Awe & Dread - Professor Sheldon Solomon

"To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets."
Bertrand Russell

"The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing."
— Walt Whitman

"There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth."

William James

"To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
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— Walt Whitman
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman

"One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical...for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity."
— Soren Kierkegaard

"What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life."
— Walt Whitman

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse."
— Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

When I consider the Gaia and Medea hypothesis's put forth by Lovelock and Ward I see it as a difference of emphasis and a point of what one highlights versus a right or wrong dichotomy. Life is a dynamic mix of life and death. Awesome and dreadful. Wonderful and horrific. Beauty and agony. Order and chaos. Beyond the dogma. To use an ancient roman god I would use a metaphor of the Janus god. The two faced god interlocked and connected. The two faces of Gaia and Medea are one. The Janus hypothesis.

Janus: Roman god of doorways and archways, after whom the month of January is named. Often depicted as a double-faced head, he was a deity of beginnings. He was one of the principal Roman gods, the custodian of the universe. Janus was usually represented with two bearded heads placed back to back so that he might look in two directions at the same time. Symbolic for entrances or exits-His chief function was as guardian deity of gates and doors.

Entrances and exits. Life and death. Evolution and extinction. The day and night exist in reference to each other. Gaia and Medea do not face in each other in conflict but attached to each other they face their gateways of life and death in unison. Another way to look at it is through the perspective of Cosmic Evolution when one considers the violence of exploding stars and how that brought about a process of new life birthing planets and new stars. Our Sun in our solar system and the Earth itself comes from a supernova. A violent death bringing new life. Medea working with Gaia in a dynamic mix of destruction and creation.

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