The first few minutes of this 14-minute video cover some basics, the rest will blow your mind.
By the way, since this video was made, Google has announced that one of its quantum computers has solved a problem in 200 seconds that it estimates the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10,000 years to solve.
Some physicists think they can explain why the universe first formed. If they are right, our entire cosmos may have sprung out of nothing at all
6 November 2014
People have wrestled with the mystery of why the universe exists for thousands of years. Pretty much every ancient culture came up with its own creation story – most of them leaving the matter in the hands of the gods – and philosophers have written reams on the subject. But science has had little to say about this ultimate question.
However, in recent years a few physicists and cosmologists have started to tackle it. They point out that we now have an understanding of the history of the universe, and of the physical laws that describe how it works. That information, they say, should give us a clue about how and why the cosmos exists.
Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because “nothing” is inherently unstable.
This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science’s two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Here, then, is how everything could have come from nothing.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), CLASH Team, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))
Particles from empty space
First we have to take a look at the realm of quantum mechanics. This is the branch of physics that deals with very small things: atoms and even tinier particles. It is an immensely successful theory, and it underpins most modern electronic gadgets.
Quantum mechanics tells us that there is no such thing as empty space. Even the most perfect vacuum is actually filled by a roiling cloud of particles and antiparticles, which flare into existence and almost instantaneously fade back into nothingness.
These so-called virtual particles don’t last long enough to be observed directly, but we know they exist by their effects.
The Stephan’s Quintet group of galaxies (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team)
Space-time, from no space and no time
From tiny things like atoms, to really big things like galaxies. Our best theory for describing such large-scale structures is general relativity, Albert Einstein’s crowning achievement, which sets out how space, time and gravity work.
Relativity is very different from quantum mechanics, and so far nobody has been able to combine the two seamlessly. However, some theorists have been able to bring the two theories to bear on particular problems by using carefully chosen approximations. For instance, this approach was used by Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge to describe black holes.
In quantum physics, if something is not forbidden, it necessarily happens
One thing they have found is that, when quantum theory is applied to space at the smallest possible scale, space itself becomes unstable. Rather than remaining perfectly smooth and continuous, space and time destabilize, churning and frothing into a foam of space-time bubbles.
In other words, little bubbles of space and time can form spontaneously. “If space and time are quantized, they can fluctuate,” says Lawrence Krauss at Arizona State University in Tempe. “So you can create virtual space-times just as you can create virtual particles.”
What’s more, if it’s possible for these bubbles to form, you can guarantee that they will. “In quantum physics, if something is not forbidden, it necessarily happens with some non-zero probability,” says Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Maybe it all began with bubbles (Credit: amira_a, CC by 2.0)
A universe from a bubble
So it’s not just particles and antiparticles that can snap in and out of nothingness: bubbles of space-time can do the same. Still, it seems like a big leap from an infinitesimal space-time bubble to a massive universe that hosts 100 billion galaxies. Surely, even if a bubble formed, it would be doomed to disappear again in the blink of an eye?
If all the galaxies are flying apart, they must once have been close together
Actually, it is possible for the bubble to survive. But for that we need another trick: cosmic inflation.
Most physicists now think that the universe began with the Big Bang. At first all the matter and energy in the universe was crammed together in one unimaginably small dot, and this exploded. This follows from the discovery, in the early 20th century, that the universe is expanding. If all the galaxies are flying apart, they must once have been close together.
Inflation theory proposes that in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe expanded much faster than it did later. This seemingly outlandish notion was put forward in the 1980s by Alan Guth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and refined by Andrei Linde, now at Stanford University.
As weird as it seems, inflation fits the facts
The idea is that, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the quantum-sized bubble of space expanded stupendously fast. In an incredibly brief moment, it went from being smaller than the nucleus of an atom to the size of a grain of sand. When the expansion finally slowed, the force field that had powered it was transformed into the matter and energy that fill the universe today. Guth calls inflation “the ultimate free lunch”.
