

The meaning of meteors | Roz Kaveney

Despite advances in scientific knowledge, many of us still want random events and misfortunes have a deeper meaning

There was a time when people looked at the sky to see the movement of clouds calm or storm, or the revolutions of the celestial spheres, or the system that eventually replaced sundial. At the end of the Age of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson may not have been as skeptical about the meteor - "easier to believe that two Yankee professors would be to admit that stones fall from heaven" - as the legend tells us but certainly found the idea unlikely. Even as late as 1943, Michael Innes could write a detective novel deliberately absurd, the weight of evidence, in which the murder weapon was a meteorite fell from a tower academic elders.

Perhaps it is better to use asteroids and meteorites as a way of thinking about the fragility of existence. If the world should end tonight, David Cameron would really like to have spent her last day being a politician cast disabled in their homes instead of punishing the corrupt bankers? Not by the prospect of hell, but because it is a way to get sticky precious hours that could be invested in chocolate and string quartets. Perhaps, however, the point about poor people is that they like really go wrong. As Stephen Sondheim Sweeney Todd says: "The life of the wicked should be short for the rest of us, death would be a relief.." On a sunny day, the prospect of universal death adds flavor to a walk in the park.

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