The Cosmos

In the days when stars were all we could see or even imagine and before the time when hundreds of billions of stars stood in hundreds of billions of galaxies. There is a lag, I guess, between knowing and realization. When my father was born the sky was filled with planets and stars, and then came Hubble. The realization that what we could not see then and are beginning to see now was pregnant with a scale of things beyond imagining. How long will it take for a species so full of itself, so narcissistic, to realize that an aphid on a tomato plant's leaf is to us unimaginably more significant than we, and all our works and thoughts and pretentions and even our sins, are to the cosmos.