"A series of irrelevant incidents had brought me, for the first time in my life, into a college astronomy lecture. It was long before the days of audio-visual teaching techniques, but the lecturer had invented his own. He leapt from one contraption to another with an attention-riveting agility. First it was a projector showing a series of slides which, he explained, had been taken by a fixed camera that recorded the position of each of the planets at the same hour every night for a year. The graph of each periodic movement made a different pattern: asymmetric, sometimes very beautiful, with darting lines and strange curves like exotic flowers. Then he sprang to the blackboard, and showed how the same planetary paths would look as seen from a central point, instead of from the oblique viewpoint of a spot on the surface of one of their own number.
""If you were standing on the sun with your camera," he said, "the patterns would all come out like this," and he drew on the blackboard a series of continuous horizontal lines, interrupted at more or less regular intervals by larger or smaller loops. He beamed at the class.
""Such a repetition would seem to show the operation of a law, wouldn't it?" he said. "Now what law would produce that unfailing result?"
"He turned like a tiddlywink to another blackboard and another subject, the swinging motion of a pendulum. The pendulum demonstrates a vibration, he said - a back and forth movement of unequal speed, for it slows down at two points: one as it approaches its farthest limit, the other as it begins its downward swing. All movements, he added, produce vibrations, and all vibrations can be supposed to produce sound, though between the highest pitched, the smallest and most rapid ones, and the lowest, which are larger and slower, only a small range is audible to the human ear, while some animals are able to hear a little above or below the sounds perceptible to us.
. . .
"It was the end of the hour. The professor beamed again and disappeared without a word, leaving the unspoken questions hanging in the room behind him. The vibrations of the planets? What ear can hear so huge a sound? And what about us, Professor? Where are we in the music of the spheres?
"The vision of a harmonious universe shows everything in its right place except the human being. Man seems to be the only living thing that has to question himself, that doesn't know who he is nor what he is for. Plants and animals fulfill their function without discussion, unless we interfere with them. It is only we who don't know what to do with ourselves; we have forgotten our lines, and there is no prompter. We drift onstage like men struck with amnesia, not knowing our own name, nor how to find ourselves again.
"Yet our memory is not totally gone; it is cut, there is a terrible break, but there are some memories of our past. There was a "time before the fall," before the forgetting: a moment when man was closer to his "name," to the note he was designed to sound. We have memory-glimpses, as if it were a dream-tast of our own childhood, of a golden age in which men lived "in harmony" with their surroundings. But our present is cacophonous. We are as out of tune with nature as with each other and ourselves, and we begin to be afraid; we begin to see the disharmony as at least partly of our own making, and to recognize that these discordant vibrations could destroy the very planet we live on. Our whole world is a Jericho whose walls are tumbling down. Will our dissonance destroy us? Or is there another truer note within our range, a resolving chord through which we could find our balance again in the rhythm and melody of creation? What vibration is proper to man? Perhaps we can remember, rather than invent, the answers; perhaps a deliberate searching in the past can help us understand our inexplicable present.
"In the fairy story, the door of the subterranean cave can be opened only by the reverberation of a magic word. Before the seeker can enter the chamber where the treasure lies, he must recall this word; recall it, or perhaps be called back to it, but this cannot happen through the help of any other person, only through its echo within him. No on can tell him what it is, for it is at once the Unpronounceable Name, and the unique vibration pattern of his own individual planet."
D.M. Dooling
Publisher of Parabola, 1977