For me black holes take the place of what believing Christians and Muslims conceived as "hell", the hole below our world, the place removed from God, the creator of all being, who, believers believe, is holding the whole world in his hands, the beautiful world which I enjoy this sunny afternoon at the beach, looking out over the blue to the horizon where the globe bends. The believers wanted their god to be good, goodness itself. But God was also the source of power, destructive power, lightning, thunder, storms, fire. Goodness punished the weak believers for their sin of not loving His Goodness enough. The reward for believing in and loving goodness was to be with God, with Goodness itself, after leaving the world. For the non-believers and for the violators of goodness as God defined it there was hell, the place without mercy, of eternal oblivion. The God who rewarded and punished does not belong in our world opened by science. This God is dead. But the ambivalence of the old God, the source of goodness and of destruction, is still with us.

The peaceful waves coming to shore now are not always peaceful. They can throw you when you try to resist them. I have wrestled with them. "Das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang" ("Beauty is nothing but the beginning of the terrible") wrote Rilke in the first Duino Elegy. Perhaps Rilke meant only that beauty is by and for the outsider, the beautiful must be unusual, paid for by the artist’s remoteness from ordinary happiness. That truth is limited. The whiteness of the breakers is not at all unusual. The fleeting moment when the wave hits the ground and turns its drops of water into swirling whiteness is something I could see again and again. The secret of beauty is just this: it will never tire you.

There is no beauty without power, and power is a very dreadful, deadly potential. Among people power acts like a drug, a drug that seduces its victim to abuse it. Murders as well as the death penalty are abuses of power, the latter also assuming the role of the punishing god. The cute little shore-birds, sanderlings, eagerly running after the receding lip of water play the role of punishing god to the tinier creatures washed on shore by the last wave. They do not know that I enjoy their running, that they add to the beauty of the scene. Beautiful are the pelicans coasting just above and alongside of a wave looking for prey. No mercy for the fish when they discover them.

There is no hell, but there are black holes, oblivion itself. The universe is not goodness, not even good. There is no mercy in a black hole. There is no merciful God. Mercy exists only among humans. But humankind needs it. Mercy is power whose strength, whose severity, is not used. Mercy is beautiful, beauty is mercy. Beauty catches but does not keep; there was beauty before me and there will be beauty after me.