Reading, reading...Michael Pollan

Months ago, of course, being one never to read books before their popularity has waned, I read, with ravishment, The Botany of Desire--as have most of my friends. Pollan is one of those writers (Isaac Walton, Robert Burton, and Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin have notably the same quality) whose various subject-matters, prose styles, and immediate personal presences are so inextricably linked, and all so wonderfully entertaining in themselves, that it is impossible to say what most delights us in reading them. I have since read Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and am four fifths of the way through A Place of My Own--which deserves to stand, I think, somewhere between Walden and The Anatomy of Melancholy.

And withal, having a general idea from scattered reading and television documentaries of the realities of String Theory, Quantum Mechanics, the Big Bang, and Sub-Atomic Particles, I have lately been diverting my leisure moments with readings in the latest modern arcana of Scientific Cosmogony (for there are many non-scientific cosmogonies)--and oh-so-belatedly I have come upon Dark Matter, both Baryonic and Non-Baryonic. Words fail, almost, to describe how disappointed I am with the Universe, and with the so-called Astronomers whose job, one might think, is to describe the Universe, not to invent silly myths about it. First Quantum Mechanics, then the Big Bang, and now the entirely inferential--nowhere evidenced or detected--Dark Matter, and, for the matter of that, Dark Energy. Wouldn't you think that the vanishing of Aether into utter nothingness--and before that, of Epicycles--would have persuaded the solemn fools in white jackets that, as a certain sharp-witted English friar said eight centuries ago, "Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity."