I shared my thoughts about the inspiring scale, the dispassionate ineluctable “thusness” of Nature as observed/felt in the mighty advance of a river over a dam as it flows to the sea, and the life-form of a virus.  Upon reading the post a friend inquired if I could put my point in a more succinct way, to spell it out so that he could be sure that he had “got it right.”  Yes, the matter can be stated in fewer words: Ignorance is the mother of human evil.  To state the matter as an abstraction reduces it to a plaything of our reason, to be manipulated, turned about as a infant would examine a new toy.   What is needed is insight; we ought to shudder because every one of us is ignorant to a significant degree.

This came yesterday in the CNN interview with Dr. Fauci:

“You’ve got to be realistic and you’ve got to understand that you don’t make the timeline,” Fauci told CNN host Chris Cuomo in an interview Wednesday night. “The virus makes the timeline.”

….“You’ve got to respond” to events, he said. “If you keep seeing this acceleration, it doesn’t matter what you say one week, two weeks, three weeks, you have got to go with what the situation on the ground is.”

He added later: “But you can’t make an arbitrary decision until you see what you’re dealing with. You need the data.”

— Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

I recall some lines that I read years ago written by Frank Herbert in his great treatise on human nature.

The universe is just there;
that’s the only way one can view it
and remain master of his/her senses.
The universe neither threatens nor promises.
It holds things beyond our sway:
the fall of a meteor,
growing old and dying.
These are the realities of the universe,
and they must be faced
regardless of how you feel about them.
You cannot fend off such realities with words.
They will come at you
in their own wordless way
and then you will understand
what is meant by
“life and death.”

Excerpt, The Sayings of Muad’Dib by Frank Herbert

Finally, we may ignore “reality,” as we often speak of the cause and effect events that brought us to life at birth, and will at some time, cause our death.  We may do so inadvertently, or quite intentionally when we are in the grip of anxiety or the thrall of greed.

Nevertheless we will be borne along by the flood.