Learning Journal #11

Does it ever seem like all of your classes are overlapping in content? This seems to happen to me every semester, and things always seem to overlap on the oddest points. It's happening again this semester, although this time I feel like I've caused it by planning most of my classes to have some relevance to my project. I also wonder if it's partially because I've got my brain so stuck on my project that I'm practically looking for things that relate to it.

This week, I was doing some reading for a creative writing class, and we were reading a personal essay by Lois-Ann Yamanaka called "JohnJohn's World." It's a very poignant piece, but I was particularly struck by one sentence from the essay: "Yes, you are universal. You are the moon and the stars, the oceans and the mountains, the planets and galaxies, a million constellations." My brain was pinging. The inner heavens, just like Marsilio Ficino discusses in his letter! Only here she's using a modern understanding of the scope of the universe! I wanted to point this out to all of my classmates, but (1) it wouldn't have been socially appropriate, and (2) no one else would have cared much, or probably even have understood the tie to Renaissance cosmology (because, as I'm trying to accept, most people don't care about Renaissance cosmology in the slightest).

I guess that's just what's happening to me though—the word "universe" makes me perk up like a dog that's been napping on the living room rug and hears the sound of a car on the street. I can't help it. My project is taking over my brain! But I suppose that's how it should be, isn't it? Even when I started reading an absolutely lovely cancer romance last night (I love cancer romances), things were bouncing off the page saying "I'm relevant to your project!" And just because this part was relevant, and I think it's lovely, I'm going to share it:

"I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary?"  - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Granted, this isn't Renaissance cosmological theory he's discussing here, but it's still the universe and talking about how people relate to it. I haven't finished the book yet, and so I'm not sure if this concept of the universe wanting to be noticed will come up again, if it will be tied to individuals' relationship with God (though, of course, the concept of an individual's relationship with God is present throughout the book, because, come on, it's a cancer romance, and you just don't talk cancer without talking God because there are people dying left and right, and if it isn't the protagonist believing in God, it's some loony character that spends most of the book making super-Christian comments at random and then ultimately says something super profound to the protagonist at the very end, probably on one or the other's deathbed).

I don't know if I'm just a magnet for this kind of stuff, or what, but it hasn't seemed to me before that much of the more recent (i.e. from the last century or so) stuff I read has said much of anything about the universe. (Astonishing, because it's kind of a (literally) huge deal.) And yet, here I am, reading double how-people-relate-to-the-universe texts in one day, without even intending to. How does that happen? Is it possible that there's a lot more of this out there that I just haven't noticed? Probably. Since I read so much for class, I don't have tons of time for leisure reading, so I'm probably not as up on my recent literature as I could be.

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe these types of references—these random musings about man and the universe and whatnot—are just the beginnings of being able to relate to the universe with a similar depth and intensity that people of the Renaissance were able to enjoy. I suppose it has to start somewhere. Yamanaka's story acknowledges the vastness of the universe, and then contains it within one person—her son. Although this suggests that JohnJohn himself is incredibly vast and complex, it also suggests that the universe is touchable, it is within our grasp. Green's reference to the universe suggests that it is reaching out to us, and that we can have a relationship, even a conversant one, with the universe. If these two stories are indicative of the general feeling that people have towards the universe, even if it's only held generally among creative people, then maybe we're progressing towards that Renaissance-like closeness with our incomprehensibly huge universe.