I don’t recall exactly when it was that I learned that it took a bit more than eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach us here on Earth. Sometime before high school, I think.
Anyway, that pedestrian fact made a deep impression on me.
I knew that light traveled at a fixed speed and that its operation wasn’t (quite) instantaneous, although in our quotidian lives, it seemed almost so.
But the fact that the sunlight we see all about us is eight minutes old made a deep and disconcerting impression on my young self.
Who knows what might have happened to the Sun in the meantime?
I began researching this phenomenon and was duly impressed by the awful (in the old sense) immensity of things.
The sun’s light, traveling some 93 million miles, takes 8.3 minutes to arrive here.
Light from the Orion Nebula, wherever that is, takes about 1,500 years to reach us.
Light from the Andromeda Galaxy takes 2.5 million years.
Then, there are the lights from long-dead stars glimpsed by that astronomical Peeping Tom, the Hubble Telescope.
These are stupefying, incomprehensible numbers.
Blaise Pascal touched on the psychological—or is it the ontological?—coefficient of such contemplations in his “Pensées.”
“When I consider the short duration of my life,” he wrote, “swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified.”
Nietzsche gave tart expression to the physical reality behind Pascal’s anxiety in his remarkable early essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense.”
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing,” he wrote.
“That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”
Such cosmic expressions of metaphysical angst have an aspect of adolescent self-indulgence about them.
As Jeeves observed to Bertie Wooster, there’s something “fundamentally unsound” about Nietzsche.
Still, since we’ve just swung across the hinge binding one year to the next, it’s worth pondering some local, pedestrian ways in which things that have already happened may finally reveal themselves in their true significance.
Gregory of Tours (c. 539–594) began his sprawling “History of the Franks” with one of the most irrefragable sentences vouchsafed to humanity: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.”
Just so, many things happened in 2023, some good, some bad, and some, like the light emanating from a distant star, delayed in reaching us.
It seemed like just another news report when the Supreme Court of Colorado, whose declared aim was to preserve democracy, declared by a 4–3 majority that Donald Trump wouldn’t be allowed to appear on the Colorado ballot.
The Colorado Republican Party appeal put a stay on that ruling, but not before other Democratic politicians climbed onto the “say-no-to-Trump” wagon.
Recently, Shenna Bellows, secretary of state of Maine, took a page from the Colorado court.
She declared President Trump an “insurrectionist” and ordered him off the ballot in Maine.
Most observers believe that Ms. Bellows’s diktat will be overturned on appeal, which would mean that it occupies a place not in the history of politics but in the history of political theater.
But my point is that actions like these—pretending to save democracy by destroying it—have a built-in natural time delay like the light of the sun.
That is to say, their full significance isn’t obvious at once.
It'll only unfold itself later when the precedents set become obvious and become, as it were, operational.
What does it mean that people of the ruling political party pretend to preserve democracy by outlawing the most potent candidate from the opposing side?
That unprecedented series of actions by a weaponized department of justice controlled by one party doesn’t declare its full significance all at once.
When, for example, the FBI conducts dawn raids against ordinary citizens whom the ruling party happens to dislike, the full meaning isn’t obvious in the immediate aftermath of the raids.
Similarly, when a prosecutor transforms an unarmed protest at the Capitol into an “insurrection” and then dusts off a post-Civil War era clause from the 14th Amendment to indict a candidate his masters don’t like, the full significance of that unprecedented act isn’t visible all at once.
No one can, at this juncture, say for certain what such astounding partisan assaults will portend.
Perhaps they'll help complete the transformation of democracy into that elite-run anti-democratic confect, “Our Democracy™.”
Perhaps it'll be seen to have initiated the mournful eclipse of the American experiment in republican governance and individual liberty.
One thing, I believe, is more or less certain: These astounding actions to keep Donald Trump from reassuming the White House will be like the light from the Sun.
Only, they‘ll not only be on a time delay; they’ll also be in the nature of a time bomb.
The people who did these things may never be called to account for their destructive actions.
Nevertheless, they'll come to rue the day they uncorked the bottle that held the genie of anti-democratic, authoritarian passion.
At the very least, they'll learn that it was much easier to release than to recontain.
