January

Abstract

Shabistari, from whom my epigraph for this month is taken, was a Sufi mystic of the 1300s. In this quotation, centuries before modern atomic theory, he intuited the precise truth that would lead to atomic energy and the atomic bomb. In some way he knew that the atom—the entity he believed to be the smallest building block of matter—contained the energy of “a hundred suns,” the power of a force that humans had a hard time understanding, then or now. Yet he was right, as scientists learned when they split the atom and then harnessed its power in the 1940s, first for bombs and later for nuclear energy. As the socially conventional New Year—not my urbanatural year—begins: (I am roosting now in January; my roosting-year began in March), it seems appropriate to imagine a poet and mystic from seven hundred years ago who understood a truth of nature simply because he could imagine how much power every individual element of the nonhuman world must contain. His quotation might make human beings seem small—puny and very insignificant—by comparison. Yet every human being is also composed of atoms, so the energy of a hundred suns is lurking in each of my atoms as well.

In each atom a hundred suns are concealed.

—Mahmud Shabistari