As weird as it seems, inflation fits the facts rather well. In particular, it neatly explains why the cosmic microwave background, the faint remnant of radiation left over from the Big Bang, is almost perfectly uniform across the sky. If the universe had not expanded so rapidly, we would expect the radiation to be patchier than it is.
The cosmic microwave background (Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team)
The universe is flat and why that’s important
Inflation also gave cosmologists the measuring tool they needed to determine the underlying geometry of the universe. It turns out this is also crucial for understanding how the cosmos came from nothing.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells us that the space-time we live in could take three different forms. It could be as flat as a table top. It could curve back on itself like the surface of a sphere, in which case if you travel far enough in the same direction you would end up back where you started. Alternatively, space-time could curve outward like a saddle. So which is it?
There is a way to tell. You might remember from maths class that the three angles of a triangle add up to exactly 180 degrees. Actually your teachers left out a crucial point: this is only true on a flat surface. If you draw a triangle on the surface of a balloon, its three angles will add up to more than 180 degrees. Alternatively, if you draw a triangle on a surface that curves outward like a saddle, its angles will add up to less than 180 degrees.
So to find out if the universe is flat, we need to measure the angles of a really big triangle. That’s where inflation comes in. It determined the average size of the warmer and cooler patches in the cosmic microwave background. Those patches were measured in 2003, and that gave astronomers a selection of triangles. As a result, we know that on the largest observable scale our universe is flat.
It may not look flat… (Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
It turns out that a flat universe is crucial. That’s because only a flat universe is likely to have come from nothing.
Everything that exists, from stars and galaxies to the light we see them by, must have sprung from somewhere. We already know that particles spring into existence at the quantum level, so we might expect the universe to contain a few odds and ends. But it takes a huge amount of energy to make all those stars and planets.
The energy of matter is exactly balanced by the energy of the gravity the mass creates
Where did the universe get all this energy? Bizarrely, it may not have had to get any. That’s because every object in the universe creates gravity, pulling other objects toward it. This balances the energy needed to create the matter in the first place.
It’s a bit like an old-fashioned measuring scale. You can put a heavy weight on one side, so long as it is balanced by an equal weight on the other. In the case of the universe, the matter goes on one side of the scale, and has to be balanced by gravity.
Physicists have calculated that in a flat universe the energy of matter is exactly balanced by the energy of the gravity the mass creates. But this is only true in a flat universe. If the universe had been curved, the two sums would not cancel out.
Matter on one side, gravity on the other (Credit: Da Sal, CC by 2.0)
Universe or multiverse?
At this point, making a universe looks almost easy. Quantum mechanics tells us that “nothing” is inherently unstable, so the initial leap from nothing to something may have been inevitable. Then the resulting tiny bubble of space-time could have burgeoned into a massive, busy universe, thanks to inflation. As Krauss puts it, “The laws of physics as we understand them make it eminently plausible that our universe arose from nothing – no space, no time, no particles, nothing that we now know of.”
So why did it only happen once? If one space-time bubble popped into existence and inflated to form our universe, what kept other bubbles from doing the same?
There could be a mind-boggling smorgasbord of universes
Linde offers a simple but mind-bending answer. He thinks universes have always been springing into existence, and that this process will continue forever.
When a new universe stops inflating, says Linde, it is still surrounded by space that is continuing to inflate. That inflating space can spawn more universes, with yet more inflating space around them. So once inflation starts it should make an endless cascade of universes, which Linde calls eternal inflation. Our universe may be just one grain of sand on an endless beach.
Those universes might be profoundly different to ours. The universe next door might have five dimensions of space rather than the three – length, breadth and height – that ours does. Gravity might be ten times stronger or a thousand times weaker, or not exist at all. Matter might be built out of utterly different particles.
So there could be a mind-boggling smorgasbord of universes. Linde says eternal inflation is not just the ultimate free lunch: it is the only one at which all possible dishes are available.
As yet we don’t have hard evidence that other universes exist. But either way, these ideas give a whole new meaning to the phrase “Thanks for nothing”.
Posted by: Margaret RouseWhatIs.comContributor(s): Ivy Wigmore
The fourth industrial revolution is the current and developing environment in which disruptive technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way we live and work.
