Reality

    The importance of totem poles is not that they are stumps of wood of a certain diameter and height that have been shaped with tools. Their significance is determined by what they stand for - by their place in a belief system. Belief and myth transform them from stump to totem.

    The meaning is, as it were, an internal magic that quickens the stumps to life. Our minds and hearts pour this quicksilver into inanimate wood shapes and - magically - they are gods and heroes, demons and spirits.

    It is a peculiar attribute of humans that we are able to infuse meaning into things.  Meaning: noiseless, odorless, invisible, untouchable, but still the governor of what we perceive.

    Much of the hold that nuclear weapons have on us is psychological. Their size in our mind's eye is not related to their size in the real world of practical consequences. They are wrapped in a shroud of sixty years of rhetoric and hyperbole. We have attached such deep feelings to them that they have been transfigured. We constantly misconceive the problems and issues that are associated with nuclear weapons because we cannot see the weapons themselves with unblinking eyes.

    It is a heretical notion in nuclear strategy and military circles, but some of the most important work we face regarding nuclear weapons is emotional. We have to find ways to overcome the needs and desires that lead us to infuse them with meaning beyond their practical reality. -That lead us to see nuclear weapons as either horsemen of the apocalypse or lightning bolts that give us the power of gods. We have to find the courage and honesty to see them plainly.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, . . . till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; . . . Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden