On Supermoons, Indifference, and Hope

(Photo: The lunar eclipse, as seen through my phone's camera from the Għargħur church parvis)

It is not unusual for me to wake up at some very late point of the night, and go on walks when I cannot find sleep again.  The silence helps me think, and the exercise also tends to do the trick in making me tired enough to want to get back into my bed and actually nod off.  Last night was marked by a particularly lengthy episode of sleeplessness.  So at 4 a.m., I decided to brave the rain and venture out, alone for a walk around the village.  I knew that it happened to be just about the right time to witness the rare Supermoon lunar eclipse, but I also realised that any celestial body would be hard to spot through the rain cloud cover.  About thirty minutes into my walk, notwithstanding, the rain stopped, and as I looked up I could clearly see the clouds part to reveal clusters of stars, and the ‘blood moon’ in all of its red hued glory. 

My first reaction was to smile at myself and at my stroke of luck.  My second was to think about how, had I been able to fall asleep, the eclipse would still have happened, and the clouds would still have parted at that specific point in time.  Moreover, I thought about how, when the next full lunar eclipse is projected to take place in 2033, I may or may not be alive and able to witness it.  It will happen, even if I am not. 

The experience brought me face to face with a somewhat familiar indifference of the universe, towards me, and towards us, as individuals, as communities, as species.  It also made me think about how we are built to ignore this indifference.  We tend to be preoccupied with giving meaning to calendar events, marking them with public and flamboyant rites de passages.  We place ourselves at the centre of everything, and pretend to find an existing structure and order, killing and dying for some overseeing God, when there is none.  We link effect to cause, to a wider scheme of things that we have constructed ourselves, and create our own proofs for what was or what was not meant to be, when the only certainty is that everything around us occurs randomly, with the greatest irreverence towards who we are and how we feel.  Yet, in leaning on one of my favourite writers Albert Camus, I thought about how one can find hope right in the middle of this hopelessness.

There are other, more mundane things than a rare cosmic event, that have a profound impact on me in making me think deeply about the negligible impact I have on them.  Seeing familiar people age and grow old, walking with a slightly heavier limp than they walked with last month, also tends to remind me of human mortality and how, sooner or later, we are all bound to return to dust.  Yet there are times when these same old limping dogs give me a fleeting but soothing impression that they are wiser than I am in not only having seen more life than I have, but in also being closer to a silent, internal peace with the inescapable effects of time and the indifference of the universe.  They are happy cripples.  They are Camus’s rebels, in having faced and come to terms with the meaningless blip that is a lifetime, and have turned their backs on it, committing the ultimate act of rebellion by being happy and living on, in spite of it.  This internal peace, I believe, is key to the right way of going through life, and of witnessing belittling lunar eclipses with the knowledge that yes, we are insignificant and there is nothing out there looking out for us, but that it does not matter.      

I cannot say that I have yet come to make my own peace with time and indifference, but I am working on it, and I hope to be able to get there and experience Camus’s invincible Summer, soon.