What is the point?

1. What is the point?

2. Why read books?

3. Why study them?

4. Why take English classes?

5. I’m glad you asked.

6. I have an idea of the world of academics as one way into the Cosmic Dinner Table.

7. The WHAT?

8. The COSMIC DINNER TABLE.

10. Maybe you weren’t even aware there was one.

11. But there they were, all the time, all those great minds! They’re just sitting there chatting with each other throughout the ages. There’s Aristotle, Shakespeare, the Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Vivaldi, Bach, and Picasso. All just talking away.

12. They keep on talking, adding their perspective on humanity.

13. They come and they go.

15. They talk to just a few. Or they talk to many.

17. Some are serious, some aren’t. And some are somewhere in between.

19. Maybe this idea is new to you. Maybe you didn’t know about the cosmic human conversation.

20. Maybe you and your friends have been rollicking along in a massive food fight.

21. Or maybe you’ve just been hiding out under the table with your friends.

22. But one day, you’re bound to hear something that seems really interesting to you. Or see or learn or detect or intuit something. You will awaken to the world of ideas.

23. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

24. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in his petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

25. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

26. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way– in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

27. An object in motion will tend to stay in motion. An object at rest will stay at rest.

30. At that point, you will want to know more.

31. You will want to pull up a chair and listen.

32. All throughout time these great minds are debating what it means to be human. As new geniuses come on the scene, they are given chairs of their own. Some stay there forever, like Aristotle or Tolstoy. Others come and go. It all depends on who listens to what they have to say.

33. They grace our lives with their talent.

34. This cosmic conversation has been going on long before we were born

35. And will continue long after we’re gone.

36. It’s hard to listen in, at first, because you have to know so much to make sense of it. “What’s that she just said?” “What’s the proletariat?” “I just don’t get Bernoulli’s principle. Can you get him to repeat it?” “You call that a painting? It just looks like drops of paint to me.”

37. But once you start listening in, you’re hooked.

38. We can even hold side conversations of our own about the Cosmic Conversation.

39. So why listen in? Why read? Why think?

40. Because it allows us to live more.

43. Remember the cosmic dinner table.

45. Thank you to Alison Mary Good Kouzmanoff for the images.