“You see, if you are prejudiced that a human being is only what is inside his skin, then you think that when anybody paints the human being beyond those boundaries that he’s lost the image of man. He hasn’t necessarily lost it at all. You see, there”s an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that said. That man is the microcosm, and that the universe as a whole is the macrocosm. Now, as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote. How could they have anything to do with us? They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body, you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image. Look at a spermatozoan under a microscope; that little tadpole. And how can that have any connection with a grown human being? It’s so unlike, you see? It’s foreign-feeling. And you get the creeps sometimes about yourself if you feel your own pulse, or if you’re able to look at an x-ray of some way of your inner organs working. See? They’re all strangers to us. We don’t know about them. And they give us the creeps as if they were, you know, coming across some weird insects in the dark. That sort of feeling. But what we will always find out in the end when we meet the very strange thing, and we look into the distant reaches of space, there will one day be the dawning recognition: that’s me! Why, that’s me! And the whole game of the universe, you see, is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can. That’s hone how keeps variety going, that’s how one keeps wonder going, and all kinds of exciting developments.”
“That space that you see all around you and containing you, and you can feel space in many ways. Space is not only something that comes through the eyes.”
