I created this blog as a project to re-paradise the world. But hold on a second, what does re-paradising mean? Well, I don’t know yet, but I have a hypothesis and it involves redemption. Humans have done a lot of destructive whoopee in the past century, and because of it, one tends to be cynical about the nature of man. It’s hard to trust people when you know that they’re capable of evil. Then to reflect on evil and what it implies about the meaninglessness of existence, thinking like that has more than once led me to some grim conclusions about being human. It recently became debilitating for me, and as a result, I spent most of February in bed. I am a person who spends too much time in his own head anyway, but to be extremely conflicted about being human requires way too much cognitive dissonance to healthily deal with. I began to perceive the world as a hell.
I had made a fallacious mistake, one that unfortunately pervades the world. I had denied all of the good and wonderful things at hand that I enjoy. I had forgotten what Walt Whitman told me, to look under my bootsoles. I had made a blunder on the scale of Milton's Satan, who thinks "the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. What matter where, if I still be the same, and what I should be ..."
But something made me laugh when I really needed it. Not only that, it made me realize a philosophical practice for dealing with difficult and uncertain times: enjoy examining your life and world. We are a natural being, evolved of and within our natural world, and we have the capacity to look back upon the nature out of which we arose and wonder. Nature is capable of observing itself and responding emotionally, and we are nature taking a good look at itself. Experiencing the joy of realizing these delightful and awe-filled things about ourselves in spite of our stupidity may be the redemption that I’m onto when I say “re-paradising.” It’s individual experience, and I’m not prescribing anything. I just want to enjoy revealing some wonders that make it all worth it. Which it’s about time I got on with …
This brings me to tossing ewoks. It comes from an episode of the British television show, “QI” on which Professor Brian Cox was a guest. He is a brilliant astrophysicist who is working on one of the experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In this episode, a discussion of how the rings of Saturn were formed led to the most amazing example of the enjoyment of the examination of the natural world that I have found, and from that I not only named my blog, but also embarked on this very adventure to look into the joy that can be found by examining the world.
A large portion of my inspiration for beginning this blog comes from “QI,” an abbreviation of Quite Interesting. It’s part nerdly quiz show and part comedy show, but it’s format deliberately runs counter to the pervasiveness of vapid pop cultural television and the vicarious voyeurism of reality teevee in which we peer into someone else’s individual life experience instead of reflecting on our own. QI encourages individual thought, which is bold for a show that is partly an educational program. They invite celebrities and comedians onto a panel to investigate facts about the world and think about applying them to individual experience—which often benefits the comedy. The goal of the show is to come up not with correct answers but interesting ones.
On the episode in question, a comedian called Ross Noble retrieved the show from a descent into didactic lecture by asking Prof Cox where ewoks might live. Truly in the spirit of the show, Prof Cox described Saturn’s moon, Titan. It’s one of the largest moons in the solar system and has an atmosphere thicker than the earth’s, possibly requiring its inhabitants be furry. However, as Prof Cox explained, Titan is so far from the sun that its freezing temperatures would cause an ewok to freeze so completely that it would shatter against the ground like a glass vase, bumping the traditional sport of ewok tossing up from lots of fun to insanely funny. But it gets better …
The atmosphere on Titan is largely made up of methane, and because of the low temperature in that remote corner of the solar system, methane exists in three states much like water does on the earth. (The triple-point temperature of water on earth is .01 degrees centigrade, meaning it can exist at one temperature in all three of its states!) On Titan, methane is a gas in the atmosphere like water vapor here, solid at the poles, and remarkably fills liquid methane lakes on the surface. Well, as you might have figured by now if you know anything about methane, another panelist on QI pointed out to Noble that methane is what farts are made of. Therefore, if you participate in ewok tossing on Titan, you could toss an ewok into a lake of liquid farts and it would shatter.
Noble proceeded to go insane with joy at imagining such a paradise. It didn’t matter that there was no physical paradise that we could go to to toss ewoks into lakes of liquid farts. Being alive and actively learning about our world and its possibilities is paradise. We belong to it, and I don’t want to lose it. As far as I can tell, if I make the examination of my life as enjoyable as Ross Noble did, if I seek out paradise, I will realize that I have been there all along.
All that said, I must return briefly to my depressive disposition. I may come to the conclusion that life is meaningless, but what if I take that same sentiment and make it enjoyable? Like this: “I was convinced that the more I thought about life, the more I would see what a bummer it is to be a human being.” I’ve just made myself laugh. The conclusion is the same, but how I feel about it has changed, and when a reader reads these two statements, the emotional response will likewise be different. This exploration of the world with a purpose became the key to my rediscovered appreciation for life and the pleasure of learning, changing, and the project of re-paradising the world of my own reality, and possilby yours as well.
