As many of you know, my first book with the University Press of Mississippi–Conversations with Carl Sagan–will be published in December. Each Conversations with… volume is made up of previously published interviews with the person described–so this is very much in the same vein as previous volumes done on John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, etc. etc. etc.
Under most circumstances, this blog won’t be about me, or about shilling my books–but I hope you folks don’t mind if I indulge every now and then. So here’s the new cover photo, which just arrived in my inbox tonight. Ain’t it a beauty?
I really like this picture of Sagan–it captures a little bit of his playfulness and curiosity. And although it was taken at the peak of his fame, showing the face of Sagan that most people probably remember best, it doesn’t look too dated. In some ways it’s kind of the eternal Sagan. It captures his legacy, at least as well as a book cover photo reasonably can.
Working with the UPMS–the biggest publisher in Mississippi, and as far as I know the only significantly sized publisher in Jackson–was a real honor, and a real joy.
And I can certainly think of worse ways to spend those hundreds of hours than poring through old Carl Sagan interviews. The main thing that came through was his humility–both on a personal level, and the humility he felt in his identity as part of the human race.
So it’s only appropriate that I close with a few of his own words. This comes from his 1996 Voyager commencement address, summarizing an idea that he had developed in his book Pale Blue Dot:
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 ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Previous Comments
Tom, even though it isn’t published yet, this promises to be a winner! Sagan not only contributed heavily to the Viking missions to Mars in the 70s – he inspired a whole generation of scientists to pursue a career and inspired even more science enthusiasts to anticipate our latest findings of the universe. Truly, he was as much a poet as a scientist – one of history’s true great popularizers.
#103162 | Author: Philip | Date: Oct 13 2005
Thanks for this, and I agree 100%. One of the great things about Sagan that a lot of people don’t notice is what a deep thinker he was on primal issues–love, morality, the meaning of life. He did so much more than make scientific ideas comprehensible to the rest of us–he also had some strikingly original things to say about the human condition in general. We need him now more than ever.
#103163 | Author: Tom Head | Date: Oct 16 2005
