An op-ed in yesterday’s NYT, by Timothy Ferris, tells the story of the space probe Voyager I, a satellite that was launched thirty years ago and is now leaving the solar system.  Ferris was responsible for a recorded disc (remember records! They sound technology of the twentieth century, oh so long ago…) that was attached to Voyager, which would provide any sentient beings that might find it thousands or millions of years from now (it is designed to last a billion years…) some sense of what earth sounded like in 1977.  That’s a scary thought: how much disco is on the record?

      In any event, Ferris ruminates on the vastness of space:

Contemplation of Voyager’s billion-year future among the stars may make
us feel small and the span of our history seem insignificant. Yet the
very existence of the two spacecraft and the gold records they carry
suggests that there is something in the human spirit able to confront
vast sweeps of space and time that we can only dimly comprehend.

      Yes, Way is vast.  And Ferris is one of those people who find comfort in that thought.  He uses this story to make that point at the very end of the piece:

If some recoil from the brink of space, others find it liberating.
Our perspective was aptly expressed by the 18th-century science writer
Bernard de Fontenelle, in his fictional dialogue “A Plurality of
Worlds.” “You have made the universe so large that I know not where I
am, or what will become of me,” complains a lovely young marquise whom
Fontenelle is tutoring. “I protest it is dreadful.”

“Dreadful, Madam?” Fontenelle replies. “For my part, I am very easy about it.”

    This, I think, is what Chuang Tzu is getting at in the opening chapter of the book that bears his name.  It begins with several invocations of the enormous K’un fish and P’eng bird, fantastical creatures that denote size and scale beyond our understandings of nature.  The P’eng, for example, "needs ninety thousand miles of wind beneath it."  But after a few of these passages he then drops in this short image:

The cicada and laugh at it, saying: "if we put our minds to it, we can fly across to the elm or sandalwood.  But sometimes we don’t make it, and we just end up fluttering on the ground.  What good’s all this talk about ninety thousand miles heading south." (4)

     The small, in other words, cannot understand the vast.  Their worlds are incommensurable.  Chuang Tzu then invokes the P’eng again, and, again, just to make the point, turns to the small:

A quail laughs and says: "It’s setting out for where? I bound into flight, and before I’ve soared a dozen yards I’m fluttering around in the brush again.  Surely that’s the limit of flight.  It’s setting out for where?" (6)

     The quail is questioning the P’eng’s capability, but only because it is so far removed from its own experience.  I don’t take this as an absolute denial of the possibility of the vast, but only as a statement of the limits of knowledge.

     The key is the laughter.  In both cases, the small laughs at the vast.  Small is not afraid, simply bemused.  Perhaps the vast really does exist as the legends (or scientists) say that it does.  But it has little direct connection to the immediate experience of the small, and it is not something to be feared or overawed by.  It just is.  And it cannot be used to judge the worth or value of the small.

      In terms of Ferris’s article, the quail and cicada and dove are not recoiling from the "brink of space."  Perhaps they do not find it liberating because they do not need to be liberated: they are already quite aware of and comfortable with the limitations of their own capabilities.  But they are certainly easy about it.  They can laugh.