The third industrial revolution, sometimes called the digital revolution, involved the development of computers and IT (information technology) since the middle of the 20th century. The fourth industrial revolution is growing out of the third but is considered a new era rather than a continuation because of the explosiveness of its development and the disruptiveness of its technologies. According to Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum and author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the new age is differentiated by the speed of technological breakthroughs, the pervasiveness of scope and the tremendous impact of new systems.
The first industrial revolution, in the 18th and 19th centuries, involved a change from mostly agrarian societies to greater industrialization as a consequence of the steam engine and other technological developments. The next technological age, the second industrial revolution, was driven by electricity and involved expansion of industries and mass production as well as technological advances.
The World Economic Forum provides a brief presentation about the fourth industrial revolution:
SEX ON TUESDAY TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2019
BY AIDAN BASSETT | STAFFLAST UPDATED OCTOBER 22, 2019 (dailycal.org)
Most bisexuals and pansexuals I know often get asked which gender they prefer. Apart from the underlying innocent (if occasionally off-putting) curiosity, I assume people ask for the vicarious entertainment: Almost invariably, it is straight people who ask me, and almost as invariably, they’re bashful but rapt as they do.
Perhaps surprisingly, I agree it’s a good question.
The notion of preferring one gender strikes me as a very heterosexual way of thinking, but preferences aren’t so crazy, even if you really like all your options. And I often used to wonder: Do I have a preference? And if so, why?
After I came out, I felt a lot of unfortunate pressure (mostly just ginned up in my own head) to actualize my burgeoning bisexual identity, and it felt like eons before I had any sexual experiences with boys. In high school, I felt I had to make an active nonchoice: I needed to invest my time equally in relationships with boys and girls — or else risk feeling somehow “fake,” as if my bisexuality required proof. But every time I kissed a boy, I compared it to kissing girls; every time I flirted with a girl, I noticed the differences in flirting with boys. So if I don’t have a preference, it’s not for lack of thought.
But choosing presumes your options are predictable, and in my view, stereotypes only get you so far. Yes, boys I’ve liked tended to be more confident, assertive and forward, ready to chase what they wanted from the start. Yes, girls I’ve liked tended to be more patient and took longer to decide in the first place — at times to my chagrin. Mostly, though, intimacy with boys and girls ranges so much that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The boys I’ve kissed, for instance, tend to be worse kissers, but not necessarily because they’re too assertive or forceful. (One time, a gay guy did criticize my kissing by saying I “kissed like a girl,” but how he would know, I’m not sure.) More interestingly, the girls I’ve kissed have typically been subtler yet more passionate, while the guys have often been less inspired, less supple and less intense. (Sorry, boys.) And one girl I dated felt my lips were “too soft” — a complaint I still don’t understand.
These intricacies and unpredictabilities of people and their emotions are generally what make love and sex exhilarating for me. One of the great joys of being bisexual is that these nuances are multiplied by the variation within each gender. Although I deplore the stereotype that bisexuals are promiscuous or sexually distractible, the universal human desire for novelty probably inflects my bisexuality; even if I love not needing to choose among genders, my mood still varies.
In the months or seasons when I want the energy or clarity of a cut-to-the-chase sexual partner, I find myself pining for the authoritativeness of the guys I’ve liked. Every boy I’ve been involved with has been older than I was — something of a necessity, given how long boys take to mature — and all of them have kept me on my toes. And in my experience, if boys are one thing, it’s unpredictable.
In more emotionally introspective times, by contrast, I crave the intimacy, self-knowledge and immersive affection of the girls I’ve dated. In my life, girls have typically varied more widely, but whether they show it visibly or not, girls are typically savvier, more emotionally intricate and more dynamic. Girls have the sexual range of boys and then some, but it all depends on the circumstances.
