Migration Toward Life, Love, And Hope
Illustration
Stories
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth…a great company, they shall return here (Jeremiah 7:8).
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) was not only one of the great science fiction writers, he was also a scientist, a science writer, a futurist, and the originator of the concept of placing satellites in a geosynchronous twenty-four orbit (roughly 26,000 miles above the earth) so they seemed to hover motionless above the earth. Placing three of these equidistantly at intervals around the globe would make instant worldwide communications possible. Clarke did not patent the idea, preferring to see it realized rather than impede its realization by trying to make a fortune out of it.
However, it is as the author of science fiction he is best known. He wrote many classics, including Childhood’s End (the favorite SF book of C.S. Lewis), The Songs of Distant Earth, and collaborated on both the screenplay and novelization for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was inspired by his short story, “The Sentinel.”
A lesser-known story, “The Possessed,” (to be found in the anthology Reach for Tomorrow, 1956) was about the migration of a somewhat immortal collective bodiless intelligence, referred to as the Swarm, which, after the destruction of its home planet when its star went nova, drifted among the stars of the galaxy, looking for a new home. The Swarm required not only another planet, but also a species capable of developing intelligence that it could enter and guide.
In the story the intelligence arrives at earth millions of years ago, and, uncertain if there is a species capable of evolving into intelligent beings, makes the momentous choice to divide into two separate intelligences. Half of the galactic mind would choose a species of creature on earth as a host which might one day develop the potential for intelligence. The other would continue the journey among the stars, searching for another potential host. The two halves agreed to meet at a certain place on Earth at long intervals.
Eventually, the intelligence settled on a species of small, furry creatures to direct and guide its evolution. At long intervals, these creatures would travel to the meeting point for the promised rendezvous, but the other half of the intelligence never came. Over time, the Swarm realized its choice had been fatal. The chosen creatures were at an evolutionary dead end, but the Swarm was unable to extricate it from these animals.
Still, though the Swarm came to forget over millions of years what it was and why it came, it would still attempt to keep the rendezvous, arriving at the meeting place by rote. However, thanks to continental drift these now mindless creatures, revealed to be lemmings, arrive at a spot now covered by water and succeed only in drowning themselves in large numbers.
The doomed migration of the lemmings is one of those strange, inexplicable facts about nature that defy explanation, and Clarke’s story, though not an attempt to actually explain why lemmings migrate to their doom, highlighted the mystery.
People grow up knowing about lemmings and their strange migration. Their mass suicide is an established fact in the minds of most people. Lemmings are used as a figure of speech to describe mass human behavior that is self-destructive. Take, for instance, the 1973 National Lampoon album “Lemmings,” about the Woodshuck Festival of Peace, Love, and Death. In contrast to the Woodstock Festival of Peace, Love, and Rock, which it parodied, in “Lemmings” young people massed together for a concert with the intention of killing themselves in order to make the world a better place.
The weirdest part of the whole lemming’s thing is that it’s not true.
Lemmings don’t migrate to their doom. It’s true that lemmings can multiply at an alarming rate and population pressure will cause many of them to migrate to seek more space to live. Some will attempt to swim across rivers and inevitably some will drown, but most will make it across.
The myth of the doomed migration is reinforced in a 1958 Disney film titled White Wilderness. The filmmakers were so anxious to have dramatic footage to shock their audience that they purchased lemmings from hundreds of miles away, brought them to a cliff, and threw them off, filming as the lemmings struggled to survive. It’s horrible to think that something so unethical would be staged, filmed, and shown as fact, but the footage was so graphic that it has remained in the popular consciousness.
