The Beauty of Insignificance

Bill Watterson drew Calvin & Hobbes brilliantly. I think of this particular strip, often, when trying to explain how it feels to be in the presence of wildness, to encounter all and anything—from being caught in a blizzard to realizing you love another human—that is greater than yourself.

My own personal, current, obsession with Moby-Dick has more than a little to do with my eternal magnetic attraction to the wild unknowns that are greater than one single person or single life. Feeling small in the presence of something wildly beautiful takes my breath away, in a good way.

Like Ahab, we’re all limping and striving along after something huge. And the hugeness, the wild things, the further shores and galaxies far far away and quests we can’t even begin to understand we’re on until pieces collide into place, all of that is wrapped up—to me—in wildness. It’s in the night sky, the sea, the enormity of an ecosystem, the miracle and brevity of life, the eternity of the mountains, and so on.

Because, against the backdrop off that HUGENESS, our own lives are glacially insignificant, and so can be better seen and known and cherished for the brief jewels that they are. We’re the dusk specks in the constellations, the lone crazy old man against the mystery of one white whale in all the ocean, the needle the haystack. In our insignificance is our specialness, our worth.

In all things, I like to elbow up against these bigger, wilder, more eternal forces. This book—in subject and in its grown mythos—is one such piece of all that.

Being small, like this, seems as if it would be the loneliest thing in the world. And it might be, if the huge and wild things did not cartwheel through all our lives in some way, until we are variously caught and find ourselves banded merrily little and together beside the wild and huge we love. There is a particular joy in finding that something you love is also beloved by others. The communities that rise out of these convergences of individual and infinite are just one more wonderful thing that is greater than each of our own mortal selves.

(On that note, I am delighted to head to the New Bedford Whaling Museum tomorrow for their annual Moby-Dick Marathon. I figure, if there is one place and time to be around other people who giggle over Herman Melville’s sense of humor, this would be it. It’s like a gam, really—all we particularly Moby-Dick fascinated people who try to pull our ships up to others for a chat, but everyone else has different protocols and interests suddenly come across each other, pull up alongside, and have a whale of a good time!!)