Another blog I read sometimes (he’s a Mac programmer; you can’t read just Catholic blogs all day) puts up a question of the day and I thought this one was interesting:
How many hours per day do you spend reading? How many of those hours are spent reading something without electricity running through it (i.e. on paper)?
That’s a good one for all you bloggers and blogreaders, although judging from the “how many books do you own” thing, there’s probably a lot of “non-electric” reading going on.
Anyway, I’d say I spend most of my day reading one thing or another, say 10-12 hours. (I am a magazine editor after all.) Of that, about 2-3 hours is spent reading stuff that’s on paper.
I’ve been spending happy hours re-reading my old Astronomy text (ca. 1968). The stuff about the geology of the planets and some of the stuff about the stars is out of date, but all of the basics are still true. There is a real pleasure in considering the cosmos and how we can know about it. Its beauty and lawfulness and the history of man’s striving to measure and understand it. There is a beauty too in the instruments that have been made to probe the stars and planets: to make them perfect as one can in shape and measure so that they might be faithful servants to our yearning to understand this world. This truly is one of the Liberal Arts.
Speaking of contemplating the cosmos, how about this image from Hubble?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0305/helix03_hst_big.jpg
It’s called “The Eye of God.”
“I’m watching you…”
Thanks Dom, very beautiful! This is an example of a planetary nebula. The star in its center has grown suddenly hotter in its ageing process and blown off its outer atmosphere. Although it looks like a donut, this cloud is really spherical with the front and the back, from our POV, much thinner and therefore less luminous than the sides.
We are in a golden age of Astronomy and Cosmology with splendor after splendor bringing a feast to the heart and mind. I find that as a Christian the beauty of the cosmos is a real source of hope: if this is what the old heaven and earth are like, what sublimity will the *new* heaven and earth possess?