The Boat Moves Away from the Shore

Columbus

 

"The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour."

 

Japanese proverb

"Telluris ingens Conditor terram dedisti immobilem," creation's mighty maker bade the earth stand firm, a note to an afterthought in the evening hours from Gregory the Great (540-604).-1 Another innocent Latin saying for the ages, and how true, as Dr. Johnson said, that "every thing intended to be universal and permanent should be inscribed in Latin." 

Keep-a going, therefore, keep-a going come what may, sunlight and stars in knot gardens and parterres by the sea. A new Moon too perhaps, waiting at sunset, looking hidden over the bridge of humanity,  se ristorar la gioia d'un innocente amor where it can be found. "Innocence indeed is a glorious thing"(2). Sometimes it surges like a river choked with rain. For the simple fact is the starting point, ready to go they say as much as an axiom, also where a greater innocence pulls one through; and if sufficently plain it will not need too much reasoning to go as well as it will. So endeavor to persevere, since if not as much as innocence in the universe, if not once or twice, the third time is a charm.

Trusting good conscience, being willing to behave well in all things, likewise again, therefore, where it comes to particular and universal, all navigation is based on a fixed-Earth assumption ... again and again. In the age of discovery too, Prince Henry the Navigator, Cousin, Columbus, Cabot, de Gama, Magellan, Elcano, and Cartier, for example, and all the other sea captains of those days, as down to present times, followed charts derived from Ptolemy not Copernicus. After all, everyone knows that as landfall fades away into the distance, and sight of shore runs out, it is the boat that is moving away from land's end, not the beach or harbor moving away from the boat. In terms of physics, that is what is meant by the medieval Carthusian motto "stat crux dum volvitur orbis": the cross as much as the earth stands firm, while the spheres of the heavens revolve around it. 

 

If it seems that life goes round and round like a wheel, all the seasons and time turning and turning, in circles, of course, to keep on keeping on, it should not be so much worse for astronomy than the birds. If true that money cannot buy poverty, or a proper religious vocation, then it must be the spirit that counts. For "it is not too clever, if wrong opinion makes one judge as false what seems new to the ear, or strange to the eye, or too hard for the intellect to grasp, but which on closer investigation proves not only true, but even obvious." Similarly, an immature and false argument many wags still indoctrinated in heliocentrism sometimes make against geocentrism is that if someone denies that the earth orbits the sun, then he must believe also that it is flat. 

However, if geocentrism is poor, so poor that it could not be any poorer, it is not for lack of vision or what would have been the right derivative. It is not from being wrong that it does not teach that the Sun, the Moon, or the Earth is flat, or incomplete, or that space is two-dimensional, and neither did the Carthusians or the Church. Saying that the sun orbits the Earth does not mean that the Moon is painted in the sky and beyond the horizon hangs the abyss. Would the Earth be at the center of the ecliptic and of the cosmos, and also be flat, with the Moon painted in the sky, going by in Oriental picture frames?  Certainly not, no either way, that could not at all be.

 

Since poverty as much as fate or form is the discoverer of all the arts,  even the bearded homeless with a cup of pennies, and a bag of french fries by chance, can tell that space is always full and roundabout in 3-D. "Paupertas omnium artium repertrix", and the Earth’s true horizon has a constant 360 degree view, all around in complete circles, wherever anyone goes. Then overall it must be as three dimensional as a sphere. That is the only way that it would be natural, continuous, and so equanamitous in its perfect balance of space. The things that make sense by virtue and assimilation also must make sense, in real properties too, as much as there is a balance for time as for space.

 
The early medieval Anglo-Saxon monk Venerable Bede (672-735) wrote in "The Reckoning of Time", that "the earth is not merely circular like a shield or spread out like a wheel, but resembles more a ball, being equally round in all," and has no end except the surface, which is surrounded by the heavens on all sides.-3 In the classic and medieval concept, the Earth is presented as the sphere within the center of the universe -- "orbis in medio totius mundi positus". And Bede added that it should be considered perfect and simple in terms of a sphere, for surface extent, "because even the highest mountains produce no more than an imperceptible ripple on a globe of such great diameter."-4
 
Science from a motel or any bank teller's window with a view outside can see that the horizons are circular and continuous in all directions, all formed in beautiful 360" tableau from point to point; and since space is carried out in 3-D, one could have guessed from Thema Mundi, and the first footprints of Adam, that the Earth is a sphere of vanishing flatness. After all, a circle complete in three dimensions becomes only another sphere.
 
"You can observe a lot just by watching, yet if you do not know where you are going, you might wind up some place else". And imagine, therefore, being transported to a lonely and forgotten place, with unbroken desert vistas, under a cloudless abandoned sky: a desert scene of desolate stillness near the deepest silence, with only some yucca trees and cactus in the distance, yet with the least hidden touch of the sublime, even if in a low degree. By contemplating a mere immensity in space and time, over quiet solitudes, at least a vague impression may filter into the mind of what some likeness to the sublime could be. An "immeasurable greatness dwindles the individual to nothing".-5 As when we "meditate on the thousands of years that are past or to come, we feel ourselves pass away and vanish into nothing like drops in the ocean".-6
 
 
The four corners of the oceans and of the earth are the four corners of a circle. De nucibus amygdalorum, the Book of Isaiah says, "it is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers".-7 At first it may not seem clear whether the passage refers to Earth as a sphere, or whether it describes a flat circular form, but some things do not need to be said outright. When already it is plain that space is 3-D in total between all, anywhere one goes, and any circle in 3-D becomes a sphere, it does not take so many words to be understood. In the Book of Job, lectio divorum, et cetera, "He has described a circle upon the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness".-8
 
"Under the whole Heaven he lets it go, and his lightning to the corners of the earth".-9 In Proverbs, the voice that would mirror the ages says, "When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep ... when he established the fountains of the deep ... when he marked out the foundations of the earth."-10
 
The simple Biblical view is that within the will of the Almighty, the Supreme Being, "all things are established", and there is none that can resist his will. For he has "made all things, the heaven and the earth, and all that is held within the circle of heaven."-11 Besides the coils of mortal life, and the essentially circular nature of being as relating to existence itself, ens inquantum ens, the sky above is in circles, and in ascension with the clouds and stars would represent heaven. And the heavens are also called gilgallim, or spheres, on account of their spherical form.
 
