“I have of late, but
wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and
indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy of air,
look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
golden fire – why, it appeareth no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in
action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals – and yet to me, what is this quintessence of
dust?”
-Hamlet
I’ve
heard that dust is an ancient thing. I think about just how ancient it is as I notice a thin layer has settled on the cherry-wood
bookcases in front of me. I glance at the titles of hundreds of books;
philosophy books, novels, biographies, historiographies, and anthologies;
pretexts, post-scripts and prefaces. No doubt the dust is nestled atop the thousands
of pages in front of me, but the words within these books do not care about the
dust; they have passed unscathed through the natural world. From the mind of
their creator, to the print, to the press, to immortality, the words are but
frequencies now, bouncing off the heavenly bodies above, blanketing space and
time. IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND IT WAS COVERED WITH DUST.
Poets tell us that to write down an idea is to immortalize
it:
“One
day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But
came the waves and washéd it away:
Agayne
I wrote it with a second hand,
But
came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
“Vayne
man,” sayd she, “that doest in vaine assay,
A
mortall thing so to immortalize,
For I
my selve shall lyke to this decay,
And
eek my name bee wiped out lykewize.”
“Not
so,” quod I, “let baser things devize
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens wryte your glorious
name.
Where
whenas death shall all the world subdew,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
-Edmund
Spenser Sonnet 75
Spenser wanted to immortalize his love object; he wanted to
protect her from the inevitability of becoming but dust, so he wrote a sonnet
about her, and once recorded in the memory of the universe it becomes something
that can’t be un-known.
I’ve
heard that household dust is in large part human skin. This information might
sound disturbing to some. It doesn’t bother me. Of course, dust is made up of
various other things, too: dirt, hair, wax, bug parts, animal parts, people
parts, planet parts, star parts, and so on. As I think about this, I scan the cherry-wood
bookcases and a large purple spine catches my eye; The Astronomy Encyclopedia. I pick it up, brush it off, and flip
through it until I find INTERPLANETARY
DUST PARTICLE. It turns out that many forms of interplanetary dust
particles exist and along with them
many names for the various
particulates: INTERPLANETARY MEDIUM,
INTERSTELLAR DUST, INTERSTELLAR GRAIN, INTERSTELLAR MATTER, INTERSTELLAR
MOLECULES, MICROMETEORITE, et cetera: “For
the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the
other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the
animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all
turn to dust again.” – Ecclesiastes 3:19-20.
This isn’t such a bad thing.
Though no adequate words exist, this is my tribute to you,
Guy Daniel Parnell. I did not know you that well, but I sat next to you for two
semesters. You affected my life. Rest in peace.
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