I can't be the only traveller to gaze out of an airplane window, see the frothed clouds below, and reflect that this now routine astonishment was not offered to Blake, Melville, Tolstoy, Dickinson. Proust's narrator bursts into tears when he sees a plane and imagines what the pilot sees; Virginia Woolf wrote an extraordinary essay in which she imagines London as seen from a pilot's cockpit. But, like their literary predecessors, they were never up there to see the view for themselves. And these are precisely the writers, you feel, who should have been granted access to the real thing the cosmic artificers, the poets and novelists who moved naturally from the mundane to the massive, who saw God and knew death and narrated time, who sensed that, beyond this "mundane egg" (Blake), "This World is not Conclusion" (Dickinson).
In the nineteen-sixties, there came a new astonishment, followed by its routinization. Bill Anders's "Earthrise" picture, taken on the Apollo 8 moon mission, in 1968, presented the Earth, for the first time, as we see the moon: gibbous, squashed, half shrouded in darkness, and almost ponderously ludic, as if playing sluggish peekaboo. The foreground of the picture, which shows a slip of the moon's firm landscape, made the perspective only more vertiginous. Apollo 17's "Blue Marble," from 1972, was oddly reassuring, the blue-andgreen orb resembling both the swirled marbles of childhood and the illuminated globes in toy shops; when we had imagined the world from space, maybe this was what we had seen in our mind's eye. Even this marvel eventually turned habitual, and those famous photographs became posters for dorms and waiting rooms. Voyager 1's image from 1990, of our world seen as a tiny blue dot from nearly four billion miles away, is, as Carl Sagan suggested, salutarily humbling; it has been followed by similarly minuscule transfigurations, visual scrapings from Mars and Saturn.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 25, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 25, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
GREAT MIGRATIONS
\"Home\" and \"What Became of Us.\"
SICK, SAD WORLD
What COVID did to fiction.
MOVE IN FOR THE CULL
The complicated calculus of killing some wild creatures to protect others.
EVERYTHING IN HAND
The C.I.A.'s covert ops have mattered-but not in the way that it hoped.
CHICAGO ON THE SEINE CAMILLE BORDAS
I used to tell myself stories on the job, to make it feel exciting—spy stories, exfiltration stories, war stories. I used to come up with poignant little details that turned the repatriation cases I worked on into “Saving Private Ryan,” into “Johnny Got His Gun.”
A SEMBLANCE OF PEACE
How life in a co-living community changed after October 7th.
HIS BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY
Ye bought a masterpiece by Tadao Ando-and gave it a violent remix.
SCREEN GRAB
How CoComelon conquered children's television.
FOND OF FLAGS
My wife is fond of fast food. I am not. My wife is particularly fond of the Wendy’s Baconator. I argue that it’s less expensive to order a Dave’s Double with a side of bacon, then put your own pretzels on top. (I’m fond of the Rold Gold Tiny Twists Original.)
TROPHY ROOM
Going on safari.