Ad astra

LISTEN. Watched the first depressing but necessary (except apparently on Fox) Jan 6 Committee hearing last night. I really need to get away.

Additions to the vacation leisure-reading list, which is already too long and (with still more New England Transcendentalism) possibly not leisurely enough: The Human Cosmos by Jo Marchant, Two Wheels Good by Jody Rosen, "The Poet" and "Experience" in Emerson’s Essays.

I think the ulterior question  motivating every item on my list, beyond mere diversion and the vacating of everyday routine, is simply: What is experience? So Emerson's coming to the beach too.

Whatever the philosophers say, I say experience is just whatever it is we do when we follow Aurelius's advice and recognize the precious privilege of being alive. It's breathing, thinking (which in this context emphatically includes feeling, not denigrating it as some philosophers do), enjoying, loving etc. It's not necessarily authoritative or authoritarian in a moral or a Rortian sense. (Interesting discussion on that point, though, in this Moral Maze podcast debate.) It's simply what James says we all do, implicitly and often unconsciously, all the time. 

“For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.” Prag I

That's also what Jo Marchant seems to think (and feel) in The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars.

"The scientific account of the universe is a pinnacle of our modern civilization, a vision so powerful that its rivals have been all but obliterated. Cosmology—the study of the cosmos—once described the broad philosophical and spiritual endeavor to make sense of existence, to ask who we are, where we are, and why we're here. It is now a branch of mathematical astronomy. So what happened to those bigger questions? Is there nothing else about the universe we need to know? Instead of detailing the latest astronomical developments, this is a guide to the long history of knowledge that people have gleaned from the stars. It's about what their view of the cosmos told them of the nature of reality and the meaning of life; about the gods and souls, myths and magical beasts, palaces and celestial spheres that we've discarded; about how the scientific view came to dominate; and how in turn that journey still shapes who we are today. It's a tale about people—of priests, explorers, revolutionaries and kings—and it starts not with the Big Bang, nor even with the birth of science, but with the very first humans who looked to the stars, and the answers they found in the sky."

There's a cosmic connection in Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle too.

In the 1890s, advertising posters depicted bicycles in outer space. These are some of the most famous images of the bicycle ever created: they show bikes pressed against the firmament, bikes streaking past comets and planets, bikes coasting down the slopes of sickle moons. The riders of these bicycles are often women—or, rather, goddesses. They have bare breasts and rippling Grecian garments and long hair that trails behind them like a jet stream. In one advertisement, for the French bicycle company Cycles Sirius, a nearly nude cyclist rides sidesaddle across a starry sky, her eyes closed, her smiling face thrust upward in ecstasy. The image says that a bicycle is a conduit of otherworldly pleasure. A bike ride can shoot you to the stars; a bike ride could give Aphrodite an orgasm. A poster designed in 1900 for another French firm, Cycles Brillant, pictures two barely clad female figures adrift in the Milky Way. One of them, with fairy wings on her back and an olive bough in her left hand, is reaching up toward the front wheel of a bicycle that hovers overhead like an orbiting sun. The bike is spotlit and radiant, reflecting the glow cast by a diamond that floats nearby. In this surreal vision, the bicycle itself is a deity, a heavenly body beaming light down to Earth."

Before we hit the beach, I'm planning to rent a fat-tire bike. Shoot me to the stars, Cycles Brillant. Or Raleigh. Or whatever they've got. If they're out (since their website says they don't take reservations), I'll still reach the stars my usual way. Solvitur ambulando.