We owe the ancient Phoenicians big time. "We" being anyone who uses the letter "A". It's my understanding that the letter A has come to us through the Romans, who borrowed it from the Greeks (back when it was called aleph), who themselves borrowed it from those daring sea-faring folks we now call Phoenicians. Although aleph lives on in our modern language as "A", the language of the ancient Phoenicians is now a dead language. Although I haven't been able to coroborate this with any ancient Phoenicians, I have it on good authority that Phoenician was a Semitic language closely related to ancient Hebrew. It is storied that the aleph held cosmic significance to the Hebrews as symbolizing the point of origin. As the point of origin, the aleph was conceived of as containing the potentiality of all else within it. Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges waxed fantastic about this in his story "The Aleph". In Borges's story, the aleph is a point in space that contains all other points within it. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously. Borges had several stories in which he touched on the theme of encapsulated infinity, which stories I won't bother citing to because this is just a blog and not some research paper. The essential point for my purpose is that any point on the number line can be the starting point of another infinite series. Furthermore, any point on the number line can itself be subdivided an infinite number of times. This means that any given point is not just part of an infinite series but also contains an infinite series within itself. This means that the number line presents us with a mathematical model of infinities within infinities akin to an infinite series of Russian nesting dolls with smaller Russian nesting dolls inside of them ad infinitum. So what does this have to do with you? Frankly, I don't know. Maybe it means we are all part of something infinitely greater than us, but that we ourselves are also something infinitely great. One interesting implication of this is that any instant in time is comprised of an infinite number of smaller units of time. So we live from one infinite moment to another but our finite minds only capture that small fragment of the infinite that we can apprehend. This shouldn't be surprising. We only perceive a finite fraction of the space around us. Why shouldn't it be the same with time?

I'll conclude my random musings and give you a chance to comment. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Next time, if there is a next time, I think I'll share some of my thoughts regarding Kaleidoscopes and their greater cosmic significance. Either that or the relationship of time, space and mind. Then again, maybe I'll write about tofu hot dogs as representing the convergence of East and West. We'll see.

Farewell for now.

Ed