The Beginning

I have a question for each of you, dear readers, do you think the original author of the Creation story in Genesis 1 meant for the line "Let there be light!" to be trumpeted or whispered? I'm drawn to this question because I think it speaks to the innate nature of the Cosmos to be both unpredictable and measurable in equal strides. We know only the smallest of notes of this great song of Nature, only what our sciences, knowledge, and wisdom have affirmed in the millennia of learning we've experience thus far as a species. We peer out beyond our horizon ever hoping for even greater mysteries to be revealed to us, things now unknown which someday we may be able to count among the knowledge contained in all our encyclopedias and catalogues of the Universe.

I for one lean towards the idea that those words in all their magnanimity were intended to be whispered, and that whisper echoed around all things known and unknown. The softest of sounds grew into the greatest and most magnificent of voices, a true symphony of nature long unseen in its totality by we the smallest of its pixels.

One of my favorite movies, the 1998 French comedy Que la lumière soit! speaks to this truth. In it, God writes an even newer testament as a screenplay, a testament for the modern world told not in ink on paper but in light itself cast onto the silver screen. The testament told of the innermost joy of all who beheld it. What better testament could there be?

Oh Lord, help us to listen. Amen.

Seán Kane is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Binghamton University in Upstate New York living back at home in Kansas City, Missouri. His dissertation is now titled "André Thevet's Brazil in Sixteenth-Century Natural History." He is making a name for himself as an up-and-coming historian of French Renaissance zoology and is editing his translation of Thevet's 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. He also writes The Wednesday Blog which comes out weekly, and occasionally comes up with good quotable lines.