Read Any Good Tank Trucks Lately?

Rush hour traffic jams on I-287 are good for at least one thing...


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…Looking out the driver’s window for close encounters with the mechanisms and undercarriages of trucks. By comparison, passenger cars are just sheet metal on parade.

I don’t know what the numbers stand for, but that doesn’t diminish my pleasure in looking at them as glimpses of a world beyond my ken. The world is full of such worlds, daily reminders of the limitations of our knowledge.

It makes no difference, really, whether those worlds of knowledge are deep or shallow, narrow or broad. Not that they are interchangeable or equivalent. There’s only so much you can devote your time and energy to learning, so you pick your spots.

But those daily reminders that, as Blake put it, there is a world in a grain of sand, indeed in every grain of sand, I find always puts me in a suitably humble relation to the concept of the universe. I would have no way to approach the concept of infinity (even if the universe turns out not to be infinite) if not for the sense that there are infinite worlds, or glimpses of them–glimpses, say, of the tank truck driver’s world–right out the window of your car stuck in traffic.

Add enough of those razor thin glimpses of infinity and you have an inkling of the conglomeration of infinities that is the human world, let alone the natural world, let alone the interplanetary world or the interstellar world.

Listening to me spin out this point of view the other day, a friend told me with confidence that I am an optimist. I don’t see myself this way, because I don’t think there’s a lottery ticket with my name on it, or that my 401K will recover before I have no choice but to reture.

Because not only do I see lodes of knowledge and networking and natural and mathematical laws drilling down beyond our sight, but if you keep drilling down, I believe everything ultimately connects in some way with everything else. So no man is an island, though I can think of several who I might like to see move to a desert island and not bring their iPhones.

 

 

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