 
Isaiah 11:12, Ezekiel 7:2, Revelation 7:1 and 20:8, all refer to the four corners of the earth, which are the four round corners of a circle. Whichever distant co-equals in the extremes, out of the very many places of perspective possible from around the earth, they are four corners also of a natural sphere: and a repetition of the four corners of a cross in a circle in three dimensions.  
 
 
From many centuries ago the ancient Greek philosophers already knew the Earth was a sphere, even in the generations before Aristotle. In Phaedo, Socrates declares as much, as if already it should be well known, as if he had learned it from others and experience without too much difficulty a long time ago. He says, "my conviction is that the earth is a round body in the midst of the heavens, and therefore has no need of air or any similar force to be a support, but is kept there and hindered from falling or inclining any way by the equability of the surrounding heaven and by her own equipoise. For that which, being in equipoise, is in the center of that which is equably diffused will not incline any way in any degree, but will always remain in the same state and not deviate."
 

Besides the Earth, any integer has a place and as a whole is all around like the bulk of a well-formed sphere, "equal balanced all ways from the middle, since neither anything more must it be, this way or that, nor anything less." As well for any point in space, counting either the numbers themselves or whatever else of external things which have number, it is the same. He adds later, when considering the relation of infinity to geometry and geometry to creation, that "the earth, when looked at from above, is like one of those balls which have leather coverings in twelve pieces, and is of diverse colors, of which the colors which painters use on earth are only a sample."-12 Socrates also thought that the sun was called helios, ήλιος in Greek, "because he is always rolling in his course (aei 'eilein ion) about the earth".-13 

He also took the sun as a special example of logos, λόγος, a distinguishing mark in an account of true belief, to relate some knowledge as well as perception about things among  philosophers. As Socrates said in simple direct terms to Theaetetus, "I dare say you will be satisified with the account of it(the Sun) as the brightest of the heavenly bodies that go round the earth. And Theaetetus answered, "certainly".

 
Rolling in a course then, in the divisions from all this or all that, like the sun in any sign, there is no way for the intellect to quantify the infinite in any shopkeeper's window except by the sense of quality in endlessness: since between the infinite and the finite there is not yet a difference that can be quantified, not more than another warehouse or city of lights except for the ineffable. "Before the Lord, the whole universe is as a grain from a balance or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth."
 
Even for aeons and aeons, numbers by themselves do not create the most original distinction in identity and difference. Except perhaps to help for sense of direction, the sense of how far and separate, as things numeric may be, how much may be close to another thing, if at once or in a series, may be difficult to say since all quantity is indifferently related to the infinite. The character of the first instance sustains or affects the second subditum. Any process in equilibrium and harmony as much as infinity, the greatest isonomia, την kαλύτερη iἰσονομία, with its quality of continuous return, would balance all finity, and so it goes throughout all mathematically correct combinations. 
 
Since the resources of geometry are everywhere, inexhaustible to any point, equally reserved for all places, how far a sense of the difference in proportion between the two, the infinte and the finite, may create an impression. Like the round edge of infinity in a wheel, such a curve in a contest between mankind and geometry, on grass or whatever surface, and who could win except geometry? Since geometry never tires and never sleeps, and cannot be defeated in signs or parallel, there must be a space in which to think about and hear what kind, to sort things out. In consequence also, to act on what is believed to be thought, or thought to be believed, a necessity universally involved in nature appears, to show that things could not have turned out any way at all.
 

Today there are still problems from nihilism and "science" (especially in the atomic theory) and many people seem to think like Carl Sagan that things could be or could have been or turned out any way at all. Like the people from the Syfy channel, "ex nihilo", they might say, therefore, any way at all. But not really so much, because of the mathematical necessity in every sequence, creation and the logic in it must be a certain way, even as all accumulation is a certain way in predication and direction, even if almost as from nothing in some cases.

 
If all the sides and steps of infinite regress were twined in circle and sphere, to make another ball, like a tennis ball, the Earth is like center court -- as far away from the ends as close to the balance of the middle. The isonomic keystone of the arch for the breezeway of the cosmos, in the middle of both whatever directions of either two of any opposite sides, it is stabilized equally in all directions from the center around the circle, where it comes out as far away to wander one way or another, to go far far away, as things may go anywhere around its sphere everywhere, et cetera.
 
 
Therefore, like being itself in fair regard, the best way is to weigh any sides with ultimate simplicity, as it so happens that between any potential infinities perhaps the simplest sign for the infinite or the ineffable is through the uniform curve of a circle. If with such unique and universal placement as the Earth, to represent the sense of proportion and relation in the infinite itself, and the difference between the infinite and the finite, the circle should be complete, of course, since if the circle is not complete, neither is the sphere, and lack of completion is a sign of imperfection.
 
Although the natural sphere of creation is not infinite, not more than numeric, it is perfect enough for any circle. The vine can grow on any tree, and one sign of that is the perfect sphericity of space, in 3-D, in bubbles after bubbles, from microcosm to macrocosm, and so the Earth. The infinite has its own perfect symmetry in a superior placement beyond measure, a superiorty beyond extension and convexity, and represents a perfect balance of forces acting upon creation. As much as quantity is indifferent before it, and as much as something cannot move away from itself, neither can the middle move away from the center.
 

Anaxagoras when he was at the point of death at Lampsacus was asked if anything should happen to him would he not wish to be carried to Clazomenae his home country to be buried; and he said that there should be no occasion for that since he thought that all places on Earth are at an equal distance from the infernal regions. Like Audie Murphy's saying that "Hell is six feet deep", a condition like death is equally separate from life.

