Saturns

I vividly remember the first time I saw a planet through a telescope. Though I had read many books about space travel, and seen countless images of the different worlds of our Solar System, nothing compared to the moment when I glimpsed Saturn so quiet and still in the night sky. What was most apparent at first was not the planet itself but the nothingness surrounding it, the sheer darkness of the abyss so total it transformed Saturn’s simple fact of existence into something like music, like the single word spoken amid absolute, deathly silence. Seeing it was taking part in a sublime and immemorial solitude. As a child I experienced fever dreams where the magnitude of the whole world would be compressed into the tiny spaces between my fingers. Something similar happened when the telescope rendered Saturn a microscopic specimen, its rings of ice and dust so perfect, so defined and self-contained, they seemed to embody the very meaning of being.

The awe triggered a certain giddiness in me, a laughter that comes from seeing something so extraordinary, so completely beyond the realm of comprehension—for if we fail to grasp the magnitude of our roiling oceans, our old growth forests, our deserts, our polar ice caps, what hope have we to understand a planet that is woven in storms so large they could engulf the Earth, ancient cyclones whose wrath may not subside for centuries. At the same time Saturn left me with a profound gratitude to be in the presence of its majesty.

Inevitably, cosmic awe leaves us with a longing for something greater than the earthly problems of our species. This is the source of inspiration for many of literature’s cosmic odysseys. A particularly fine example is Olaf Stapledon’s masterpiece Star Maker, set during the Second World War. An earthling, so utterly nauseated by the political state of the world, leaves their home one night to go stargazing. In that moment their consciousness departs their body, and so begins a journey across time and space, across a diversity of planets and civilizations, where galaxies gain sentience of their own. The earthling wrenches themselves free from the prison of historical condition, and ventures with sheer intellect into eternity.

But despite its grandeur and perfection, there is something still more incredible, more complex, more astonishing than Saturn: the awe itself, the human sentience from which its stems. Saturn is a symbol for eternity, an order of magnitude far greater than human scales. At the same time, it is a mirror dignifying what we are. There is no Saturn without a witness. As a matter of fact there are as many different Saturns as there are perspectives, each colored by their own memory, experience, imagination, cultural upbringing. These Saturns forged in consciousness are each unique, each graced in their own way.

Even more staggering than the cosmic grandeur of Saturn is the magnificence of the human eye, the workings of the human brain, the mystery of language, the complexity of our biological systems. More precious than Saturn then is a scientist, a poet, a musician, a child. For all our folly and limitless cruelty, humanity also holds the capacity for awe, an awe it transforms into mathematics, physics, art, and a myriad of cosmogonies.

Recently I read this report of the state of children in Palestine. It broke me for days. The very best of humanity is being murdered with absolute impunity and complicity from the ruling systems of power, hollow men who resemble scarecrows so stuffed with their own propaganda, they fail to see the horror they are inflicting, cowering in the face of their own crimes, aiming for these kinds of things to be normalized for the petty reason it makes them a lot of money.

2025 looks like a long, hard year. Instead of the usual twelve resolutions, I say we only need one: courage, courage to speak up for human rights, courage to defend our values, courage to love humanity. There exists no greater beauty in all the universe than the biological diversity of the Earth: its sentience shines the light of meaning into the cosmos, and kindles even the brightest stars.

Capitalism, militarism, colonialism—these have debased and degraded our species for far too long. We require courage to breathe into being a greater ethics and purpose of existence. The alternative surrender is already a kind of death.