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So they sometimes think it would be easier to unwind the heliocentric centuries and go back to the years of a divine and hulking earth around which all things orbited – the sun, the planets, the universe itself. You’d need far more distance from the earth than they have to find it insignificant and small; to really understand its cosmic place. Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a Godgiven clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness. It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways – in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines – the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours us humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
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