A Desert of Dust

I'm still alive! I managed to survive my first year of academia and I feel like the next year will be so much better. I've finally narrowed down my research topics and I'm getting a firmer grasp of my subject. It's nice to be back on familiar ground, so to speak. So, my long career or scholarship begins with a firm foundation and a happy send-off.

So, obviously, this gets me thinking about the lives we create for ourselves. You know, the empires we build together, the knowledge we create, and the lives that we touch. I ran across two quotes while in this frame of mind. Well, technically, I ran across one quote and then I opened up an old book to find the second quote. The two quotes are related and I thought of the second one immediately after reading the first. I saw the first quote while reading A Continent Of Islands by Mark Kurlansky. The book is about Caribbean history; how the people of the islands have struggled against near insurmountable odds to craft nations out of slavery, poverty, genocide, and their colonial pasts. The quote is somewhat out of place, padding the end of the introduction and starting the first chapter, but there's a universal appeal about the quote; something about it speaks to so many things.

I was thinking about was what my life will mean one day, what it means to build a nation, and what role can I play in the grand scheme of things. Here is where I found the quote:

"And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of the colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Those words still ring through my ears, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" I imagine myself in the Imperial Sand Dunes of southeast California. The dunes are huge and expansive. You can't help but feel small compared to them. Not just small, but vulnerable. You check your gas gauge, twice. The heavy sands and the heat they trap could kill you if you don't keep moving.

And here, in the middle of this wasteland, you encounter a pedestal. One stone artifact in a mountainous terrain of sand, heat, and desolation. The stone object is a warning to the mighty, to you who believe that you can create something timeless. "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" The warning is clear: nothing remains.

This reminded me of a second quote by one of my favorite authors, H.G. Wells. In this passage, the protagonist travels into the future where the remaining people had become like animals, simple and unintelligent. He explores the area and encounters an abandoned building here. It's old, but it is obviously some sort of museum or university. The flags that line the large room catch his eyes. That's when he sees the shelves:

"The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness or rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought cheifly of the Philosphical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics."

Again, the warning is clear. So little remains from our massive efforts. Our great nations are sand and all the we know is dust. Our monuments break and our books crumble. Really, in the end, all we have are our individual life journies. My roommate once jokingly told me that he's after prestige in the scientific world. At first, that seems like a noble goal. In the end, however, that goal, like Ozymandias' great kingdom, will be like every other goal; a desert of dust. Suddenly, I'm glad that my journey is one I do out of love. We have so little time and so many steps to take in our lives. I can only pray that each of my steps takes me towards happiness and the things that truly are timeless in life.

What I study may not last forever, but it brings me true inner joy. On top of that, I think I may be able to touch a life or two in the process. Isn't that all that matters in the end?

Monkeys With Guns

I've been doing a lot of reading on the depiction on scientists and science in literature. What has originally started with a fascination regarding the mad scientist through history has illuminated a whole world of interactions and connections between society and the science that it creates. I've been particularly struck by two quotes:

"The plain message which physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as the linotype machine, and antiseptic operating plant or an electric tramcar, there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil in the world and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear and the anxiety that now make human life so doubtful in its value... Science stands, a too-competent servant behind her wrangling under-bred masters, holding out resources, devices and remedies they are too stupid to use."

- HG Wells, A Modern Utopia (1908)

the second passage, I quote

They made a myth of you, professor,
you of the gentle voice,
the books, the specs,
the furtive rabbit manners
in the mortar-board cap
and the medieval gown.

They didn't think of it, eh professor?
On account of your so absent-minded,
you bumping into the tree and saying,
"Excuse me, I thought you were a tree,"
passing on again blank and absent-minded

Now it's "Mr. Attila, how do you do?"
Do you pack wallops of wholesale death?
Are you the practical dynamite son-of-a-gun?
Have you come through with a few abstractions?
Is it you, Mr. Attila we hear saying,
"I beg your pardon but we believe we have made
some degree of progress on the residual
qualities of the atom"?

-Carl Sandburg, "Mr. Attila" (August 1945)

In case you didn't remember, on the sixth day of August 1945 the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing approximately 70,000 fellow humans in the span of seconds.

I am constantly hit by the vast power and potential that science offers the world. Humanity and Nature reveal themselves to one another for brief moments. Nature reveals its terror and splendor, offering the ability to shape our destinies and possibly of molding the universe itself. Humanity, in return, shows her frightened state, that we are nothing more than startled lemurs cowering in the trees. We, as a race, have the potential to ascend to heaven, to remake the world as paradise. Instead, we satisfy ourselves by eating each other.

Even with this knowledge, or the privileged exposure to this perspective, scientists resign themselves to creating more industry, which may not even be science at all. We scientists, as an international community, compete for financial resources, power, and personal prestige. We are walking, thinking factories of technology by our own culture's social design. It is no wonder that some of the great social-scientific, reformist minds are relegated to the kiddy-table of science, Alfred Russell Wallace (the discoverer of natural selection), HG Wells (noted scientist and humanitarian), and many others. My respect for modern scientists that seriously dedicate themselves to societal improvement has increased a hundred-fold.

I can only hope to live up to their stature and wisdom. I would rather work on improving my world-community and prepare it for our scientific advances than hand guns to monkeys.