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.
Esta historia es de la edición December 25, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición December 25, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.