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.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 25, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 25, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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Thataway Thomas McGuane
The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca.
THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN
“Megalopolis.”
THE THEATRE - PHOTO REALISM
Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries.”
AGE OF ANXIETY
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
FAMILY PORTRAIT
In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.
EYES UP HERE
The perils and pleasures of a nice rack.
A CRITIC AT LARGE SAY THE WORD
Why liberals struggle to defend liberalism.
A REPORTER AT LARGE YOU MAKE ME SICK
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
THE WORLD OF TELEVISION CASTOFFS
REALITY-TV CONTESTANTS ARE BARELY PAID, AND THE EXPERIENCE CAN FEEL LIKE ABUSE. SHOULD THEY UNIONIZE?
SHOUTS & MURMURS IDENTIFIED
A panel of scientific experts commissioned by NASA to study unidentified anomalous phenomena,” more widely known as UFOs, said Thursday that it found no evidence that any of the reported objects were extraterrestrial in origin.