It was a mad and spinning world in which you met her, but she was a mad and spinning girl — so brightly and resolutely burning that she herself was celestial. There was starshine bottled up in her heart, solar winds charged the particles of her thoughts, ions in the atmosphere ignited her impulses. Her willful joy was her own burning sun.
When she was sly, her eyes were hasty comets. Her passion amassed from Saturnal storms. Her smile was silver Jupiter– you wanted to repose over its white sands, beside the stained and rose-metal lakes of smoldering, darkening copper.
Between the spaces of her words, chasms of cosmos would occasionally open. You could stare into those depths for indifferent and measureless distances of light years — the sublime nightmare-nothingness that Providence had made, the Forever-of-Empty-Dark. But before you could be afraid, her own gravity drew you in.
And you were glad. That such loveliness could exist in a single soul was reassurance. (The Forever-of-Empty-Dark wasn’t entirely empty, after all.) And you were grateful — grateful for her rejoinders, for the taste of her mouth on your own, for her girlish laugh, for the way that she regularly lighted a murky Earth with the moonbeams of her quiet kindnesses.
She was unstoppable. Ultraviolet rode the coronal shades of her irises, and flared in her contemplation. She blazed. Magnetic radiation murmured in her poetry. You loved her for her uniqueness in a universe of cold space, for the way that she burned and turned and burned and turned without ever slowing or expiring. When her light fell across you, you could almost believe that you, too, were spinning and illuminated. You loved her enough for the illusion alone.
You loved her more for her gravity that drew you in and held you, and for her arms that did the same.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2022
This image of Jupiter and Europa, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth. The full view of this Hubble image can be viewed here.
As always, I am grateful to the editorial staff of this superb regional newspaper. The Roanoke Times is the primary newspaper for Southwest Virginia, and its Sunday readership throughout 19 counties is estimated at 230,000 people.
I’m also pleasantly surprised that this particular letter seems to have struck a chord with people the way that it did. After it was carried by a number of newspapers in Virginia and by Newsday in New York, it was shared with a combined 733,000 readers. That would make it the most broadly circulated single item of all of my writing.
So … the term “overeducated” has gained currency in the national discourse.
I myself can never be “overeducated.”
The more that I learn, the more I understand how much more I have to learn. The greater my knowledge, the smaller a fraction it seems of the vast and sprawling sum of knowledge to be gained.
It is like cresting a tall hill at the edge of my neighborhood, only to lay eyes for the first time upon distant ranges of mountains, lining a dawn horizon like endless, luminous, upward serrated silver. I am richer for having seen them there — no matter how paltry my hilltop now seems when I imagine it measured against them. And now that I know the mountains are there, there is a chance that I will someday depart to reach their feet.
I hope I never call myself an “expert” in any subject. The word is fool’s gold. Hubris clings like oil to the circumference of its rounded letters.
But shaming the pursuit of knowledge? Chiding those who’ve worked to attain it, as though their diligence and curiosity were character flaws? That is worse.
Let me tell you something that I have learned in my nearly half century on this planet. When people tell you not to think, then you should think. When people tell you not to ask questions, then you should ask questions. There is always information or a new perspective that the people behind such admonitions do not want you to gain.
And why should we trust those who would deny us so?
Photo credit: By Ansel Adams – This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 519904., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118192
I learned a little while ago that the Salem Times-Register printed my recent letter about the courage of the Ukrainian people protecting their homeland. You can find it right here.
Thank you, Editor Shawn Nowlin, for allowing me to share my thoughts with my neighbors in Southwest Virginia.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 