…on today’s memorable quotation

I haughtily trumpet this truth: I was a Trekkie way, WAY before it was cool and sought. Star Trek. Precisely whence today’s memorable quotation.

On the Enterprise, experiments are being conducted presently with a soliton wave, which will effectuate light speeds sans engine propulsion, and the heretofore – and more so now! – rhapsodic Geordi, in his ebullience at existing in this “moment in history,” is palpably bewildered by Data’s insouciance at the same:

“Every nanosecond in this continuum is a moment in history once it has elapsed.”

– Data, Star Trek TNG: New Ground

The cross-pollination of conviction I have previously distinguished between my thinking and that of Emerson; through epochs and intellects; which is realistically to be anticipated and openly received if one comprehends the essence of the Over-Soul; is, in actuality, oft-evident in Star Trek. Data, repressing the exhilaration of Geordi, receives the passage of time and events of History with indifference equal to that of my hero; that notwithstanding, I imagine – and expect! – Data was doubtless programmed with the complete works of Emerson; ergo, I should not be taken aback at the glimmer of a perception deserving of – and stirred by – him.

The only time the word, data should be singular

“Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing

already into fiction.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, 1841

As a Classicist, I have already expressed a humbling unease with Emerson’s perception; the revelation which determines that events to which I have dedicated years of study should fade to inconsequence with the advancement of minutes, hours, years; yes, these are regarded as momentous and even revered in our day; but, what will become of them at the hands of time?

Consolation for me is to be found in the words of that same sage; my hero, whose notion of the Over-Soul prescribes that the human soul is inconceivably beautiful, immortal and immeasurable; and every human soul is wed with all others to constitute one soul.

“Of the universal mind, each individual man is one more incarnation.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul, 1841

Even more so, when one perceives the fact that the Soul cements all men and transcends time; yes, time and space are irrelevant in this construct, as everything persists: both Nature and man…both Catalina and I stood and stand beneath Betelgeuse upon gazing up at Orion in the northern hemisphere winter night sky.

“In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, 1841

Moreover, that Cicero was an eminent man; nevertheless, corresponding promise for my comparable notoriety contemporaneously must also be conceived and pursued.

“How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, 1841

The thread of brilliance wends its way through being: events, figures and existences: a final word on this inter-connectivity:

“When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, 1841

Tick, tock, tick, tock…