Superficial Reality

Beauty is impossibly thin.

The thinnest human hair is half a million angstroms thick. Typing paper is a million angstroms. Yet the layer of quicksilver that turns plate glass into a mirror is only 700 angstroms thick. It would take 714 such layers to equal the thickness of a hair, yet it’s this impossibly thin layer that reflects a woman’s beauty.

Beauty may only be skin deep, but the reflection of that beauty is one seven-hundredth of a hair.

Spray a coat of varnish onto a globe of the earth and the thickness of that layer will accurately represent the blanket of air that surrounds our planet. Yet most of the beauty of life on earth is contained in that thin, outer skin.

Likewise, the nutrition in most vegetables is contained in the outer surface. So don’t scrape your carrots. Don’t peel your potatoes or apples. The outer skin is where the vitamins hide.

The outer layer of the brain, the cortex, is only a fraction of a centimeter thick. Yet all the higher functions happen there.

Are you beginning to see a pattern? I’m not yet certain what this pattern might mean or how deep and wide it may go, but I’m certainly going to investigate it. What will I discover? Does value always ride close to the surface, or is that an oversimplification?

Let the journey begin. Do you want to come along? If you can think of another example of how “value rides the surface,” respond to this week’s e-Poll through the hyperlink at the bottom of the page.

Are you, like me, drawn to recurrent patterns? They seem to whisper, saying, “When a thing is true, it’s always true. What is true in marriage will also be true in agriculture and chemistry and architecture and banking. You’ll see it in the Bible and you’ll see it in the sky.”

The purpose of Wizard Academy is to discover and document these reliable phenomena, to map their depths and chart their patterns so that we might harness their power to do good.

Sigmund Freud, that early investigator of the human psyche, once said, “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.” I think I know how he felt. As I ponder this question of whether value always rides the surface of its carrier, I suddenly recall what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1905: “All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.”

You were right, Sigmund. Robert Louis Stevenson already discovered that particular treasure on the island. He was the poet who got here before me.

Is any of what I’ve written today useful or valuable? I don’t know. I haven’t finished pondering it. So for the moment I think I’ll quit talking and go back inside.

Aroo.

Roy H. Williams