A different sort of string theory

Earth was the size of a car,
and I put my head out the window.
space went streaming by
then--- look there!
a galaxy speeding away from us:
backlit, beautiful, and
connected to Earth;
you can see the string.
and there! and there! and there!
others, all separated, never to meet again
yet forever connected to Earth,
sparkling like charms on a bracelet.

As the universe expands, not only great celestial bodies are moving further apart from each other, but people grow distant from each other, and even we as individuals grow estranged from our earlier selves- yet at no point in time is the connection ever broken. That is the feeling I got from this dream- one of surreal beauty and acceptance and, yet, deep loneliness.

This passage by Marilynne Robinson resonates in much the same way:

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untransversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

(page 198 of Gilead)

And, I guess, maybe the universe won't go on expanding forever. It may well reach a certain point and then start collapsing back in on itself: all the parts reuniting to make whole once again.

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