Put In Words

I sometimes hold it half a sin 
To put in words the grief I feel 
For words, like nature, half reveal 
And half conceal the soul within. 

But, for the unquiet heart and brain 
A use measured language lie's 
The sad mechanic exercise 
Like dull narcotic's, numbing pain 

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er 
Like coarsest clothes against the cold 
But large grief which these enfold 
Is given in outline and no more. 


                                     ---- Tennyson from In Memoriam

Loved and Lost

I envy not in any moods

         The captive void of noble rage,

         The linnet born within the cage,

That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes

         His license in the field of time,

         Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,

To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,

         The heart that never plighted troth

         But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;

Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

         I feel it, when I sorrow most;

         'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

                                 ---- Tennyson from In Memoriam

Pale Blue Dot

Voyager I is out of the heliosphere, once again and probably really this time around.

In 1990, after visiting Saturn and its primary mission completed, Voyager I turned around to take that picture of home before saying goodbye. The Pale Blue Dot is Earth photographed from about 6 billion kilometers away.

This picture was taken by a narrow-angle photograph. Eventually, NASA also published a composite image of Sun Earth and Venus. The wide-angle image was inset with two narrow-angle pictures centered on Earth and Venus. That image was composed of 640,000 individual pixels of which Earth takes up less than a pixel.

Cassini did a better job photographing the Earth this summer though. I suppose, though we are small and insignificant, we do have the ability to make ourselves count.


Excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that 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.