If I had to choose a favorite aspect of being bi, it would be the joy and variety of these fluctuations — of these celebrations of my nonchoice. After breaking up with my first serious girlfriend, for instance, I had my heart set on a boy entirely her opposite: assertive, flamboyant, shrewd. But he defied my expectations for boys. Despite being the first boy I ever kissed, he made me wait for quite some time and wanted me to be very sure of my feelings before starting a relationship.
Perhaps unfortunately (for him?), the tumult of our drawn-out courtship coincided with a renewed desire for ease and simplicity in my life, and I opted for another girl I’d been smitten with for years, a girl whom I’d thought was cerebral and predictable but who instead gave me one of the most adventurous years of my life.
Pretending I could reliably prefer one gender ultimately ignores the fact that gender or sex have limited bearing on who someone is, and any statement of preference would revolve mostly around genitals, which (obviously) vary immensely in quality. I’ve fallen in love with very different people, and no matter what traits I presumed based on their gender, they surprised me.
If I said I preferred boys to girls or vice versa, it would be like saying I preferred Braeburn apples to mandarin oranges even though I preferred tangerines to Gala apples or (God forbid) Red Delicious, which are, in fact, abominable. In short, it would be somewhere between a lie and an oversimplification.
So facing the choice to choose or not to choose, I’d choose not to choose because choosing is meaningless, impossible and, above all, blessedly beside the point.
Aidan Bassett writes the Tuesday column on sex. Contact him at sex@dailycal.org.
The following screen snap provides a lot of info:
– the url
– a static image of what you find when you go there, which can be dynamic
– it can be set. As the date in the lower right shows, I’ve set it for my birthday. I have not yet compared this to my chart—it will be an interesting shift in perspective.
– a control panel. At the top, below the URL, there is a drop down next to “Any time.” Clicking this causes the control panel to be displayed.
–Michael Kelly, H.W.
VICTOR TANGERMANN OCTOBER 24TH 2019 (futurism.com)
After weeks of speculation, megacorporation Google is claiming to have achieved “quantum supremacy” in a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature.
Why should you care? And what is quantum supremacy in the first place? Let’s take a couple steps back.
In the paper published today, the team of Google AI scientists claimed their quantum computer — called “Sycamore” — was capable of completing a task involving the verification of the randomness of large numbers in just three minutes and twenty seconds. The most powerful supercomputer in the world, they said, would need 10,000 years to accomplish the same task.
Classical computers — any piece of equipment from your laptop to warehouse-sized supercomputers — work with just ones and zeros. But quantum computers, like Sycamore, use quantum bits, commonly known as qubits, to do their calculations instead. Rather than being stuck with two possibilities for a single bit, a qubit can be both zero and one at the same time.
That means the power of computation rises exponentially the more qubits you have. With 52 qubits, Google’s Sycamore quantum computer can look at 10 million billion states at every one time, according to a flashy video uploaded by Google today on the subject. That’s a hell of a lot of math.
So what makes Sycamore more effective than a classical computer?
American theoretical physicist John Preskill first coined the term “quantum supremacy” back in 2012. In a column for Quanta Magazine published earlier this month, he defined it as “the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful.”
It’s important to note that quantum supremacy doesn’t mean a quantum computer can solve a task that’s impossible for a classical computer.
“Given enough time… classical computers and quantum computers can solve the same problems,” Thomas Wong of Creighton University told Quanta Magazine.
Noting that the term “quantum supremacy” would likely result in “overhyped reporting on the status of quantum technology,” Preskill congratulated Google on their “remarkable achievement in experimental physics” calling it a “testament to the brisk pace of progress in quantum computing hardware.”
In short, by proving the quantum computer’s superiority, we are now capable of solving certain complex problems much faster than before. Pharmaceutical companies could conceivably use the tech to devise extremely complex compounds that could be used in medicine. Financial modeling could use quantum computing to figure out market trends.
And on a darker note, quantum computers could theoretically crack current encryption standards with unprecedented amounts of computational power.
But that’s all speculative. Leading researchers still haven’t found the exact use cases for these powerful and notoriously finicky computers.
And that’s why Google’s result should be taken with a healthy dose of salt: Sycamore solved an extremely specific task in an extremely specific way.