Hippolytus wrote, "the Earth is aloft, not dominated by anything, remaining in place with similar distance from all points."-14 Not flat or an oblate spheroid either, for in the greatest indifference of the middle, it is complete and perfectly spherical. Balanced in the means of the extremes of the cosmos, which overall is spherical in shape too, it is not moving and not orbiting the Sun. According to Bucalino, the distant rims of the world stand on three supernatural fish, the almost almighty trine, in the relation of the ultimate derivative to service and kind. One could compare it also to a magnitude of hypostasis in creation, or pleasant state of inebriety, in between all the signs of the ecliptic all the time. If to describe it through symmetry of proto-elemental forces, one could say "electro-magnetic hypostasis" perhaps, if that helps to describe the vasty equilibrium.
 
The Legend of Er from before Plato and the Dream of Scipio describe the Earth as a globe transfixed at the center of the cosmos. Many early medieval manuscripts also, drawing on earlier sources, include maps of the Earth as a sphere, labeled as globus terrae, located at the center of the hierarchically ordered planetary spheres.
 
Since they recognized like Euclid that space is 3-D, as much as round in the instance to each point, it was always fair to assume that the Earth must be spherical too; otherwise, contra naturam, it would not be as complete as any point, and if not complete that would not be natural. Space, however, must be natural, since it informs anything at least as much as common sense, and knowledge of the natural roundness and sphericity of the Earth has been more or less in existence perhaps since as far back as Thales, in the 8th century BC.
 
"There never was a period of flat earth darkness among scholars (regardless of how any uneducated people perhaps may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). The ancient Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology."-15 As well by further examination of the apparent angle of elevation of the sun, in close comparison from two different latitudes in Egypt, Eratosthenes from the 4th century BC was able to calculate and record its overall size with amazing accuracy. 
 
He recorded two simultaneous observations, from the shadows cast by two long poles, one from Alexandria to the north, and another near Syene, 5,000 stadia south, when the Sun was directly overhead on the day of the summer solstice. The Sun's rays appeared to beam straight down to the bottom of a deep well in Syene, as close to directly from up above as they could tell, without signicant length of the shadow -- and in Alexandria to the north, at the same time they shone at about a 7.2" angle from the zenith, when measured there also by the more substantial length in shadow cast by the pole, or an obelisk as they sometimes recount it.
 
7.2" represents about 1/50th of a circle, and Eratoshtenes reasoned correctly that if the earth were a complete sphere, the noonday sun could not appear in the exact same angled position in the sky, as seen by two observers of widely separated latitudes. Also, because the Sun is so far away, it could be assumed that the sun's rays at the two distant latitudes were running parallel, and that the angular difference in the sun's rays between Syene and Alexandria, therefore, were due to the spherical curvature of the earth. So by comparing the angular displacement of the sunshine and shadow with the distance between the two towns, he could elaborate an educated guess at the actual size of the earth, and he came very close.
 
Even so primitive as it was without TV, satellites, smart phones, or the internet, ancients like these then were not so dumb. If at times still not far from the caves, or at other times still living in them, not so far removed from the gods either, "viri a diis recentes", et cetera. 
 
"Orbis terrarum", the orb of lands, is an old Latin expression for the Earth, also to appreciate the closeness in nature of the circle, and any orb also subsists within the curved plane of a sphere, for sure. Geometry would have a voice to speak for itself in all occasions, and in the prayers of the ancient Catholic mass, the words "in toto orbe terrarum" refer to the Earth as the world. These words have been there for almost two millenia, declaring the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere, from the ancient days of its creation, not that it is flat. The "Te Deum" from the 4th century says as well, "Te per orbem terrarum sancta confitetur Ecclesia", you the Holy Church praises from around the world, etc.

 

By logical intuition then, or common sense, any reasonable man who wandered his way across the face of the earth, from Thema Mundi to the modern era, from Adam to Enoch to Noah, could have figured out that such an Earth is a sphere, and that as well it is not moving, and that the Sun and the Moon and the other planets and stars, obviously, are all revolving around it. In fact, one can reckon again that it is a sphere since the constellations and the planets are mirrored differently, as in opposite directions, from the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

In the Northern hemisphere, when viewed from the surface of Earth, the planets and stars rotate counterclockwise around the north celestial pole. Looking back down at it from the sky, they all go clockwise like the Moon. In the Southern hemisphere, when viewed from the surface of the Earth, the planets and stars rotate clockwise around the south celstial pole. Looking back down at it from the sky there, they all go counterclockwise. Since the perspective of the ecliptic and circle of space reverses in halves, and that in 3-D, according as one wanders away from the terrestrial equator to the poles, the Earth must be a sphere.

 

Besides whatever else elsewhither, it is always daylight daytime somewhere around the Earth. If some people imagined that the earth could be flat, if it seemed to be, perhaps it was because they recognized at least that it was not moving, that indeed it was still. If there was an appreciation without detailed understanding, in the subconscious mind they associated its profound stillness with the flat surface of calm water. Laying down flat on the ground at night, for instance, and looking up at the stars, the sky also can look flat, from an angle of perspective. Another sphere of vanishing flatness in the heavens then, and cirrus clouds and the earth can look flat as the sky; yet the sky is not flat, but domed all around from above, and the earth is a sphere too, of course.

 

"None of the great eighteenth-century anti-clerical rationalists -- not Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or Benjamin Franklin, for example -- accused the scholastics of believing in a flat Earth, though these men were all unsparing in their contempt for medieval Christianity".-16 The myth of the flat Earth falsely associated with geocentrism has been a devious hoax that was started in the 19th century United States and France, where Washington Irving, Andrew Dickson White, Robert Ingersoll, and Antoine-Jean Letronne were four key authors who  helped develop and advance this false impression of history, that has been made so common among modern school kids.

