One of my favorite books is…

G.R.R. Martin’s, A song of Ice and Fire.
Mass doesn’t always equal excellence but the awesome heft George R.R. Martin’s A song of ice and fire (4 books with two more to come!) at least indicates a significant amount of time to be spent comfortably wasted indoors ignoring the sunshine. Set in a quasi-realistic medieval world including, but not restricted to, princes, dragons and knights, the heart of the action unfolds in a series of epic political upheavals spanning several generations and involving a generous cast of characters. In breadth The Song of Ice and Fire excels. The heroes in the seven kingdoms traverse huge distances and encounter vivid, detailed civilizations. Nomadic horsemen, seagoing reavers and undead zombies all present themselves, undaunted by the size of the narrative and content to inhabit their own specific sections. Long books often suffer from a glut of weak material on the periphery of the action. The song of ice and fire, against all odds, avoids this fate. Despite the sheer mass of his repertoire, Martin’s reach never encroaches on the vitality of his characters and his imaginative force rarely degenerates into clichéd or shallow characterization; all the components of his books are as captivating and as convincing as the center. So read it bitch.

My whole theory is blown.

So, I'm an atheist through and through. I've tried at various times in my life to entertain the notion of a god or some other sort of aesthetic or conscious order to the universe, but it's never really stuck. I've recently decided to abandon all that and just go with the thing that's always felt true to me - my own consciousness is just the result of evolution, which is the result of all the forces of the universe being exerted consistently over time. I don't have a soul and there is no afterlife. There are answers to the questions of where the universe came from and stuff like that, but it makes sense that we don't and can't know the answer. Filling that void with some made up stuff that sounds nice doesn't do it for me.

But this brings me to the interesting part. But: there is one thing that blows my mind, and it is enough to make me doubt this entire whole world view. Why is it that when there is a total eclipse of the sun, that the moon and the sun appear in the sky to be the exact same size? I mean, there are many other incredible things about the way the universe is constructed, but the incredible thing about them is usually that life itself could not exist without them. (Example: that unlike nearly every substance, solid water [a.k.a. ice] is less dense than liquid water, and thus the top of a lake freezes and not the bottom). These things can be (somewhat paradoxically, but successfully) explained with the reasoning that if things were not that way, we would not be here to ask the question. This, however, is not an answer to the sun/moon question. If they did not match up, life would be here just the same. Could it be a coincidence? I'm just not comfortable writing off the significance of this beautiful and profound fact with the word 'coincidence'.

As Sherlock Holmes says, when one explanation has been eliminated, whatever else remains, no matter how improbable, must be the solution. So, as improbable as it sounds, I suppose there must be some sort of aesthetic order to the universe after all.

Credit to Webb Mealy for the sun/moon insight.