Remembering Valentine's Day 1990

This is the anniversary of the day that Voyager 1 took a photograph of the earth from space that was the subject of Carl Sagan's most famous statements, in which he called the Earth a "pale blue dot." Here it is, for those of you who remember it, but especially for those who don't.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

That's about as romantic a Valentine's Day wish as anyone could hope for. We miss you, Carl.

posted by C A Crowley @ 10:58 PM

February Already

Two things, not related.

The first is the inauguration of a new blog, which is the public website of my class this semester called Introduction to Japanese Culture. The blog is intended as a place for us to share information about Japan we find on the web, primarily from the websites of various English-language publications, like Kyodo, Asahi, Yomiuri, and Japan Times, among others. As of this writing, I'm the only one who's posted anything. I look forward to the future. The link is on the right, or here.

The second is a bit of verse having to do with February. After a disquietingly mild December, winter has settled into a dreary routine of very cold nights and chilly days. These lines have little to do with Atlanta, which has only the most rudimentary rail system. Still, in its mood, it has much in common with the weather now:

Beads of glass, pearls and diamonds
glint on rails strung out tensely into a dim beyond
below the stare of an indifferent moon
the shriek of steel flashing sparks and then
nothing as the city remembers it was still.
Wind stirs the only movement, bringing clouds
to further postpone the dawn.
Voices muffled into the grayness
grow indistinct and disappear.
Cold drizzle leaks without a sparkle
dripping into puddles that simply stand and don't reflect.
A dream struggles feebly against intruding cold
and loses its grip in all the slickness
slipping back into never into nothing
as pale light rises, reaching toward morning.


Old Phil in Pennsylvania is an optimist this year. It's something to be grateful for, and gives us something else to look forward to--along with the students' contributions to the aforementioned blog.

posted by C A Crowley @ 7:13 PM