Dr. Salvany rightfully accused Ingersoll of vulgar blasphemy for his disrespect of the faith; and Ingersoll even went so far as to put false words of an utterly false characterization in Magellan's mouth, in his ridiculous essay "Individuality", where he wrote: "I believe it was Magellan who said, 'The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.' On the prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success."-17

 

Magellan, however, was a pious Catholic throughout his life. He even prayed the rosary in Latin, practiced the sacraments, did not eat meat on Fridays, especially during Lent, and was a generous donor to the Church; and he never wrote any complaints against the Church for teaching a doctrine of the "flat Earth". The Church Magisterium never taught a flat Earth either, of course, what it taught instead was the ultimate order of creation, and the existence of the Holy Ghost, and that the Earth was immovably transfixed for time and place at the center of the cosmos.

 

Contrary to the myth of the flat earth, "it was conventional wisdom among both early and late medieval thinkers that the world was round."-18 Maimonides and Al-Ghazali refer matter of factly to the spherical globe, and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote in the Summa Theologica that "sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round."-19 In the Divine Comedy, written two centuries before Columbus, Dante describes an obviously spherical earth at rest at the center of the spheres of the cosmos.

 

Roger Bacon(1220-1292), Jean Buriden (1301-1358), and Nicholas Oresme(1320-1382) all affirmed the roundness and sphericity of the Earth. Christopher Columbus did not prove to the Western World that the Earth was round by sailing to America. In the universities and monasteries across Europe, it was already recognized that it was so. Even from the earliest medieval period, to show the power and sovereignty of the almighty over the sphere of creation, Catholic art commonly depicted the orb of the earth as a sphere with a cross set on top, the cross-bearing orb, the globus cruciger.

 

Between Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Venerable Bede, Thomas Aquinas, Tycho Brahe, Giovanni Riccioli, Dante, Prince Henry the Navigator, and others, there is a clear record of scientific knowledge of the sphericity of the Earth. In 1492 they only did not yet comprehend so well that America would be there, where they discovered it, although there were rumors about it ... from Iceland to Greenland, and then land to the west -- and thus further along to the south, the Caribbean islands were a discovery when Columbus sailed West.

Posidonius, a geographer and astronomer from the 2nd century BC, estimated that by sailing westward from Cadiz, India could be reached after 70,000 stades, and this remark recorded in various books later became some part of the foundation for Columbus's confidence.-20 There is the account also that Jean Cousin, a French navigator from Dieppe, discovered Brazil in 1488, and that one of the captains from his voyage, Alonzo Pinzón, who later returned home to Spain after they had returned to France, advised Columbus at least a little on the westward sail.

Ferdinand and Isabella referred Columbus’s proposal to a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, Archbishop of Granada. This commission composed of both clerical and lay advisers met at Salamanca among other places and posed some objections to Columbus, but all assumed the earth’s roundness. As an advisory they advised that Columbus would not reach the East Indies in his own estimated time because the earth’s circumference was too great. China and India were too far away, with too much ocean to cross, not that he would sail off the edge of the flatness, and they were correct. Therefore, the Columbus idea did not seem so worthwhile to some, since nobody in his right mind wants to die at sea going the wrong way to India, and that for a journey too long. It seemed a better idea to others to sail around Africa, the corner of Arabia and then India, and then on to South China. Yet Ferdinad and Isabella later decided it was worth a try, and he discovered America instead by some happy coincidence.

On the door of Plato's Academy the admonition was engraved, "No one ignorant of geography may enter here", and it always has been obvious for starters that the full limit of skyline everywhere is one complete circle around. As much as the country of the human mind would have a home, and the eye would have a thing, the land and sea are everywhere in circles after circles.

 

Complete as they are from all points of the compass, the visible and true horizon go round and round, and if the bar of the horizon seems straight for a time, it obviously is from looking at only a lined section of it. The line of section in the far-away distance may seem straight, because of the limited miles involved, but in totality the Earth's horizon shows the aspect of a curved round edge. And one that dips away, as the flatness in the distant tableau disappears. The 360 degree perspective of Earth and sky continues round the bend; and there is no debate, not even over a crate of gin, that seeing the entire horizon at once is seeing a circle again.

Any straight line in a drawing has two edges, as the pink elephant has his tail, 180 degrees shared on one side, and 180 degrees on the other. A sketch cannot be drawn without all lines sharing two edges -- and any of two semi-circles always add up to 360 degrees, for one side of the curve and the other. There are two ways in each side of the line and the curve. So, clearly then, the horizon of the Earth is a complete circle, with as much natural duality in space from any point around as much as from any sketch paper. One side or the other is how most people live, yet the circle is the symbol of perfection; and in the scope of creation, with so many trees and boats, such a thing should be complete as well as any sphere and all whatnot.

The average bulb of human perspective from Earth is like an Evel Knievel helmet, the visor of a daredevil or quarter section of an orange. There is the level semi-circle in the distant skyline, and then the vertical quarter that angles up into the sky 90" from there. Behind the view and to the opposite side is the same mathematical distribution; and science knows that two quartered sections of an orange make a complete half. This half is the half from where one sees day and night passing in their balanced measures through the seasons and the years. The semi-circle loop of the ecliptic, where the sun and moon and other planets pass overhead is only 180" for a view, so there must be another half of earth and sky, and another 180" of the ecliptic, around the other side.

 

Besides this, if a large enough triangle is extended anywhere over the surface of the Earth, and the interior angles are measured and surveyed accurately, the sum will always turn out to be larger than 180". If the extension of the triangle were over a flat surface, the interior angles should total only 180", as in the case of a flat triangle on a flat surface. However, in surveying acres and miles in the real world, the sum always comes out more than 180", and this can only happen on a sphere. In fact, if a full quadrant of the Earth or a sphere is considered, the quadrant (actually becoming an octant because of three dimensional space), three ninety degree angles or 270 degrees are produced in the three points.

