writing in the dust

When you read ancient literature, it tends to have a mythic creation at the beginning of it. And then it proceeds through the various dramas of the passions and the aversions and the attractions and all the rest of it, or in the case of the Bible it tends towards history. But the thing that’s interesting, is that the fundamental intuition that ancient literatures share—that there was a beginning—is extraordinary. Because it wasn’t until Edwin Hubble that modern science accepted a beginning.

And so—it’s sort of odd—but the things that are apparently least scientific, in fact, anticipate what is probably the major datum of contemporary science. This is all very strange. To think that someone in antiquity understood the world as beginning in time, and that Einstein didn’t until Edwin Hubble: It’s remarkable! It’s one of those things were you just have to stand back and marvel.