Ruminations: His Own Undoing

There are some people who just live reckless lives. Antagonizing those whose power is not to be questioned. And then reaping the sorrowful harvest of their scorn, their verdicts that consign the incautious to a lifetime of misery.

Imagine, if one suffered hugely throughout life and considered that if only they had not brought down upon themselves the wrath of those whose power they questioned, life would be so much different for them. Would they, then, given alternate choices, have thought twice before embarking upon a mission that would leave them defenceless against the onslaught of forces that no mere human could guard against?

Consider Professor Stephen Hawking, arguably the most famous theoretical physicist in the world at the present time. Not more famous than Albert Einstein, to be sure, but Dr. Hawking is still alive, and Dr. Einstein left the musings of his incomparable mind to posterity long ago when he departed the land of the living.

Dr. Hawking too may now not be long for this world. "The nerve decay has now reached the point where we need to move to some new technology. We have tried some eye-tracking systems; the other method is brain scanning, and there are all sorts of techniques for that. So far we have only considered those that don't require intervention; no surgery, certainly, and no shaving of the head."

These, the words of Dr. Hawking's technical assistance, Sam Blackburn, remarking on the severe deterioration of Dr. Hawking's neural-motor disease. Which has left him a prisoner in his own body, incapable of moving beyond a barely detectable twitch in his cheek and becoming progressively weaker. That twitch enabled him to communicate through a voice box hooked to a computer.

Nature does not take kindly to being tampered with, it might seem. She hides her secrets from human scrutiny. Any who venture too closely through the immensely singular power of the soft grey matter in their craniums evoke her anger. And she appears to have been extremely annoyed with Stephen Hawking, impressing upon him a debilitating condition that should have killed him decades ago.

Dr. Hawking also disputes in his magnificent scientist's manner, the existence of an omniscient, omnipresent Spirit looking down from some heavenly place, manipulating the Universe to reflect His ineffable power, and alternately toying, and coercing, encouraging and protecting, commanding and abandoning humankind, one of many species of His playful design.

And the third powerful entity that Dr. Hawking has provoked is none other than womankind, professing despite his magnificent mind which he is capable of plying toward the interpretation of the most arcane of Nature's secrets, to be bewildered by women, expressing his opinion that women are to him, a complete mystery.

Nature is not a mystery to him that cannot be solved; God does not present as a mystery, but rather as a fictive human conceit, but woman, ah the female of the species truly does confound. He is his own undoing.