 

And one plus one equals two, and we have two halves in two sides. "The existence of the half necessitates the existence of that of which it is a half", and half a dome of sky is a quarter section of a sphere, and anybody who has a quarter section of an orange should know that he has only one of four parts. The reciporcity of space is the same as the reciporicty of nature and an orange. Since the half and the double are reciprocally related, it is to be expected that if there is a half, there is also a double, and they cannot go on forever.

With two quarter sections, there becomes the half, and with two more, there becomes the whole. There is not any quarter section of cantaloupe or orange without there having been another three equal parts, and it is the same way with the Earth. If the hand of heaven, or the hands of time, are in oranges and cantaloupes, or spheres, then it must be so in the world and the cosmos as well, and the Earth then clearly is one complete sphere.

 

As much as one side of the line and the other, there are two perpendicular planes from an intersection, and wherever the four corners of the world go, the semi-circular patterns always come back around in a sphere, continuously around all points on Earth. Wherever someone may be, the 180 degrees of a straight line plays the middle, with east on one side and west on the other. Looking to the east, everybody knows there is another 180 degrees on the other side in the west. Even as world science would spin around and around, dizzying itself with relativity and various frames of quantum reference, and peculiar states of denial, all the balance in the skylined perspectives never stops.

 

Yet cave man know like ancestor of Aristotle that one element in each pair of contraries will suffice in the difference to know both that element and its contrary, as for example, by means of the straight line both it itself and the curved are known, as the carpenter's rule enables us to test both, et cetera. As the way to pay attention is also the way to be, in the order of nature, definition, and time, the form is prior, having a special priority, and without it nothing can be complete. So if stars and planets of ecliptic pass beneath earth and sky at end of day, out beyond horizon, then there must be equal curve, "beneath earth and sky", on other side as well, around corner of west -- and circling back to east, from where they rise again in morning time. The geometry of space is already full, even perfect, without anything annoying like heliocentrism being set in motion to confuse all the parts, and the best balance is always reflected in measures of equal parts.

If there is any peace in geometry or proportion, it is in the properties of wholeness also. So it is natural to know the 180 degrees on the other side of the line to the farthest west, running from north to south, just beyond view of eyesight at sunset, is also the interface of another great semi-circle, not only the other half of a straight line from nowhere. In whatever direction, east or west, north or south, the parallel lines in the distance are the curves of semi-circles coming back around to the ends continuously.

Even as weight by itself does not constitute a source of motion, it does, however, distribute with a center; and Aristotle described the generation of the Earth as spherical, to the center, for every portion has weight until it reaches the center, and the evidence of the senses further corroborates this when lunar eclipses always show segments shaped as we see them. In lunar eclipses the outline of the Earth is always curved as a circle, and the Moon itself shows itself to be a sphere through all its phases, since it waxes in such a manner because it is spherical.

"Since it is the interposition of the Earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the Earth's surface, which is therefore spherical". Also the fact that relatively small changes of latitude cause changes in the perspective of constellations and stars as seen overhead, that they are different, show the Earth is circular. For otherwise the effect of such relatively slight changes of latitude would not be so quickly apparent in them. Since changes in longitude do not have the same pattern of effect, it also shows that the stars orbit the earth from East to West, as it naturally appears.

It only makes sense that space and geometry should be the same difference in whatever dimension: and curiously perhaps "the Earth is the very quintessence of the human condition"-21. Between tropics, solstices, and equinoxes, therefore, the passing of the sun and the moon and the planets always works out overall in a balance of motions reflecting equal parts.

 

From before Themistocles, and going back to Noah, ancient mariners could tell that across the Earth there could be 10,000 ways to get lost at sea or as many ways around. Since the true horizon of the oceans is a uniform curve of 360 degrees, that descends equally at all the distant corners of the Earth, on open water a ship is sailing on the swell. As though elevated a little on a central hill, gradually higher above the horizons, to see from there is from a slight spherical elevation, a salty advantage to enjoy as long as the ship stays afloat, and it is the reason why objects in the offing appear marginally from the top down.

What is beyond the offing -- "where the sea and sky are welded together without a joint" -- is hidden by the curved surface of the Earth, a round sphere, enough already then, and things come into view gradually from top to bottom. When a ship's mast first appears at the bar of the horizon, the lower part and the deck are invisible due to the curvature of the sea. Only the top of the mast appears first, and then gradually the rest, from the beginning tippy top then to the bottom. Elevated towers and higher city lights and higher bluffs of shoreline in the distance are visible first, when coming in sight of land's end -- and, like the masts of ships, coastal mountains and tall fantastic trees appear to rise out of the sea from the top then down, rather than the bottom up.

 

Because the Earth is a sphere perched in the sky, and space is consistent in three dimensions, the procession in sequence of the edges and days, the dynamic including rainbows and the ecliptic, can only confirm again that space and the world are spherical in nature. It is simple enough to see that the sky overhead looks spherical like a dome, and as a dome, half a sphere. So for the better balance and better reflection of parts, to compose the whole, there must be an equal half, another similar dome of sky, around the other side of the earth, that is there, although one cannot see it because no one is that tall. One would have to be a fantastic antediluvian giant, perhaps one with six fingers and six toes, 24 in all, and two rows of teeth, or a fearsome god, or great demonic entity, to see the other side. If one were as tall as Saturn or Jupiter, or as far away for eyes, then one could see around the sides better, and at least half of the sphere of the earth at a time.

 

The arc of a rainbow partially encircling the atmosphere is another sign that the Earth is formed in circular bands from top to bottom and side to side. The rainbow's uniform curve is created along its plane by the interaction of sunlight and the earth's atmopshere as such things are continuous in 3-D. And the four corners of the earth, anywhere in all the repetitions, are always as smooth and continuous as can be wherever anyone roams. And the earth never spins away from underneath or across a rainbow either, but the sun keeps moving across the sky day by day.

