#carl sagan
To celebrate National Poetry Month and Maya Angelou’s birthday, you can hear Angelou’s sublime poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” which flew to space aboard NASA’s Orion — “a timeless cosmic clarion call to humanity, inspired by Carl Sagan.”
A Brave and Startling Truth
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
The essence of life is not the atoms and small molecules that go into us, it’s the way, the ordering, that those molecules are put together.
- Carl Sagan
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Eres una especie interesante. Una mezcla interesante. Eres capaz de tener los sueños más bellos y las pesadillas más horribles. Te sientes perdido, aislado, solo, pero no lo estás. Verás, en todas nuestras búsquedas, lo único que hemos descubierto es que es la compañía de otros lo que hace soportable el vacío.
Carl Sagan
Somos como mariposas que vuelan durante un día pensando que lo harán para siempre.
Carl Sagan
La Magia de un Libro (Carl Sagan)
Qué cosa tan sorprendente es un libro. Un libro está hecho de un árbol. Es un objeto constituido por partes planas y flexibles (que todavía llamamos “hojas”) impresas con garabatos en oscuros pigmentos. Pero echas un vistazo a un libro y escuchas la voz de otra persona, quizás la de alguien que incluso ha muerto hace miles de años. A través del tiempo y los milenios, la voz de quien lo escribió nos está hablando, clara y silenciosamente, dentro de nuestra cabeza, directamente a ti. La escritura es quizás el más grande de todos los inventos de la humanidad, uniendo a personas, ciudadanos de épocas lejanas, que nunca se conocieron. Los libros rompen las cadenas del tiempo y son la prueba de que los seres humanos realmente pueden hacer magia.
40yroldgoth would invite Hunter S. Thompson, Carl Sagan and Charles Bukowski.
candieaftersunsetwould choose Pochaontas, Jim Morrison & George RR Martin for a weed party in the hills of Tuscany.
redheadedfemme would want “the most devout of the Popes, Stephen Hawking, and Socrates at a party talking theology and philosophy.”
phallusifer9says,
I would invite Varg, Euronymous and Dead just to listen to them bicker.
I hope I can magickally understand them tho, because my Swedish isn’t -that great, and my Norwegian is near to nonexistent.
I’d probably serve sushi at this dinner just to see if they can figure it out. I’m sure at some point Varg’s chopsticks will need to be taken from him, lest he try to stick them in Euro’s eyesockets and lobotomise him like that guy did in Session 9.
Dead would eat the sushi, not because he necessarily liked it, but because he’d hope eating something raw would gross the other two out.
pink-absinthesays,
I’d invite Sarah Kane (playwright), Rachel McKibbens (performance poet) and Jonna Lee (swedish musician) to a whiskey and Pictionary party because, odd and interesting as they are, they’d have the strangest ways of drawing things I’m sure. Also, when drunk later we could get into heated discussions about anything and everything, Kane brings the intellectual viscosity, McKibbens the emotional sucker-punch and Lee the creative originality. One would leave inspired for life.
Let me know if I missed anyone’s responses. Sometimes reblogs fail to show up in the notes, or messages are not received.
Photo: A garden party given by Governor Rawson for the Officers of the American Fleet at Cranbrook, Sydney, 1908.
