Book 42: “a book with antonyms in the title”

“First and Last Things” is a loosely-connected series of memos and notes about his personal beliefs regarding faith, spirituality, and community.

I found this book quite inspiring. It was fascinating to see a famous science fiction author justifying his own personal beliefs in the way the world works, particularly with regards to the way he was able to balance his appreciation for science with his belief in something larger than oneself. Overall his philosophy seems very similar to mine – he recognizes that our power lies not in an individual’s capacity to make huge earth-shaking change, but our capacity to work together in what he calls the ‘human experiment.’ I’d love to go into more detail here, but honestly I feel like it’s better if you just read it for yourself – he explains it better than I ever could in such a short amount of space. I’ll just leave you with this quote, that struck me as summing everything up nicely:

“It seems to me that to judge these large questions from the personal point of view, to insist upon the whole world without exception living exactly in the manner that suits oneself or accords with one’s emotional imagination and the forms of delicacy in which one has been trained, is not the proper way to deal with them.”