c. 2000 Religion News Service
VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ Death is the ultimate deadline. And Dennis Danielson heard it rapping hard on his door a year ago as he struggled to complete his soaring anthology, “The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe From Heraclitus to Hawking.”
Months before the University of British Columbia literature professor was expected to hand in his 556-page manuscript to Perseus Books, he was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. His wife and four children shared his utter shock.
He became obsessed about beating the fearsome double deadline and giving birth, perhaps as one of his last acts, to “The Book of the Cosmos,” in which 85 of the Western world’s inspired thinkers reflect on the origin and purpose of the universe.
At the time, Danielson desperately welcomed the challenge of finishing his epic. It didn’t give him time to feel morose. As well, as he underwent treatment and stared down the gun barrel of mortality, some of the offerings in his book took on a keener meaning for him.
Although “The Book of the Cosmos” contains reflections from thinkers ranging from ancient Greek philosophers to contemporary physicists, Danielson remembers being struck most deeply by a passage by the British Roman Catholic essayist and detective writer, G.K. Chesterton.
In a meditation on the uniqueness of the universe, Chesterton captured something Danielson had been experiencing as he faced the possibility of not being alive to see his own book published _ the realization that his own existence, and the existence of the universe itself, are “Great-Might-Not-Have-Beens.”
Danielson said the Chesterton piece gave him a sense of blessing, of bliss,particularly since his surgery appeared to be at least temporarily successful. The passage brought home that life is contingent on many things, or as Chesterton writes, “This cosmos is indeed without peer and price. For there cannot be another one.”
Danielson calls his book chapters “telescopes for the mind.” He said he hopes each one, without being unduly academic, will focus on an aspect of the universe _ the sun, moon, stars or shape of space _ and offer a glimmer of the world’s richness.
The Victoria-born 51-year-old has an engaging way of introducing the subject of cosmology. After asking an audience how many wear cosmetics, he reveals that the word “cosmetics” comes from the Greek verb meaning “to bring order out of chaos.”
His point is that cosmology, like cosmetics, is about order and about beauty.
That’s why he tracked down poets, writers, eloquent scientists and impassioned philosophers to air their most speculative thoughts on the ultimate nature of reality.
In Heraclitus, the fifth century B.C. Greek philosopher mentioned in the book title, Danielson finds astute aphorisms about existence, such as, “Everything flows and nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”
In the section on Stephen Hawking, born in 1942, Danielson shows how “the most famous cosmologist since Einstein,” working from a wheelchair and speaking through an artificial apparatus, heroically imagines a universe that has no starting point.
Danielson also shows us Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) declaring God’s creation is “perfect” and so there cannot be such a thing as a vacuum; author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) offering a precursor of the big-bang theory; playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) introducing a speech by Albert Einstein in which he amusingly praises the European physicist for upsetting the “British rectilinear world” and substituting one in which “the heavenly bodies go in curves”; and contemporary scientist Freeman Dyson explaining the stunning similarities between butterflies and microscopic “superstrings.”
Although Danielson attends First Christian Reformed Church, “The Book of the Cosmos” is not a Christian treatise. He has gone out of his way to make sure it “doesn’t push anyone around” theologically.
“The book is an orchestra of dissonant voices,” he says, including those who believe in a supreme being and those who do not.
Danielson is clear, however, that his own theism leads him to especially enjoy passages that contain a sense of awe and delight with the cosmos.
Personally, he said, he’s experienced moments _ in and out of church _ when he “could hardly keep his knees from collapsing” as he intuited the “world is a created thing.”
Danielson’s timing seems to be right for publishing such poetic explorations of the links between science and spirituality.
In the cosmology and literature courses he teaches at UBC, he says English students tired of reading endless commentaries on works of fiction revel in the chance to dig into ultimate questions.
And Danielson admits his academic’s heart went pitter-pat early this month when the Internet bookseller Amazon.com featured “The Book of the Cosmos” as its publication of the day.
For a man who must now go year to year wondering whether his cancer might return, and who says he “can still hear the bullets of mortality whizzing past my head,” “The Book of the Cosmos” and its warm reception are amounting to an especially poignant Great-Might-Not-Have-Been.
DEA END TODD