“In brief, the quantum computer executed a randomly chosen sequence of instructions, and then all the qubits were measured to produce an output bit string,” wrote Preskill in his column. “This quantum computation has very little structure, which makes it harder for the classical computer to keep up, but also means that the answer is not very informative.”
Google’s biggest rival in the quantum space, IBM, published a piece two days prior to the publication that criticized the accomplishment.
It claimed that an “ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.”
That’s in large part due to certain parameters Google’s experiment was ignoring, according to IBM, including “plentiful disk storage,” and other “well-known optimization methods.”
Supremacy or not, the power of quantum computers is arguably only as significant as its possible use cases. Google’s team is already working on “near-term applications,” according to a blog post published today, including “quantum physics simulation and quantum chemistry, as well as new applications in generative machine learning.”
Besides these applications, Google has proved its quantum computer is really good at spitting out random numbers. That may not sound like much, but randomness can be extremely useful in computer science.
Preskill believes we are still decades away from seeing quantum computers have a “transformative effect on society.” But Google’s watershed moment could lay the groundwork of an entirely new era of computation that could enable anything from the design of new materials to more efficient fertilizers — if Google is to be believed.
READ MORE: Google and IBM Clash Over Milestone Quantum Computing Experiment [Quanta Magazine]
More on Google’s paper: It’s Official: Google Claims to Have Achieved Quantum Supremacy
DAN ROBITZSKI October 23, 2019 (Futurism.com)
Faced with the challenges of global climate change as well as the refugee crisis and armed conflicts it will create, the U.S. military may very well collapse.
That’s the dire conclusion of a Pentagon-commissioned report about the future of the military, first published online in August with little fanfare and recently surfaced by Motherboard. The takeaway is clear: if humanity continues to destroy the environment, American infrastructure could collapse and the military would be so ill-equipped to respond that it too would fall apart.
In a cruel twist of irony, the U.S. Department of Defense was recently shown to have the largest carbon footprint in the world — the military does more to exacerbate climate change than do entire developed nations.
“Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions,” reads the report. It says that increased energy demands caused by increased heat waves and droughts could destroy the power grid, which it describes as “an already fragile system.”
The report illustrates an increasingly-dire warning: we’re running low on time to change course and prevent the most devastating impacts of our climate change catastrophe.
As the military and the world’s infrastructure face heightened strains from rising sea levels, water shortages, and growing numbers of environmental refugees, it would seem wise to decarbonize as much of society as humanly possible before everything falls apart.
READ MORE: U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says [Motherboard]
More on the military: Scientists: Harming The Environment Should Be a War Crime
John O’Donohue. Photo by Colm Hogan.
“It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person,” philosopher Amelie Rorty wrote in examining what makes a person through her taxonomy of the seven layers of identity. I have thought about Rorty often in watching the steamroller of our cultural moment level the beautiful, wild topography of personhood into variations on identity politics, demolishing context, dispossessing expression of intention, and flattening persons into identities. Half a century ago, James Baldwin shone a sidewise gleam of admonition against this perilous tendency as he contemplated freedom and how we imprison ourselves: “This collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.”
Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
During a tense recent dinner table conversation about these tensions, I was reminded of a lesser-known legacy of the great Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008), who has written beautifully about selfhood and the crucible of identity.
In 1997, the Irish broadcaster and radio producer John Quinn conceived of a summer series titled “Webs of Wonder” — a modern embodiment of Descartes’s conviction that “wonderment is the first passion of all,” exploring the elemental sublimity of wonder through poetry, music, literature, and philosophy. Quinn enlisted O’Donohue in the philosophical component of the program. In a hotel bar in Kinvara, the two sat down to explore the tessellations of wonder in a roaming hourlong conversation, the transcript of which was published as Walking on the Pastures of Wonder: John O’Donohue in Conversation with John Quinn (public library).
In one of the most poignant portions of the conversation, O’Donohue considers the trap of identity, the relationship between limitation and wonder, and how the unquestioned confines us to smaller and smaller compartments of ourselves:
Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds. All thought is about putting a face on experience… One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. So a question is really one of the forms in which wonder expresses itself. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways to wonder.
