During commercial jet air flight, you constantly face forward, you align perfectly with the vector of the jets motion. Though you can only see the back of the passenger’s head in front of you, your line of sight is directed perfectly toward where you are going.
It’s quite different for us as passengers on a planet hurtling through space. As I sit in my chair at my desk the planet rotates and revolves. There is only one moment in each 24-hour period when I am facing the tangent vector of the planet’s rotation around the sun. The rest of the time I am aligned to the left or to the right of that vector, looking sideways, or backwards, my gaze directed toward a space I will never occupy, or for an equally brief instance, directed backwards, towards my past. Mercifully, this causes no disorientation, no jet lag, no motion sickness. Perhaps the reason for this mercy is simple. For all but a few seconds of our existence, we are unable to bear or keep in mind the crushing, vertiginous thought of the entire universe in its splendid loneliness.
This is an elemental form of oblivion—we forget the universe. And this oblivion offers us a compensatory assurance. The universe has forgotten us as well. Or rather, we were never even remembered.
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