POV

Reading the Times I see a group mind, or is this every person's mind thinking all kinds of apparently minimally related thoughts?  Today's front page:  (A) Broadway shows need a bankable star to open ( e.g., Pacino, Scarlett); (B)  the State's top judge says excessive bail is being used as a tool to force poor defendants to plead guilty (lock 'em up til they say uncle.)  (C) Business page notes that Deveauboise is eliminating trusts and estates--too few billable hours in helping billionaires reach out from the grave.  Big corporations are the cash cow for big law.  And the obituaries (D) note the passing of Strom Thurmond's love child, who signed his letters to her "Strom Thurmond."  I suppose this is better than Ike's dismissal of his lovely driver as she suffered terminal cancer.  Is tragedy really only personal?  Is God alone caring for the falling sparrow? 

From whose perspective do we view our lives and the life of the world?  I remember fondly a doodle: a black circle with two white triangles opposite each other on the circumference.  Titled: the world as seen by a little man living in a beer can.  Is interior decorating that beer can the chief end of man?

Well, no, by God!  I re-read a reminscence of a weekend encounter with Dirac written by an astronomer whose family entertained the great man and his wife near the Hawaiian observatory in the early seventies.  The host wrote that watching Dirac read two children's books with his nine year old daughter confounded his later learning that Dirac was seen as austere and distant by the world of physicists.  He also wrote that Dirac tried to draw him  out on The Large Number hypothesis saying that though he, too, was once plagued by doubts it was astrological, he still thought the remarkable ratio was hard to accept as a coincidence.  None of us easily accepts living in a beer can.  Dirac, too, wanted to see cosmic significance in what he saw from the can.  And I, in his ability to perceive.