(Science simplifies and neglects the personal, since it has to generalize and be “objective”. So it offers only broad-brush insight into the complexity of human nature or individuals. One value of our subjective feelings is to preserve to us the chance to recognize our common humanity and to fulfil ourselves as ethical beings. The faculty of conscience is like the aesthetic sense of the eye - it needs the stimulus of moral beauty. This poem’s high didactic purpose echoes my own experience as a trainee teacher, observing science classes in 1989 (I gave it up and returned briefly to research). It is autobiographical in another sense. Total disillusionment with my Christian faith in 1990 threatened to return me to atheism (even nihilism) unless I was prepared to embark afresh on a search for ultimate truths. As I consulted my inner experience for evidence of the transcendental power of certain moral claims and values to move me, I learned not to despise the words that flow from the mouths of children (Psalm 8:1)).
Observing a Science Teacher
The damsel was out of this world that men called Eternity,
Too chaste for Galileo’s telescope:-
But now, escorted to space-time, she strips for modernity,
The physicist’s conquest our hope.
His one-track brain now steals the grain of ages,
Mistakes for gravity demureness that inspired the sages.
Between the thought and knowledge stood the pedagogue,
And the observer with many pangs.
‘Why, Sir, do space and time appear to hog
My mind’s eye before the Big Bang’s
Founding?’ was the high flier’s sounding. ‘Nothing amiss,’
The teacher replied, ‘To have no grasp of nothingness.’
Strange how I envisage, by turns, the firmament in its glory
And imagine that space unlined,
But form no conception of no-space, because an a priori
‘Space’ is applied by my mind