 

The Earth, in fact, is not an oblate spheroid as heliocentrism would like to pretend. It does not have an equatorial bulge and is not squeezed-in at the polar caps. Rather there is a balanced perspective of day and night in the seasons, from the planets and stars moving along the ecliptic through the horizons, over all longitudes and latitudes. Since the 180 degrees of the ecliptic in the halves of the sky overhead curve roundly in an arc, like a semi-circle, it must be that the Earth and the cosmos are spheres, since the best balance and best reflection are in similar measures of similar parts.

 

 

Cave man not need camera for right answer, since likeness goes all the way around, like dog star shine light, and satellite photography shows that the Earth and its atmosphere are spherical. Wth twin curvature overall, even with variations in terrain, the true horizon is everywhere the same balance, whether seen from the surface or high altitude in space -- as it should be for a sphere. The horizon is not subtended in a funny or disproportionate way anywhere along the equator or towards the polars caps, as if it were an oblate spheroid.

 

For example, heliocentric astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote: "It is well known that as a consequence of its rotation the equatorial diameter of the Earth exceeds the polar diameter by about 27 miles -- the earth is slightly squashed at its poles in other words."-22

 

Such would be the fool's figure for an error in abstraction rather than reality: and heliocentrism has the shape of the Earth wrong not geocentrism. Geocentrism says the Earth is a simple sphere, perfect as much as not moving, and heliocentrism argues, without any evidence, that it is an oblate spheroid with an equatorial bulge and squeezed-in polar caps.

No one can notice any of the gigantic motions and stresses that would create the supposed equatorial bulge and squeezed-in polars caps in the first place, and no one and no satellite photography can notice any evidence of the equatorial bulge or squeezed-in polar caps themselves, either. Rather the horizons are always perfect parallel after parallel, on all sides equally rounded from whatever angle of vanishing flatness, as it could be only in a true sphere, not an oblate spheroid. 

 

If the diameter of the earth along the equatorial axis were 27 miles greater than along the polar axis, that is a substantial amount in size: a difference equivalent to two and a half bekadeks or 142,560 feet. The highest mountains in the world are around five times less than that, yet quite noticeable for the seasons, easily visible for verification, while the equatorial bulge and squeezed-in polar caps, and the tremendous forces of spinning rotation that supposedly create them in the first place remain utterly hidden away.

II

 

Twenty-one years before Copernicus published "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestibus", the sailors of the Magellan-Elcano voyage completed the first recorded circumnavigation of the globe. Such a feat it was that no extreme was judged too much but another chance to find such a rare good place all the way around. Since of four extremes all the world could not keep them, not for anywhere much too long, they always chose one; everywhere somewhere super-feidan,  and none ever reported seeing any signs of a so-called equatorial bulge or squeezed-in polar caps. Rather then as much as now the convexity of space predominated in spheres, and the horizons all the way around never gave evidence of any odd oblate distension, as Newton would describe it one hundred and sixty-five years later, without leaving Cambridge or the Bank of England for the equator or the poles.

Neither Magellan, Elcano, or any of the crew thought that the Earth was flat, or that it was revolving to orbit the Sun; yet a somewhat legendary sophism was started that in the journey they had lost a day from sailing west around the world. They had sailed over many thousands of leagues for three years, and when surviving Captain and crew arrived at the Cape Verde Islands, they put a boat ashore for provisions and supposedly discovered to their astonishment that they had lost a whole day from the voyage. The story goes that the crew thought it was Wednesday but the islanders said no, that it was Thursday.

But the history books say the arrival in Santiago was on July 9, 1522, which was a Wednesday, not Thursday, July 10, of the Julian calendar. It was almost sixty years before the Gregorian reform of October 1582, and perhaps events somehow became confused with time, with later changes in the calendar and so forth. So in some circles the idea spread that mysteriously they had lost a day from wandering west, where the sun sets so distantly around the Earth ...

The fable today may have fallen out of popular knowledge but brings up the circumnavigator's paradox, an old paradox from the Middle Ages, that said one would lose a day by going West around the world, and gain a day by going East. So somehow the story spread that Magellan's voyage had proved it. Yet for whatever it is that people enjoy paradox, sophism, and fables, the Magellan-Elcano voyage did not really lose 24 hours or a day from going west around the world.

 

From the continuous projection of the Sun around the Earth, not by motions of things across the surface of the Earth, nor by any motion of the Earth itself, the days after all are as simple as one by one, in a singularized index zone. The supposed confusion of days that could result from ships going so far west or east or with such great inimitable speed is another false dilemma, a fool's paradox, to imagine that one would lose a day by going west around the world, and rather gain a day by going east.

 

Some sort of arbitrary medieval joke, like trial by clutter or silly sidecar, if not combat or drowning, since there is no natural diminution or extension of time because of the Earth itself. There is no dilation of time because of relativity stuck between rocks or continents either, or because of motions of clocks and things across the surface. All the days are in stereo, of course, simple as parallels within a plenum, and all resolved as one, one by little one.

No matter how many angels can dance on a thimble or beading needle, there is only one center to any circle, and everywhere in a pin some mysterious relation to the center, if the legendary would really exist at all. Even the smallest needly point or the smallest remnant of a bead possible represents better than nothing a circle, or the circle within it; and there is only one center to any day, and all the minutes and hours, and astral mysteries and aspects of cosmic secrets that go with it, and that is the Earth.

 

The Earth and so many cans, where one day ends and another begins over cannery row, the new day consumes yesterday as the point of the circle where the snake swallows his tail, going round and round. Where aforetime burns out and runs out of extent, the present abides, and tomorrow consumes today, when it passes away. Yet it seems perhaps arbitrary in abstraction to say that the point of completion and the new beginning are different in a perfect circle. If there are many similar circles same as the first, it is the same question again, sicut pons asinorum de integro, like Euclid's bridge of asses. The one is the same as the other, duo duo, for the sameness all around.

