Stars, universe and humanity

I was more than halfway through William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, when I came across a peculiar passage where Heat-Moon reflects in the desert. Here it is:

Stars shone with a clarity beyond anything I could remember. I was looking into—actually seeing—the past. By looking up into the darkness, I was looking into time. The old light from Betelgeuse, five hundred twenty light-years away, showed the star that existed when Christopher Columbus was a boy, and the Betelgeuse he saw was the one that burned when Northmen were crossing the Atlantic. For the Betelgeuse of this time, someone else will have to do the looking. The past is for the present, the present for the future.

Astronomers say that when telescopes of greater range can be built, ones that can look down the distant curves of the universe billions of light-years away, they might show existence at the time of creation. And if astrophysicists and countless American Indians are correct in believing that a human being is composed of exploded bits of heavenly matter, billions of galactic atoms, then astronomers may behold us all in the stellar winds; they may observe us when we were something else and very much farther away. In a time when men counted only seven planets, Whitman recognized it:

“Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I knew I was even there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time.”

In his writing, there's a sincere reverence for history. He gives textual space to describing the landscape, sharing the bits of folk-knowledge he picks up along the way and explaining the history of a certain place, no matter how many centuries ago. 

It's enjoyable to hear him rattle on and on about fun facts. It makes this great country called 'America' feel more human, more 'lived in', for lack of a better word. It feels less of a global superpower with uncanny dominance over the world's economics and culture and more of someone's home.

That said, this passage about the stars scare me, somehow. It's a very profound appreciation for the past as a concept. I guess that's a good reason why I enjoy the passage. There's something humbling and universal about confronting history on such a scale.

—

1970s American culture has this peculiar aversion to the past. Writing about how no one cared that industrial cities are declining in his book, When America became Suburban, Robert A. Beauregard describes the American character as follows:

With city living once again desirable and with many of the once-industrial cities enjoying renewed investment and even population growth through the 1980s and 1990s, it was easy to forget the urban trauma that had transpired a few decades earlier. Of course, Americans have never been wedded to the past; the future is more beguiling. Nevertheless, a sense of history, a sense of unavoidable and myraid ways in which the past implicates the present, is essential if Americans are to grasp who they have become and how they arrived there. These are the raw materials of a national identity (18)

Beauregard writes this because this is the time of mass consumerism. People wanted to live in the suburban areas and enjoy consumer products, to get new jobs and all that. 

Another relevant case can be seen in Lauren Pearlman's article, "The Bicentennial and the Battle over DC’s Downtown Redevelopment during the 1970s", where the government refused to hear about what the local people wanted and instead wanted to build the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Bicentennial Civic Center, which promises economic growth, jobs and tourism! Indeed, the 'future' beguiles.

At any rate, Daniel Bell said something similar in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, when describing modernism. However, his description injects a crippling loneliness as a result from the insistence on detaching oneself from the past:

The emphasis of modernism is on the present or on the future, but never on the past. Yet when one is cut off from the past, one cannot escape the final sense of nothingness that the future then holds. Faith is no longer possible, and art or nature or impulse can erase the self only momentarily in the intoxication or frenxy of the Dionysian act. But intoxication always passes, and there is the cold morning after, which arrives inexorably with the break of day. (50)

Sure, Bell might be referring to a lack of reverence towards literary/cultural tradition. The 'high art', the 'great canon' dominated by the likes of Renaissance paintings and epics like Homer's Odyssey. However, I think Heat-Moon's appealling to something more fundamental than that: a deeper sense of humanity.

Heat-Moon's vision of the 'past', as rendered through the vast darkness of the night and 'billions of light-years' is an apparently isolating one. His descriptions remind us of our inherent 'smallness' in the world, where our lives will eventually end and it will not make any difference in the 'grand scheme of things', so to speak. It's easy to feel desperate and lonely with this realisation.

Yet, Heat-Moon insists that being connected to history is humanising. Others have experienced this vast expanse just like us. Christopher Columbus saw the same skies when he came to America, and as rootless as we seem, we're all connected to one greater story as started from the 'time of creation' and that we have 'heavenly matter' in us. Even if we play an insignificnt role, we are still part of a larger lieneage of human and natural history.

Everyone wants the hit new thing, but it gets tired and lonely after a while. Heat-Moon appears to say that it's more fruitful to find meaningful connections in natural sights we take for granted. That's the way to keep us humbled, while also inspired.