Black holes as Hawking's life metaphor

[Magical Realist]

Could anyone ever BE more interested in black holes than he whose life has become a gradual regression into a "black hole" of physical expressivity and mobilty? That Stephen Hawking's life study was a perfect metaphor for his debilitating condition---of an inexorable and slow implosion of one's being into an incommunicable and isolated state of consciousness-- has probably not been lost on some, but it strikes me as rather synchronistic in its poetical truth. It strikes me that one's life meaning and destiny, is not something that can easily be unentangled from the conditions of one life--it's trials and adversities and physically imposed burdens. You are an expert in what you have suffered thru the most. The dream you follow is inevitably the cure to your own sickness. As Rumi put it, "The light enters into you thru your wound." What is the shape of that light image which shines thru the wound in your heart? The shape of the wound, only no more a wound, but a radiant portal towards a universal truth.

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[Yazata]

I don't think that Hawking would like that sentiment very much.

He wants to live as normal a human life as possible, and understandably gets annoyed when interviewers just want to discuss his disability. Unfortunately, his disability is all that many people perceive when they look at him.

Hawking is all about ideas, the more cosmic the ideas the better. That's what he wants to spend his days thinking about. Reducing all of that to his suffering wouldn't be pleasant for him.

I think that black holes interest Hawking because they are actual empirical manifestations of singularities, of cosmic principles tending to infinity and maybe breaking down. Particularly general relativity, which is his academic specialty. I suspect that he intuits that fundamental facts about reality itself might be learned from such anomalies.

[Magical Realist]

Hawking is all about ideas, the more cosmic the ideas the better. That's what he wants to spend his days thinking about. Reducing all of that to his suffering wouldn't be pleasant for him.

Well there's Hawking as Hawking wants to perceive himself, and then there's the reality of his daily suffering and the inevitable influence that has on his own mode of being. If I were faced 24/7 with a largely nonfunctional body, I too would devote myself to a purely mental life of abstraction and cosmic speculation. It's the one way I would be assured of escaping the depression of my condition. And with a mind like Hawking's, you have a virtual transcendence of the subjective mind into universal mathematical truth---something possible for only a few of our greatest scientists. Hawking may NOT want to be viewed as disabled or weakened, but the reality is he is and that will be part of his heroic legacy whether he likes it or not.