On Advent: "We Are All Lying in the Mud, but Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars"

Published: December 4, 2007, 10:50 am

The caption at NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" page reads: "Atlantis to Orbit." The filename of the picture reads: nightlaunch. And I am moved by the poetry of this most modern of images, not by the triumph of Reason which it seems to enshrine, but by that which is beyond Reason yet within it all the same. In thinking about this brief essay I could not help but think of a longer one by Doctor Bob at The Doctor Is In about a "civilized" European nation that cannot stop itself from taking the next step down into the pit; its people driven, as these things always are, by the inexorable demands of "what is reasonable." In the work of Goya we see how that great soul came, having walked the carnage cloaked landscapes of his era, to understand that cry of the Enlightenment, "The sleep of reason breeds monsters."

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