Adapted from a chapter of a philosophy non-fiction book i’m currently writing and welcome thoughts
Untitled, Theodor Jung, 1935. From the series “Farmland, hillside type, thoroughly worked, Garett County, Maryland”, as one of the 270,000 ‘killed’ photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression
Gravity — the word slips into our minds with equations, laws, and the unfathomable pull that holds the universe in place. It is the lone housekeeper on an invisible farm, who steadies our feet to the cottage floor and binds planets to their weathered sheds; choreographing the grand design with duty and humility. To a physicist, gravity is beautifully, almost chillingly precise, captured in the elegance of Einstein’s formula:
Einstein’s General Relativity equation
Yet, despite the clarity and beauty of these symbols, something about the concept still escapes me, something almost alive, something that feels far closer to the heart.
Gravity in nature exerts an inexorable pull to create an orderly symmetry that endures. It is a force of cohesion, a counterbalance to the universe’s natural tendency toward disorder. But in human experience, gravity reveals a second nature — an emotional force vastly more sphinx-like. We speak of being “drawn” to people, of “gravitating” toward them, as if they, too, possess mass, an invisible pull. Yet here, gravity denotes not physical mass but emotional heft, a magnetic quality that demands attention and alters the very fabric of our inner worlds. And unlike the harmonious orbits of planets, the gravitational pull in human relationships often destabilises; it draws us in, tightens our grip, until, paradoxically, it crumbles under the intensity.
Meanwhile, relationships without gravity remain calm, polite, collected. We thank strangers, smile at acquaintances, and keep a polite distance; phenomena resemble gravity’s effect in the physical world. So it seems, that what creates order in nature, creates disorder in the heart of man, where intimacy is tinted with tension. Perhaps this order arises from years of conditioning by the principles of civil society, an artificial gravity imposed by upbringing and culture. In contrast, the gravity of deep relationships defies such order, pulling us into emotional orbits resulting in an almost mutually destructive exhilaration.
I suppose in the same way that gravitational force opposes entropy in nature, it does this to oppose a different kind of entropy in human experience — a stagnated unity and a corrosive assimilation. When we stay in a weighted connection, we absorb each other and lose an independent self-identity, disturbing the esoteric order of a meta-cosmic- structure that requires diversity. So in a way, gravity disconnects our relationships when we are dangerously close to being assimilated, in order to preserve our brittle sense of identity and independence.
Perhaps this is why gravity exuberates a poetic resonance. It bridges the materiality of the physical world and the metaphysics of abstract emotions; something that defies simple dichotomous categorisation, like a true maverick against the authoritarian, dictatorial physical reality. As a prisoner of this world myself, I suspect gravity has always hugged me ever so gently in my subconscious, and it is only now that I’ve dug it out, dissected it, to truly understand its place in my heart.
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