"When everything else has gone from my brain ... what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that." Annie Dillard
Pages
▼
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Earth and Heaven
Yesterday was Earth Day; tomorrow is Easter. Today we are nicely tucked between earth and heaven. Which is where we are most comfortable, anyway.
"[It is a] a shabby genteel sentiment," wrote the 19th-century British historian William Winwood Reade, "which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes."
I disagree. It is not a "shabby sentiment" that makes us feel uncomfortable in our human skin, that makes us believe there is something for us after this life is done. We may be wrong, of course. But hope is a choice. An informed choice.