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                       C I R C U M L U N A R
                     T R A N S M I S S I O N S
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Issue One                                                  May 2021

The Hearth of the Matter

by durtal

It seems that Kepler first used the Latin word 'focus' in 1604 to refer to 'the point of convergence' in the mathematical sphere. It is possible that this is an analogical use of the term and may reference the point of light created with a lens. You probably know what I mean. I remember another child showing me a trick with a magnifying glass outside one sunny day. He quickly adjusted the glass's height over my forearm to effect a sharp pain as the converging rays burned a hole in my skin.

Hobbes brought 'focus' into broader English parlance nearly fifty years later. I don't know if he did this with a magnifying glass or not. But, Hobbes is certainly not my favourite philosopher. With its particular take on human nature, he published Leviathan about the same time he popularised a word whose use is ubiquitous but whose original meaning is too often unknown. Sometimes the abstractions of science and a specific sort of philosophy separate us from the mundane realities of life in unfortunate ways.

Ironically, the political philosopher who espoused that humans are "all take and little give" used a word that belied his contentions in the original. Focus is the Latin equivalent of the Old English word 'hearth'. People still used the latter term in my youth, especially in rural regions. Phrases like "hearth and home" and "keep the home fires burning" catch something of its ethos. The hearth was where household members gathered to cook or to work by the hearthstone's firelight. In its warmth, children sat to hear the stories of the family and community after dusk. Kith and kin entertained themselves with music and drinking and dance nearby. In some cultures, families kept ancestral bones beneath the hearthstone. Here was a point of convergence in the human habitat.

The rising or setting sun reminds me of a hearth fire as it converges on the horizon. I know what it is to wait in anticipation for the warmth of a fire on a cold winter's morning. Others gather close to you, hoping to absorb a little of your body's heat while they wait too. You each rub and blow warm breaths onto your hands and comment on the cold, and you remark on the day ahead. As the kindling catches, hope builds and blossoms as the flames devour the larger pieces of wood. The fire roars madly as you back away, waiting for the wooden pyramid to collapse. When there are coals left mostly, you cook your breakfast over them and drink your morning coffee. You smile and share a joke or two with your fellows. One of them ruefully remembers that it is his day to do the dishes; they are piling up as the others finish and go. This time, like its later double, is a short space of intimacy before separation.

By analogy, sunrise is like the birth of a child for whom the family cares. Such brief familial intimacy is still most often the case for the young. But, not so for the elderly. We fill the noon meridians of our lives so completely with striving and drift so far from one another that, too often, family members no longer live near to one another at the sunset of a loved one's life. Now others, not family members, nurse the frail and wash their bodies late in life and at its very end. Frequently, there is only the intimacy of strangers who alone know where the bare bones of our final days lie before we slip into the deep dark of death's night. This is all that the world offers in this day when hearth fires and home are all but forgotten. We now only focus camera lenses (automatically).

Did old Thomas Hobbes have a point?

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