A New Idea, and Lots of It

Man’s mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

I was only a child-man, but my mind got stretched. It was 1933 and I was six years old lying in the sand at Jacksonville Beach, all alone in a deserted section of the beach, the late-morning sun so hot the bottom of my feet were still smarting from the scorched tar on some of the roads I had to cross on the way to the sand and the waves. There was nothing to do, there were no distractions, there was no one else around. I had just returned from the edge of the surf where I had been scooping holes in the wet sand and watching as they filled with water and were washed away, a game I couldn’t win, and I was bored with that. I lay on my back on a towel in the dry hot sand looking up at the clouds, seeing if they reminded me of anything, and sometimes I would gaze at patches of blue sky showing through the clouds.

There was no warning, there was only the sudden presence, like an announcement, of the thought in my mind that I was looking into that blue sky, that I was looking through that blue empty space---and there was no end to what I was looking at, it would go on and on, it would go on forever. Endless and forever, twin enormities of space and time for a six year old in the blazing Florida sun.

For a moment I felt very strange, overloaded, even afraid and guilty for experiencing something so unusual, all by myself alone, not as imagination or day-dreaming, but something really true and important. And it wasn’t just thinking: it was as though I could see the truth in the empty blue of the sky---it had no end, it went on forever. Forever and ever, always.

I sat up and scanned the horizon---there at least was a kind of limit. I felt older, serious, different. All of a sudden, in a way I couldn't understand, I had changed and I couldn't go back. Being alone had its dangers, but I knew that I wouldn’t tell anyone for a long time about this frightening truth that came to me as I lay on my towel in the sand in the summer sun.