Saturday, February 01, 2003
You'll have heard the news by now. I'm sitting here thinking about that morning in 1986 when I was late to Biology 103 because I couldn't stop watching the images of the Challenger explosion. And about the fireball streaking across the Texas sky this morning, and what might have gone wrong with Columbia at 9 a.m. today, seventeen years after we first lost a shuttle. I'm sure it was a very small thing. I watched CNN this morning and kept thinking, We're never going to get off this planet. The thought may have been unwarranted. I'm trying to think, instead, about the seven men and women on board. And trying to make myself keep moving, because it's already history, one way or another. But this will be one of Those Days, the sort that, years and years from Now, I'll look back and say, "Oh, I was There, right There, when X happened." Like Challenger, and September 11th, Sadat's assasination, the deaths of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, the Oklahoma City and first World Trade Center bombings. One of Those Days.
"'One thing,' he said later, 'it's quick in space. Death. It's over like that. You don't linger. Most of the time you don't even know it. You're dead and that's it." — Ray Bradbury
"Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we'll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We'll just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that's what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we've asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and inifinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will die as always, but our history will reach as far as we'll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we'll know security and thus the answer we've always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass on the gift to infinity. That's a goal worth shooting for." — Ray Bradbury
"What I wouldn't give to go with them. What I wouldn't give." — Ray Bradbury
Anyway, I wrote 1,166 words on "La Peau Verte" yesterday. I should do as well today.
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