[…]
All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking… And thought, if it’s not open to wonder, can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous.
Two decades after O’Donohue’s beautiful words, we have somehow found ourselves in an era where even the brightest, kindest, most idealistic people spring to judgment — which is nothing other than negative wonder — in a heart-flinch. Questions invite instant opinions more often than they invite conversation and contemplation — a peculiar terror of wonder that O’Donohue presaged:
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.
Paradoxically, in our golden age of identity politics and trigger-ready outrage, this repression of our inner wildness and fracturing of our wholeness has taken on an inverted form, inclining toward a parody of itself. Where Walt Whitman once invited us to celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the wonder that comes from discovering one another’s multitudes afresh, we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments of others. (For instance, some of mine: woman, reader, immigrant, writer, queer, survivor of Communism.) Because no composite of fragments can contain, much less represent, all possible fragments, we end up drifting further and further from one another’s wholeness, abrading all sense of shared aspiration toward unbiased understanding. The censors of yore have been replaced by the “sensitivity readers” of today, fraying the fabric of freedom — of speech, even of thought — from opposite ends, but fraying it nonetheless. The safety of conformity to an old-guard mainstream has been supplanted by the safety of conformity to a new-order minority predicated on some fragment of identity, so that those within each new group (and sub-group, and sub-sub-group) are as harsh to judge and as fast to exclude “outsiders” (that is, those of unlike identity-fragments) from the conversation as the old mainstream once was in judging and excluding them. In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning — imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness.
Art by Oliver Jeffers from Once Upon an Alphabet.
This inversion of intent only fissures the social justice movement itself, so that people who are at bottom kindred-spirited — who share the most elemental values, who work from a common devotion to the same projects of justice and equality, who are paving parallel pathways to a nobler, fairer, more equitable world — end up disoriented by the suspicion that they might be on different sides of justice after all, merely because their particular fragments don’t happen to coincide perfectly. In consequence, despite our best intentions, we misconstrue and alienate each other more and more.
O’Donohue offers a gentle corrective:
Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.
A generation after James Baldwin asserted that “an artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian [whose] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are,” O’Donohue considers the singular artistry of composing a human life, suspended between the doom and the glory of the interior truths that comprise our identity:
Each one of us is privileged to be the custodian of this inner world, which is accessible only through thought, and we are also doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves from the world that we actually carry… All human being and human identity and human growth is about finding some kind of balance between the privilege and the doom or the inevitability of carrying this kind of world.
One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne.
Today, we seem to serve not as custodians of our inner worlds but as their terrified and terrible wardens, policing our own interiority along with that of others for any deviation from the proscribed identity-political correctness. And yet identity is exclusionary by definition — we are what remains after everything we are not. Even those remnants are not static and solid ground onto which to stake the flag of an immutable personhood but fluid currents in an ever-shifting, shoreless self — for, as Virginia Wolf memorably wrote, “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” To liberate ourselves from the trap of identity, O’Donohue implies, requires not merely an awareness of but an active surrender to the transience that inheres in all of life and engenders its very richness:
One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere — they have vanished… It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.
To come to terms with this — with the impermanence and mutability of our thoughts, our feelings, our values, our very cells — is to grasp the absurdity of clinging to any strand of identity with the certitude and self-righteousness undergirding identity politics. To reclaim the beauty of the multitudes we each contain, we must break free of the prison of our fragments and meet one another as whole persons full of wonder unblunted by identity-template and expectation.
Complement this particular direction of thought inspired by Walking on the Pastures of Wonder with James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s spectacular conversation about identity and belonging, young Barack Obama on how we fragment our wholeness with polarizing identity politics, and Walt Whitman on identity and the paradox of the self, then revisit O’Donohue on the central pillar of friendship, how our restlessness fuels our creativity, and what makes life’s transience bearable.
Thanks, Krista
This article was originally published on January 1, 2018, by Brain Pickings, and is republished here with permission.
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