In today’s passage from Jeremiah, the prophet describes a mass migration of a different sort, not an inexplicable lemming-like mark to death, but a divinely ordained and organized migration away from exile and back toward home and a new life. Everyone, including the most vulnerable, the blind, lame, those who are pregnant, or even in labor, are not abandoned to their fate. They are nurtured and protected as they migrate toward life, love, and hope.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) was not only one of the great science fiction writers, he was also a scientist, a science writer, a futurist, and the originator of the concept of placing satellites in a geosynchronous twenty-four orbit (roughly 26,000 miles above the earth) so they seemed to hover motionless above the earth. Placing three of these equidistantly at intervals around the globe would make instant worldwide communications possible. Clarke did not patent the idea, preferring to see it realized rather than impede its realization by trying to make a fortune out of it.
However, it is as the author of science fiction he is best known. He wrote many classics, including Childhood’s End (the favorite SF book of C.S. Lewis), The Songs of Distant Earth, and collaborated on both the screenplay and novelization for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was inspired by his short story, “The Sentinel.”
A lesser-known story, “The Possessed,” (to be found in the anthology Reach for Tomorrow, 1956) was about the migration of a somewhat immortal collective bodiless intelligence, referred to as the Swarm, which, after the destruction of its home planet when its star went nova, drifted among the stars of the galaxy, looking for a new home. The Swarm required not only another planet, but also a species capable of developing intelligence that it could enter and guide.
In the story the intelligence arrives at earth millions of years ago, and, uncertain if there is a species capable of evolving into intelligent beings, makes the momentous choice to divide into two separate intelligences. Half of the galactic mind would choose a species of creature on earth as a host which might one day develop the potential for intelligence. The other would continue the journey among the stars, searching for another potential host. The two halves agreed to meet at a certain place on Earth at long intervals.
Eventually, the intelligence settled on a species of small, furry creatures to direct and guide its evolution. At long intervals, these creatures would travel to the meeting point for the promised rendezvous, but the other half of the intelligence never came. Over time, the Swarm realized its choice had been fatal. The chosen creatures were at an evolutionary dead end, but the Swarm was unable to extricate it from these animals.
Still, though the Swarm came to forget over millions of years what it was and why it came, it would still attempt to keep the rendezvous, arriving at the meeting place by rote. However, thanks to continental drift these now mindless creatures, revealed to be lemmings, arrive at a spot now covered by water and succeed only in drowning themselves in large numbers.
The doomed migration of the lemmings is one of those strange, inexplicable facts about nature that defy explanation, and Clarke’s story, though not an attempt to actually explain why lemmings migrate to their doom, highlighted the mystery.
People grow up knowing about lemmings and their strange migration. Their mass suicide is an established fact in the minds of most people. Lemmings are used as a figure of speech to describe mass human behavior that is self-destructive. Take, for instance, the 1973 National Lampoon album “Lemmings,” about the Woodshuck Festival of Peace, Love, and Death. In contrast to the Woodstock Festival of Peace, Love, and Rock, which it parodied, in “Lemmings” young people massed together for a concert with the intention of killing themselves in order to make the world a better place.
The weirdest part of the whole lemming’s thing is that it’s not true.
Lemmings don’t migrate to their doom. It’s true that lemmings can multiply at an alarming rate and population pressure will cause many of them to migrate to seek more space to live. Some will attempt to swim across rivers and inevitably some will drown, but most will make it across.
The myth of the doomed migration is reinforced in a 1958 Disney film titled White Wilderness. The filmmakers were so anxious to have dramatic footage to shock their audience that they purchased lemmings from hundreds of miles away, brought them to a cliff, and threw them off, filming as the lemmings struggled to survive. It’s horrible to think that something so unethical would be staged, filmed, and shown as fact, but the footage was so graphic that it has remained in the popular consciousness.
In today’s passage from Jeremiah, the prophet describes a mass migration of a different sort, not an inexplicable lemming-like mark to death, but a divinely ordained and organized migration away from exile and back toward home and a new life. Everyone, including the most vulnerable, the blind, lame, those who are pregnant, or even in labor, are not abandoned to their fate. They are nurtured and protected as they migrate toward life, love, and hope.
