Essays in Idleness

“Well, rocks do not die, and yet they are part of nature.” My correspondent may not have seen the rocks, being crushed into gravel by a road crew with machines. Who will hear their cry, and who stand for their rights, the way the environmentalists stand for innocent vegetables and other defenceless creatures?

Granted, I am being facetious, but let us imagine instead a planet formed by processes of nature into an immense diamond in the sky, or better a Red Dwarf, such as our Sun’s nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri — as I was quite convinced until Monday evening. But this is because I failed to distinguish hardness from density, as I am prone to do. Plenty of metals out-dense a diamond; my personal preference is for gold. The luminosity of Proxima Centauri is so slight that there is risk we may bump into it, or into one of the several dozen other Red Dwarves in our vicinity, when Elon Musk develops the giant rocket that will launch us through the galaxy.

Indeed, this is one of the many worries for the near-light-speed voyages that surely he is planning. Celerity like that, and the baffling effects of velocitation, will surely expose us to a misfortunate prang along the way. It is among the reasons we may never get there; and meanwhile, that we may not even settle Mars (I add, parenthetically). For there is the question of what humans can endure, when removed from our customary bourgeois supports on interminable space missions.

Brown Dwarves are also a danger, to interstellar travellers, although they are just huge gas-bags (typically larger than Jupiter, according to another of my informants). Surprisingly, big as they are, I hadn’t noticed them until the day before yesterday.

An oversight.

Each of the items we find in nature is on an unavoidable course out of existence — which by convention we call extinction, or colloquially, death. All will, sooner or later, no longer be, although we might receive replacements. Nevertheless, material nature is tremendously insecure, and truly, “Maya,” as the Hindoo philosophers maintain in their Upanishads and Vedanta. What is our apparent reality, is merely an illusion, or as some translate, magic. The “fact” that the reader has a body, let alone a headache, is among his fantastic apparitions. Or perhaps we should be diplomatic, and call it a misunderstanding. Wait patiently, and it will pass away.