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The subtle off-symmetry in our universe is just so damn elegant.
The length of a lunar year is very slightly off that of a solar year; sun-paths change every single day; and even the equinoxes don’t actually fall at the same time each season.
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The length of a lunar year is very slightly off that of a solar year; sun-paths change every single day; and even the equinoxes don’t actually fall at the same time each season.
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It’s only fair to wonder where on earth I’m going, only rational to consider occurrences like this as mere ‘misalignments’ and ‘deviations’ rather than mechanisms of beauty, but I guess the very language and words we use betray our limited perspective:
As a civilization, we’re obsessed with lining things up, reducing and trimming until everything is neat enough to fit inside our neat mathematical models. For, God forbid, what if we had to deal with phenomena that our proud and symmetry-loving brains couldn’t make sense of?
I guess we could save face by presenting them as accidents.
But real beauty is only in complexity: uniform, understandable things are destined to monotony. We are hardwired to enjoy pursuits, and if the object of our attention offers no resistance or mystery, it's simply boring.
But real beauty is only in complexity: uniform, understandable things are destined to monotony. We are hardwired to enjoy pursuits, and if the object of our attention offers no resistance or mystery, it's simply boring.
I was recently struck by the example of The Pantheon: Rome’s most famous building, it has been analysed, copied, and deconstructed to bits across the years. Many keen observers have often noticed within it a ‘fault’: the series of coffers (hollowed bits) in its domed ceiling...
...don’t at all line up with the arrangement of the levels below, which must be a mistake – because what kind of a sane designer would willingly make such a messy decision? Even its most dedicated fans across history have ‘corrected’ this careless mistake when copying its form.
However, my classicism lecturer this year made a great argument: The Pantheon’s architect was no idiot, and this apparent misjudgement actually creates a level of freshness and dynamism that would not otherwise be.
There are many entrances, and no matter where you come in from, the fact that nothing aligns with your innate expectations keeps you awake and interested. It takes longer to make sense of things; it’s not as easy to defeat intellectually, and thus a sense of enigma remains.
And how curious to note that subsequent copycat Pantheons that have ‘fixed’ this issue have often been criticized as being more ‘boring’ than the original.
Similarly, I’ve always found it brilliant how religion uses perplexing cosmic phenomena.
Similarly, I’ve always found it brilliant how religion uses perplexing cosmic phenomena.
As a Muslim, the times when I am to pray are determined by the day’s sun-path– wow! Things that I rely on for my prayer-routine, like sunrise and sunset, change position literally every single day– and so it is quite impossible to brush prayer away into a set part of my day:
God forces me to work around Him, to make it a priority, by changing it every single time. Ramadan, on an indeterminable date each year, is the same.
The great mechanics of our universe emerge from very simple geometries and fairly basic balances, but with a knowing nudge here and artful knock there, grow altogether into one great big, beautiful tangle.
And this tangle is the license that validates the complexity & contradictions of the experience of life. Can you think of a more elegant reality?
Or the opposite: can you imagine the sterile and hellish case of the flipside: a perfectly tidy world with no dynamism, no paradoxes?
Or the opposite: can you imagine the sterile and hellish case of the flipside: a perfectly tidy world with no dynamism, no paradoxes?
As is the creation, so must be the Creator: such is the Islamic conception of God’s relationship to His universe, often represented in our art: One sole divine Being, giving way to a great and torrential cascade of infinite multiplicity.
