instance of space and time, or of consciousness, seems difficult to defend when that language itself depends on ways of speaking that belong fully to everyday experience. Talk of illusions is surely overrated and often no more than sensationalistic silliness. It would be wiser to say that the physical world, whatever it is like when expressed in the full complexity of mathematical physics, is unlike what it seems to us. And that is the point: The physical world isn’t like that to us, which means that if it matters that we understand human experience as fully as we might, including how we shape our personal, moral, and political lives, then the hope that mathematical physics alone discloses ultimate reality is misguided. This is so even while — and this is no small thing — physics offers one of the richest opportunities for wonder, to which the most deeply human response, besides seeking to understand, may well be either poetry or silent awe.

In this humble individual’s view, Rovelli should practice more silent awe.

Brian Eno (1992):

The inconsistency of these positions finally filtered through to me while I was delivering a talk to a group of businessmen in Brussels. My talk was called “The Future of Culture in Europe,” and in it I tried to sketch out the breakdown of the classical view of Culture and art history in favor of a more contemporary one. Until quite recently, I said, Culture had been viewed as a field of human behaviors and artifacts that could be organized in some ideal way, the assumption being that, if only we sat down and talked about it for long enough, we would all agree that, say, Dante, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Goethe, Wagner, and a few other big names were the real kingpins of Culture, and that, say, chocolate-box designers, popular balladeers, walking-stick carvers, hairdressers, clothes designers, and Little Richard were all relatively marginal. The history of the history of art is really the story of people trying to make a claim form one orthodoxy in favor of any other, asserting that the particular line that they drew through the field of all the events we refer to as Culture had some special validity and the proximity to that line was a measure of originality, profundity, longevity: in short, of value. […]

So, just as we might come to accept that “coriander” is a name for a fuzzy, not very clearly defined space in the whole of our smell experience, we also start to think about other words in the same way. Big Ideas (Freedom, Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered, unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in an ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands.

And I love it: I love watching us all become dilettante perfume blenders, poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing which combinations make sense for us, gathering experience – the possibility of better guesses – without certainty.

Perhaps our sense of this, the sense of belonging to a world held together by networks of ephemeral confidences (such as philosophies and stock markets) rather than permanent certainties, predisposes us to embrace the pleasures of our most primitive and unlangued sense. Being mystified doesn’t frighten us as much as it used to. And the point for me is not to expect perfumery to take its place in some nice, reliable, rational world order, but to expect everything else to become like perfume.

Paul Kingsnorth:

One minute [Simone Weil] is incinerating the “uprooted intellectuals obsessed with progress” who dominated the cultural elite of her time (and who have entirely conquered ours), assailing the Left for its contempt of the peasantry or asserting that “of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital … than love of the past.” But just when you think you’re dealing with a conservative Defender of the West, you read something like this:

“For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.“

Weil wasn’t wrong. We in the West invented this thing called modernity, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. […]

For the past several centuries, this intersection of financial power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies has constituted an ongoing war against roots and against limits. The momentum of the “global economy” is always forward: it demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes, and it will not stop until the world has been entirely remade. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes — or, worse, no shapes at all — with all the consequent turmoil and conflict. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer.

Plenty of people, of course, are quite happy with all of this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like me when we lament it. Even we Romantic Luddites are here on the internet, lamenting, so perhaps the last laugh is on us. But we are, I think, desperately in need of real culture. We want to go home again, but if we even know where home is to be found, we see that we can’t return. And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: toxic imitations of our lost roots. Identity politics, newly rigid racial categories, extreme nationalisms, intolerant strains of religion, endlessly multiplying genders and “identities” constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far Right or the diversity identitarianism of the far Left: take your pick according to your predilections and fears. But these fake roots can never replace the real thing and the result is an orgy of anger, iconoclasm and rising bile. Meanwhile, the machine of techno-modernity pushes on, relentless.

When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our current cultural — and spiritual — crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not dying — it is already dead. We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Now, we are living in a time of consequences. Some day soon, we are going to have to look up and begin searching for what we have lost. I have a feeling that this process has already begun.

I do not have that feeling.

Rowan Williams:

These are texts that took shape only a few centuries before the beginning of the Christian era; the chronological gap between them and the most abundant collection of mythical writings about El and Ba’al is larger than that between Homer and Sophocles. It seems strange to say that the “real” god of the Hebrew Bible is to be identified simply with the most archaic aspect of the text. None of the final editors of the Hebrew scriptures is committed to any theory about the non-material nature of their deity. But in the three or four centuries before the Christian era the divine body is increasingly understood by Jewish writers as drastically unlike our own, invisibly filling or containing all finite space, constituted of (or at least manifest in) fire or light. It is not circumscribed as ordinary matter is, and so apparently contradictory things may be said about it. [Francesca] Stavrakopoulou is right to underline that this is still a good way from the resolute insistence of later theology and philosophy on God’s immateriality, from the first Christian century onwards, but it is part of the long process by which that concept finds its way into the Jewish and Christian thought-world. […]

This connects with a question raised by Stavrakopoulou’s closing pages [in God: An Anatomy]. She takes Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous picture of the dead (and prematurely decaying) body of Christ as illustrating the way in which Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy ends up in a conspicuously unbiblical position, presenting human bodies as “repulsive” (her word), unfit to portray the divine. But – apart from the fact that in Holbein’s lifetime the glory of the human form as representing divinity was being reaffirmed by artists in southern Europe as never before – the point of a picture like this, or of any other representation of the torment and suffering of Jesus, was to say that “the divine” does not shrink from or abandon the human body when it is humiliated and tortured.

In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less “real” dimension of the Bible? Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off.