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What Things Are Made Of
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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87 What Things Are Made Of Thales thought, Water: nicer stuff than Alchemy’s sulfur, mercury, earth, salt, and phlegm— although if nice makes right, Aristotle with his earth-air-water-fire is your man. Democritus said things are made of atoms, which he thought were indivisible, but we think are made of quarks, which may themselves be made of strings, but not the kite kind, or what make the Brahms concerto sing—theoretical strings strummed in dimensions we can know only by Math, which summed the universe from nothing, Pythagoras believed, a child’s face being a complex of numbers, like photos we e-mail to friends. Tests show the urban myth “Life weighs twenty-one grams,” is a heavy load of crap: precisely what the world is made of, my mind insists some days. The “problem of minds” obsessed the ancients, as it does me, now that I’m older, hoping to hold onto mine. How can a thing bouncy and bright as thought vanish when a pump in my chest quits? How can anger at a parking ticket, or joy to find a cowrie grazing a tide pool, turn to mercury, sulfur, earth, water, and phlegm because a clot obstructs one artery? Minds are weightless, Descartes said: res cogitans as opposed to res extensa. Thinking v. extended “stuff.” Incorporeal v. corporeal. What does God weigh? Nothing, since He’s the Ultimate res cogitans. 88 Everything, since He has no limits—res extensa to the max— and everything grew out of Him. Is God water? I’ve thought so on a hot day. (Lack of what substance gave Death Valley its name?) Is Death a substance? In the case of cyanide or a bullet to the brain, it seems to be. It weighs me down to think of it. And how about sadness? Love? And time? Is God love? Is love all we need, as the Beatles sang eons ago? When my dad died, all love felt sucked out of the room, as if I were one of those spiders, rats, and cats Robert Hooke killed, to the applause of London crowds, by pumping air out of their jars, proving the existence of vacuums, which Aristotle and Descartes denied, as did Mom’s mom, who cleaned everything by broom (corporeal), or hand— corporeal too, and time-limited, so I suggest you take your child’s whenever he/she offers it, and love its res extensa, and the weight of love that warms its flesh. This offer is too good to last long. ...