Books books books!

 I've been making a list of books I wanted since last year, I have not gotten every one, but most of them. One I gave to my cousin, in hopes he can read it with a magnifying glass. I cannot complain, at least there are printers out there. There is a book by Mary Sommerville, her translation of another I think, which I would also like. And come to think of it, wouldn't probably mind owning "The Principia" just to have on my shelf.

I am writing today after a sort of dry spell, I have been sick and weak and today I am lying down recuperating after a stomach bleed. I had to go to the hospital and have a solution shot through my arm to end the bleeding, and now I am hoping to be strong enough to work next week. As of right now, I have five new books! There were six, but "Anticipations" is no longer with me and I plan to purchase the original printing or one closer to that original date eventually so my aging eyes can read the words. 

I have a hard bound copy of "Origin of Species". I have a very marked and stickered "used" copy of a Viking Critical Library copy of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". An extremely large copy of the "Decameron", and "A Brief History of Time" and I started with a copy of Ovid, his love poem. I read a bit of that, I wonder where I left it. Oh, and after one of my favorite blogs by the Marginalien, I purchased a copy of Nietzsche. Knowing little to nothing about him, I chose "Beyond Good and Evil". I will pick it up some time in the next day or so. That should cover every title!

Now to why I wanted to write today. I was reading "A Brief History of Time" by the one and only Stephen Hawking, you know, to sort of get back into my never ending interest in the cosmos, and trying to reconcile my past discoveries with anything very new. If I take too long of a break I lose interest and my continuous train of thought is lost and I am forced to try to put together my learning in new ways by reinvesting myself in things. I am not a professional scientist, or writer or scholar. But as I am that interested in it, I allow myself to enjoy myself, carte blanche. But on to other matters....

I can say that my original idea has brought me back to write about this science. I said "Life imitates non-life", and my big idea today was that spontaneous evolution, in line with my belief that life is pervading all, sort of like the ideas of the Hindus, is not really spontaneous, but instead is a non-stop process. I am curious about how this will cause me trouble as a Christian, since the people who follow religions are very insistent on never breaking with their beliefs, and really, it is not like me to do so as well. I have been a Sabbath observer for most of adult life. Also, science fiction gets really cool here all of a sudden. (I am imagining new evolutions, I wish I knew more fiction, lol)

If you have ever read "A Brief History of Time", and maybe you have - Hawking boasts his book is best selling, second only to those books that don't count, Shakespeare and the Bible - you may remember his opening, disclaimer lines, meeting with an elderly woman who said we are floating on the backs of turtles. Whether we are on turtles or not is obvious to many, but the truth of many things remains hidden. Discussing the beginnings of the universe had me in a couple of books, one of them brought up Steven Jay Gould, who I believe was an evolutionary biologist, but even more than that, he was a realist, a truth-ist, a logic-ist, and a lot of other things that prevent categorizing him with those less inclined to reason. I liked him, anyway, here and there. And my bringing this all up, and usually I am better able to keep up with myself, is to reiterate that spontaneous evolution might in fact just be the ever present creator doing his thing. It may be a sort of creation in action and not entirely evolution.

Another beautiful thing I read by the Marginalien, was the story of flowers, I cannot even rewrite it in the moment, concerned with so many things. How did it work? Was it Darwin who said this most amazing thing or someone else? It was, I remember, Emily Dickenson who she was highlighting, and she was saying that she had said things in line with ecology as the word was first termed only a year afterward. I had been reading a bit of Emily Dickenson a week or so ago and so it was a peculiar thing. I have found her to be, in my older and wiser years, just as important as they've made her out to be. Her poems are much more interesting and far deeper than a young person who greatly disliked poetry could have understood. I think it is amazing that you are able to grow with age, she was obviously a very astute young woman. 

According to the writer, both Emily and the man who coined ecology and Darwin were all greatly influenced by flowers, the precursor to fruitful life on land. Their pollinating is of great importance. It sounds very romantic to me, so I cannot get to into it, I am not very adept at biology, (failed it 3 times) but, I am fascinated by things which seem to be impressive, not to myself only, but especially by wider groups. I was reading an inspirational the other day and came across a passage that said something about when God gave birds their wings. You know, I am not only impressed by the idea of flight and its evolutionary implications, but at the "primitive man's" awareness of the miracle of flight. I often wonder about man before he was impressed with himself. 

If there is such a thing as spontaneous evolution, and yet there is a God who knows and endorses things, it is of course not spontaneous. I am apt to believe that the smartest people must be believers because they cannot miss the whole picture.

p.s. of course things may have come flying on a comet, who knows!?