What I have delighted in were the first photographs from space of our earth, as something so delicate, so beautiful, so vulnerable, so fragile, so alive. My whole generation was in awe. We had thought the world would seem old, ugly, wrinkled, barren, small, not young and so infinitely precious. When I taught at Princeton one of my students was doing work with me on Jung and the medieval mystics and with Professor Wheeler on black holes in astronomy. She is now teaching mathematics at Berkeley, a lovely young Quaker.
Scientists pretend to be detached from their subject and their emotions.
But we know that where their inner selves are blocked they, too, can blotch and distort their findings. A group of us scholars in Medieval Studies are now asking ourselves why we chose our particular areas of research, and, where we are honest with ourselves and others, finding the answers of the greatest value. It is all right to have an emotional agenda, if one knows one has it. Even the Internet began as part of nuclear war preparedness and has turned in the hands of some of us into a means for building 'interior castles' that the globe can share in. Socrates said, 'Know thyself'.