The silence of the infinite spaces

"Not long afterward, the American astronauts landed on the moon. Monsieur and Madame Yvonne [bar owners] were glued to their television . . . Madame Yvonne turned to Old Man Sinouls because he was a man of numbers. . . . Monsiuer Sinouls tossed out a few numbers, spoke of the sun and the planets, of antipodes and parsecs and meridians, drew diagrams with his ballpoint on paper napkins; that was all well and good, but in the course of his lecture he began talking about how the distance in question was no big deal compared to the distance between the stars. . . .

"When Madame Yvonne went to bed that same night, she began thinking about light-years. She tried to visualize them, and she thought about all those stars receding in to the distance, with nothing so much in between for a foothold, and about how there were even more even farther away, with poor little rays of light getting all out of breath making the trip (who knows why) and how those rays, despite their great speed, didn't seem to be making much better time than a Mercedes caught in rush-hour traffic on the highway. Madame Yvonne couldn't sleep. All those distances and unfathomably faraway stars had given her a headache, and she shook Monsieur Yvonne, who had been snoring peacefully at her side:

'Arsene,' she said to him, 'the thought of those infinite spaces frightens me.'"

Our Beautiful Heroine, 167-168.

(no subject)

I just saw a new movie that features St. Francis and St. Clare!

Message: it's hard to straightforwardly do good. There are so many interests and values and consequences to be taken into account. (For some reason I feel like I was raised with "the complexity of the world" as a value; the right thing is always a best approximation. The trouble is that being boggled by complexity inhibits good-doing reflexes.)