![]() Millennia before James Gleick wrested chaos theory from the obscure annals of meteorology to make it a locus of magnetic allure for modern science and a fixture of the popular imagination, the ancient Greeks placed chaos at the center of their cosmogony. “Chaos” by George Frederic Watts, circa 1875. ![]() So argues Stephen Fry in the opening of Mythos ( public library) - his gloriously imaginative, erudite, warmhearted, and subversively funny retelling of the classic Greek myths. It is also - curiously, thrillingly - where these two seemingly irreconcilable strains of our hunger for truth and meaning entwine. It is the foundation of our most ancient origin myths and the springboard for our most ambitious science. ![]() Since the dawn of human consciousness, this question has gnawed at the insouciance of our species and animated the most restless recesses of our imagination. ![]() But what was there before there was time, before there was substance? Before, in the lovely words of the poet Marie Howe, “the singularity we once were” - “when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all”? “Time is the substance I am made of,” Borges wrote in his sublime meditation on the most elemental and paradoxical dimension of existence. ![]()
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