Never Say Never

Can a fish swallow itself entirely? The impossible can never be possible. She shakes her head. Never say never! He looks up at the night sky with its shining stars. I don’t believe we ever will know all the secrets of the universe, he says. We live in a world of innumerable mysteries traveling on a small planet around the Sun in the Milky Way. Billions of remote galaxies surround us. They are all unplumbed and inscrutable, many light years away. So how can the finite mind of man accommodate and contain infinity? Mind you, as a matter of fact, we don’t even know ourselves. She smiles. Still, never say never. Look, for example, what Auguste Comte said about the stars. This French philosopher in 1842 published a volume, titled “The Positive Philosophy”, wherein he asserted that we would never be able to know anything about the chemical composition, or minerological structure, of planets and stars; and much less about organized life forms on their surface. However, just a few decades after Comte’s claim, by using the technic of spectroscopy, measuring radiation intensity and wavelength, astronomers have succeeded to figure out a great deal about the chemical Composition of planets and stars. Actually, the gas helium was discovered in the Sun in the 19th century before it was detected on Earth, as well. It turns out that the chemicals in our bodies are the chemicals of the stars. And we are made of star dust. Our dreams of the Moon and the Sun and the stars are our longings to return to our origins, to our cosmic birthplace. And the universe misses us, too. So we continue to dream and to write poems.