Winter Reflections: Of stars and bugs

As I sit at my desk, a bug flutters by. It and its family share my home, adding little but some small annoyance. They are each about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Yes, that dot, or maybe smaller. They seem to waft like a slow-motion knuckleball, though still too swift in their gyrations for me to catch them (except when I do) and they are easily killed once entrapped. But I look at these things and wonder, does it have a name (I’m hoping some scientist has dubbed it something like Timwakefieldius minoris). More importantly, does it have a brain? I know it has wings and I assume it has sex organs because spontaneous generation is no longer de rigueur in the scientific world. But how to cram all that and a digestive system and sensory organs into such a small space, and why—yes, yes, I know the story of David asking God why are there spiders, but I’m not David—all elude me.

Then I look up to the sky. It’s glorious in the winter. When there are neither clouds nor moon and the air is crisp I can see to the South the Great Winter Oval, an asterism consisting of first magnitude stars from six different constellations. Starting at what appears to be the top and proceeding clockwise there’s Capella from Auriga (the Charioteer), Aldebaran from Taurus (the Bull), Rigel of Orion (the Hunter), Sirius of the Great Dog, Procyon from the Little Dog and Pollux of the Twins. In the midst of all this, just a bit off center, is Betelgeuse, which forms the right shoulder of Orion. Viewed as in a gallery over my neighbor’s house this elongated circle forms an enormous object d’art. The red giant Betelgeuse throbs, big enough to cover our solar system at least to Mars, and possibly beyond. No Timwakefieldius minoris here. And yet, these glorious points of light are only the local eye-catchers. Our galaxy has about 200 billion stars (estimates vary) and there are probably as many galaxies as stars in our Milky Way. In the autumn, find Andromeda, two lines of stars that seem to come out of the square that is the constellation Pegasus (the flying horse). If you know just where to look, out of the corner of your eye (you can’t see it straight on) is the gauzy blur of the Andromeda Galaxy, a good 2 million light-years away (a light year is approximately five-trillion miles. Now multiply that by 2 million and you’ll agree that it’s not walking distance). It’s the farthest thing you can see with the naked eye.

How big is the universe? It depends on who you ask, but a good guess is that its diameter is just shy of 14 billion light-years from here. All of which makes me think that none of us is much more, and probably considerably less, than a Timwakefieldius minoris in the grand sweep of things.

The psalmist asks:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, …what is mankind that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us?” and then answers his own question, “You have made us a little lower than the angels and crowned us with glory and honor.” Well, that’s one approach. Shakespeare expressed another: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So, who is closer to the mark, the psalmist or the bard? I know not but as old age creeps upon me, as I look at the tiny bug and at the glorious stars and imagine the unimaginable vastness of the universe beyond, I think … it must be Shakespeare. We come, we go, like the tiny Timwakefieldius minoris unremarkable in the vastness, alone in our teeniest speck of the corner we occupy of outer space. So, petty as we are, it is the petty that consumes us. Locally this is expressed in the anger directed at a young woman who wants to honor the spirit of Rhode Island’s founder and of the US Constitution by fighting to remove a prayer from a public school. To quote Shakespeare one more time, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

The Bard and Barack

It’s summer time and the livin’, as Ira Gershwin wrote, is easy. The world has no fewer problems but the tendency is to put the serious stuff on the back burner until after the World Series. But people can go too far.

I have in mind Edward Achorn in Tuesday’s August 5 Providence Journal: “Was the Bard a secret Catholic?” is the question asked, and it will come as no surprise that the answer is a definitive “could be.” Achorn relies on Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome. You may remember Pearce. He was a member of the British National Front, a neo-fascist society dedicated to race purity. Twice he served time for militant racism, but then he found the Catholic Church and reformed. Currently he is a professor of literature at the right-wing Catholic Ave Maria University.

The evidence Achorn selects from Pearce’s tome is interesting, but it’s the kind that people present when they want to make the case that Columbus was Jewish—as circumstantial as it is irrelevant. Achorn concludes his article with a graphic you-really-don’t-want-to-have-to-read-this-stuff-while-sipping-your-morning-coffee description of being drawn and quartered, a punishment meted out to Catholics in Elizabeth’s persecutions of them. This is followed by, “His works remain universal. But that Shakespeare might have been a hidden Catholic lends undeniable piquancy to the themes of power, honor and strained loyalty running so strongly through his work.”

If Catholics want to claim Shakespeare, it’s fine with me. But what is objectionable is that while Achorn uses as his source a (pseudo) academic and quotes a legitimate one—Anthony Esolen who contends that Pearce’s case is “meticulous, reasonable and convincing” he without cause or justification maligns academics in general. Hey! What’d I do?

“All this of course, [that Shakespeare was devout crypto-Catholic] must seem anathema to academics who wish to embrace Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity. The popular creed of our day is that godless Man is all, and that elites, using Machiavellian means to advance themselves, should have as much power as possible to work their superior will over less enlightened human beings. In the view of some, Shakespeare had nothing specific to say about morality or religion, other than to question the legitimacy of both.”

Let’s parse this. To begin with there is no such thing as “academics”. We are, if anything, anarchists. No one of us speaks for another, and often enough, not even for ourselves. We are ready to admit that we favored something until we opposed it. We are a punching bag for conservatives who see our malign presence in the classroom as undermining everything they believe in, but the punching bag is never the aggressor; it’s the innocent bystander.

Is there really a stampede of academics embracing Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity? Is secular modernity so immoral as Achorn assumes? I know conservatives who are atheists, liberals who believe in God and neither camp advocates immorality.

Now we get to the core. We secular modernist academics are elitists! And we don’t trust the common man to make decisions for themselves! And we are inappropriately co-opting Shakespeare, that moral Roman Catholic. I know you know, this, dear reader, but when conservatives use the word “elite” they are not talking about Noble Prize winners, nor even of Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. They are talking about liberals, especially liberal Democrats, and, now-a-days more particularly Barack Obama. It’s the cry of the right-wing haves who want to wrest the poor and the lower middle class away from the Democrats who have been their champions at least since the days of FDR.

Oh, and lest it goes unsaid. Poor Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic because he feared torture and death at the hands of rabid Protestants? This is why he “revered justice, detested bullies, and fully understood the sinfulness and frailty of his fellow men and women”? Elizabeth’s predecessor, her half-sister Mary, burned Protestants at the stake and Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, tried to blow up Parliament. In Spain the Inquisition’s auto de fes were consuming Protestants, Moors and, need I remind you, Jews. Galileo was threatened with the same punishment for the same crime as Giordano Bruno who had been burned at the stake for teaching the Copernican theory. Let’s face it, Catholics at that time held no monopoly on being persecuted. Belief in God does not equate with moral behavior; secularists can be just as moral—or immoral—as religious folk.