 

It was an arbitrary decision, of course, therefore, to say that the Great Meridian should correspond to Greenwhich, England, so close to the Bank of England and a matter of custom to judge whether the old day ends at sunset, or at midnight, or even at dawn. But wherever the old day ends, the new would begin, and everywhere the sequence is one day at a time.

Stereoscopically, from the big picture in full 3-D, the actual dimensions of the Earth are such that 15" of the ecliptic equal about one hour of any day: and along the Equator that corresponds to about 1,037 and a half miles. The correspondence of time and space may seem peculiar at times; yet as many different days as there are, they resolve as each one, one by single one, in circular patterns per diem; and if any old boat did sail off the edge of the world, it would be a wreck for one specific day's sailing not two.

 

Even Superman cannot reverse time. Even if he could change the weather, he cannot reverse the past by flying backwards into the west from the east, as fast as he can, as many times as he can. There is no skipping time and fast forwarding into the future by flying into the west either, as fast as he can, as many times as he can. Neither way west or east recovers old losses or saves shipwrecks, or changes reality good or bad, as though they had not been, or prevents a future poorly foreseen. In fact, the simple accomplishment of the days is within such an order of sublime achievement that it cannot be explained by random theories or the Big Bang either.

 

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) had another sophism about the confusion of space and time, in which he imagined that there was a strip of land circling the Earth in which everyone speaks English. He embarks on a journey due west from London, Tuesday at 9 am, and speeds quickly enough along to keep the Sun in the same relative position in the sky. As he travels along, he checks the time by asking the locals, "what time is it?" They always answer "9 am". Indeed, everything goes so smoothly that that is the answer when, 24 hours later, he returns to London. "But the Londoners also report the day as Wednesday rather than Tuesday. So where did Wednesday begin"?-23 

 

This kind of thing could become annoying, yet if arbitrary to say which one it is, which is which is not to say what kind of thing it is or where. Since the cosmos is spherical and much intelligence is innate, the feeling and shape of eggheadedness may not be unnatural. Even if time and space may become something peculiarly transcendental, at times baffling, people know the difference between midnight and high noon without having to consult an astrologer or think tank. Therefore, like the unending enumerations of Pi, plain experience may represent at times something in the continuation more mysterious than mundane, even in simple calendars and sandglasses, et cetera.

 

For instance, it is less possible to lose time by going west around the world, or gain time into the future by going east, than it is to square the circle. And comparatives among things that are impossible do not really make that much sense anyway, because, of course, what is impossible is simply not possible, and does not bear much comparison with other things that are also impossible. And it is impossible to square the circle, as much as it is to lose a day by going west, or gain one by going east so fast or by keeping up with 9 o'clock am around the world.

Mortal tabulations and the post office are not so transcendental as the abstract thing in question, the thing itself in the limit wherever and beyond it. Like existence that keeps going in circles, like a ghost in the machine and on up to Heaven, the ephemerides would benefit from all the averages, certainly, as much as any continuous probability distribution, where every day is as simple as 24 rows in a column, and every week 24 rows in seven columns, with a column for each planet: and 168 hourglasses make a week.

However, the quintessence of the quantum leap still mistifies, from the catfish to the birdwing butterfly, from one instance of a moment to the next, where the 24 hours are 24, like the letters of the Greek alphabet. Arranged in a neat circle around the Earth all the time, the dance of the hours and Thema Mundi, for example, were before Sesostris and Sosigenes, who were after Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim, who were before Don Quixote and St. Paul, and "until death it is all life, as every new beginning comes from some other beginnings ends".

When the rows in a column have all been filled, the day moves forward to the next column. After a day, the Sun even changes an average .9863 degrees in background, or about one for the eclitpic. Simple enough, but still it seems that some mystery about time and space must escape the minds of mortals, which may be hidden somewhere in the forever ever nature of Pi, perhaps, that days and time could possibly get lost.

 

"Un grand peut-etre" subtends, as it will seem the same over all conjunctions, to say maybe this or maybe that, ens inquantum ens; yet the habitable world of being could still be simple as circles, and apples and oranges, and whether one is or is not in a certain place on a certain day does not have to be too complicated. If an old medieval caravel did sail too far for commerce, to fall off the edge of the world, it would at least have been an accident that occurred at once, as a single mistake during one day of the week. The same vessel taken together could not fall off the edge of the world twice, at the same time and place, not even for quantum mechanics or Schrodinger's cat.

After all, if Zeus defeated Cronus, it is because he figured out and understood so well that in the essential relation of forms, space has ultimate precedence and the advantage over time. Part of the precedence of space in the advantage of signs over elapsing time, established by Jupiter long ago, is that aspects, like living or not living, for example, are impossible to avoid in the instance. Nature has its cues and mews; its limits, of course, like Saturn too, such a planet and other things since each parallel goes some place and everybody has to be somewhere. The creaturely is conditional as much as orthographic projection,, so it goes, and even eagles that see it from the sky can only go so far and then the parallel fades.

 

Yet what not of the hopes of eternity, that may or may not be proposed to adventurous minds. If Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe did not go as well as Magellan's, and ship and crew fell off the face of the high seas one day, over an apocalyptic waterfall by some odd chance of precipitation, they could not fall off twice. For something like that, to fall the first time in such a way, off the edge of the world on such a scale, would be enough. However it would look for the boat and final proof, then to where in the world would they and the Golden Hind descend except down, resolved to the center, in the direction that is perpendicular to still water? 

 

If the senses tend to converge to a point of awareness, the world may be the congregation of all-parallel, like a point distribution set of everything that is the case. And some think that, with lensing equipment in the best condtions, they have been able to discover proof that the Earth is flat, not a sphere, because they have seen too far into the distant horizon for it to have the curvature of a sphere. If the greatest skill in it would be to mark and follow the line of sight to its conclusion, with a little luck they should eventually come to the edge; and once there be able to look so far down; but really they would have already been at the edge where they started, and along the whole way to make another great circle.

