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The Mental Abyss Dividing Us from Nature
Dispense with the mystical sentiment that everything is united
In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrew thinks, “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
Tolstoy adds, “These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun.”
Elsewhere, I’ve shown why the maudlin tone of the sentiment specifically that God is love should be scorned. But there’s also this more general conviction that everything is at least united. “God” or “love” might merely symbolize this quasi-gravitational force of attraction. Indeed, according to the Big Bang theory, everything is related by a common point of origin.
The cosmic abyss
Nevertheless, in what astrophysicists Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin call the cosmos’s current “stelliferous age,” in which matter is arranged in stars, planets, and galaxies, the notion that everything is united is perverse.
