Beltane Summer Moon
Got to thinking about the standing on the shoulders of giants meme. It’s a great contribution of Isaac Newton, a quotable polymath and giant like last century’s Albert Einstein. The more I thought about it though the less satisfied I was with it. [Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (Poussin, 1658)]
It introduces a necessary humility to any advancement in human thought, emphasizing the debt owed to the past. But. It seems to me a forest works better.
The giants of the past remain just that. The General Shermans, the Methuselahs of the forest, but they protect the growth of new, younger saplings and smaller giants who grow up among them. They are nourished from the same soil, in the case of Newton and Einstein, western civilization, and they don’t disappear under a long chain of legs and heads and shoulders, but remain in their place, already tall, eternal and the guarantors of the forest itself.
Too, I can easily imagine my own journeys into these groves, wandering among woodlands growing since the days of classical Athens, old kingdom Egypt, republican Rome, the Renaissance. And consider Newton. Perhaps the mythical apple tree of his life might have been the Islamic scientist Averroes.
This ancestral forest lies just beyond the edge of this material reality, its sylvan nature dependent no longer on the laws of physics but on the memories of the future. We are its caretakers, responsible for its continued health.