Since the Earth has more sides than all the tangents to a sphere, the infinite regress really need go no further. The last or next step makes its way, where the sphere is simply the most efficient relation of quality and quantity, which is also the reason for it. Perhaps a prophecy or mischief, or never-failing property of things, is that they should be at least as well as they are, in the round concouse of events, as the evidence of good sense is or should be asserted by all who have anything to do with nature. If knowledge like that at the edge may be directed to two or more contrary ends, while remaining one and the same, still it is a long way down. After all, it is in the approach of one thing to another that results are found and the laws of nature.

 

Some have thought that the world rests on a great turtle, others that it rests on deep water. Either way, whether it is turtles or water all the way down, the best relation in geometry to the infinite is in a sphere, since it minimizes tension and surface to volume, or whatever costs in the difference, and requires the least energy to maintain its shape.

 

 

 

Nature is everywhere the cause of order, and wabi-sabi the Japanese say about tea, as schedules are not made in relation to the infinite, not more than around. Since the infinite cannot be scheduled, as there is no ratio in that which is always beyond more or less, things do not change in relation to it but in relation to other things -- principles, percentages, positions, and so forth. As Al-Ghazali said, "since all the states of the Eternal are alike, it is impossible to suppose a change in the states of the eternal." 

As the infinite remains beyond any point of demonstration in "commensurate universal", to gather the sense of direction in relation to it, one must be so very equally inclined at all sides. Since again nothing can change in relation to it, what would come to nothing must rather end in something, if not what was before -- and if by the size of it, a boat of sailors sailing sailed too far to the edge, and fell straight off the face of the Earth, it would be a mysterious disaster indeed, per misadventure into the fateful face of the deep, yet not one that could go on without end. So it goes too in another way that no thing can bring itself into existence; and neither can a straight line be infinite, for there is no such thing as an infinite straight line. To reckon an infinite number in such a way, as the disaster of a sinking boat, is impossible, as no process of change is eternal and no motion can run on to infinity by accumulation. Therefore, it may seem unclear where it would go, and how long to fall before hitting rock bottom, but free-fall cannot continue forever, even for the weirdest of accidents.

 

There is a simple question of necessity in the picture that touches everything. Since the Earth is not flat, the direction called "down", that is perpendicular to the surface of still water, is distributed around the world gradually. Scoped within circles as with a center, the center is as important as the collection of facts, of course; since if the Earth were flat, the lateral terminus of departure for a drop into the abyss, between a parallel that so high and one so low, collected at the end point of an edge, would be beyond relief of earthly terrain. Over the edge, out of the blue, it would lead to some other place: parts far away and unknown.

All ships centered in rudder and keel on the curved surface are the same way around the abyss far below, which would not be the case if the Earth were flat, where the midpoint would be differently related to the extremes. Tattoo from "Fantasy Island" used to sing when he was drunk, "O the deepest deep, and me so cheap, if my voice dies on land, carry it the little way down to the sea, 'twas a sunny day when I went to play down by the sea". Even if he did not know the rest of the words, and he would say, "Boss, the plane, Boss the plane". If too short and high in the perspective, like him, the world still holds together in the round, perfect as a sphere; and all the waterfalls and boats that would go over the edge can only fall down according to the range of vertical descent, that goes further and further down and to the center.

 

Experience has shown that in such cases too, that a vast and perhaps larger portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant, and some say any true philosophy will always show the same, yet there must be some center, of course, as much as the all-in-between: and there things would collect even where they land, if in some strange way, if more than one went off the edge, down and to an area far below -- such a place not only in abstract obscurity, but even as they would if the space of the Earth were absolutely flat in overall extension.

The expression of flatness in the case is only a matter of resolution, like the bottom line, where falling is falling as falling to an end. Another metaphor, and like the poets, "if the skies fall, one may hope to catch larks". Boats and watefalls that would go preciptously off the edge of things and exit the surrounding terrain will collect and land as coordinated to a center. Why because how, as much as how because when, as they go deeper down into the sphere of what, where, how much so, which one and who, and so forth, it should not be that different for things like that from a picture from any decent cartoon.

Cartooning at times may also be called preaching, and to many comic book heroes, "si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae." If the orb of creation shoud break and fall, the ruins would strike him fearless.

To the boat as person, or the persons as boat, as whatever between corporate and service code, the face of the Earth is curved as the surface of a sphere, and to fall off any elevation is to fall off the edge, since every point on the surface of a sphere is also an edge. Yet some edges are higher and more precipitous than others, and it is a poor hypothesis that will not explain more facts than it is designed to meet. When some people imagined that the Earth was flat, because it looks flat in so many acres, they imagined that it was that way overall because otherwise people and animals on the other side would fall off. However, as Ptolemy and others noticed, there is not the normal sense of up or down in regards to a sphere. In all places the way up or down is merely assigned by a label, as the situation seems appropriate, yet in pure terms the up or down is simply motion away from or to the center.

 

As all that and the consentium gentium may be, the simple memory of the best place, and the best way to live under the orbit of stars, this way or that, appears at times to have been lost. With heliocentrism, for example, the notion of an original garden paradise, comite optimo omnis, is gone. "Was there a garden or was the garden a dream? Amid the fleeting light, already it is imprecise in the memory, the clear Paradise, but somehow some would know that it exists in flower and profusion", et cetera.-24

 

With deep thoughts, intuentes abyssos, as one sign and gesture meets another, to dwell is to garden thought Heidegger. As much as Don Quixote in the cave of Montesinos, going deeper down into the sphere of the Earth is going deeper down into the sphere of the cosmos, which they have pushed to the roots of infinity and of space itself. It is the most reasonable conclusion and scientific, since the direction called down, perpendicular to the surface of still water, is only one of six cosmic directions, that assimilate with a center and way of return, which happens to be the Earth again, resting in grand hypostatic suspension in the middle of the six and the stars, et cetera.