We felt, first of all, that this was a kind of sacred trust — that here we were, half a dozen very flawed human beings, with huge holes in our knowledge of all of these subjects, building a cultural Noah’s Ark. It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like to beings of, perhaps, a thousand million years from now. Because the Voyager engineers were saying that this record would have a shelf life of a billion years. If that didn’t raise goosebumps, then you’d have to be made of wood.

It was also the season that Carl Sagan and I fell so madly in love with each other, and here we were, taking on this mythic challenge, and knowing that, before it was done, two spacecraft would lift off from the planet Earth, moving at an average speed of thirty-five thousand miles an hour for the next thousand million years, and on them would be: a kiss; a mother’s first words to her newborn baby; Mozart; Bach; Beethoven; greetings in the fifty-nine most populous human languages, as well as one non-human language, the greetings of the humpback whales. And it was a sacred undertaking, because it was saying ‘We want to be citizens of the cosmos; we want you to know about us’.

In my office there is a whiteboard on casters. It usually stands directly behind L.’s desk. A couple of weeks ago I drew a thought bubble on it, and pointed the shrinking originator bubbles at where her head usually is. In the bubble I wrote lots of laughter words. Ha-ha, giggle, etc. Later I erased it, and replaced it with PIE! It wasn’t long before someone changed that to PEE! In my office we sometimes hurl things at each other from long and short distances. We knock things off of people’s desks with Nerf balls. We peg each other in the face with soft footballs. Crashing sounds have become commonplace. In my office while we work we often listen to music. People share their music collections on the network and it’s not unusual to see twenty or thirty people in a room, skulls cupped with headphones, staring down their screens.

But today while I worked I listened to a podcast (WNYC’s Radio Lab, the “Space” episode) in which Ann Druyan, widow of Carl Sagan and a noteworthy author and artist in her own right, talks beautifully about NASA’S Voyager Interstellar Record Project, and her participation in its creation. It’s a romantic, wonderful concept, that we can do these things, that we have done these things. A part of me is enthralled; a part of me turns inward, regards my own life, and looks for that sense of wonder, and doesn’t find it. Listening to it left me a little underwhelmed by my little place in the world. “So don’t listen,” N. said. That doesn’t excite me at all, that suggestion. Listening to a thing like this takes my breath away, and then doesn’t give it back.

At the very least, I wish that my life had more conversations that left me feeling like this interview did. The common language that most people I know speak is that of parties attended, things purchased or seen or heard. There is far too little exchange of ideas in the conversations I’m involved in, and it’s somehow more exhausting, this truth, than a truly engaging conversation would be.

I’ve always been interested in the things that Sagan wrote, something obvious to any reader of my site, but I’ve never spent much time reading Druyan’s writing (I’m excluding her coauthoring work with Sagan here). Unsurprisingly, I suppose, she turns out to be equally fascinating. (Read this; watch this.) But what moves me most is the way she talks of her late husband:

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl.

But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance … That pure chance could be so generous and so kind … That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time … That we could be together for twenty years.

That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful … The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007   

1. deeplyshallow // thirty-five thousand miles an hour wrote:
   September 8th, 2009 at 7:11 pm

   […] written about the interview in question before. In it, the Radiolab writers talk with Druyan about her part in the historic Voyager Interstellar […]

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

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Lust, Caution
Double Indemnity
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
There Will Be Blood
Gone, Baby, Gone
Live Free or Die Hard
The Indian Runner
The Iron Giant
Contact
An Inconvenient Truth
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
Enigma
Nobody's Fool
Look, Up in the Sky
Numb3rs
Mission: Impossible III
Heaven
The Abyss
The Constant Gardener
The Mosquito Coast
The Hustler
Limbo
Grizzly Man
The Verdict
Superman Returns
Elizabethtown
Battlestar Galactica
You Can Count on Me
Rolling Roadshow 2005
The American President
My DVD collection

01. dreaming of falling
02. marvelous descent
03. a conversation
04. the colors
05. huffnagle island
06. a hundred million
07. sixty-six stories
08. anyone earthbound
09. a girl named eleanor
10. a route obscure and lonely
11. a certain stillness
12. this is jack
13. wide flat lands
14. going home
15. girl unscrewed
16. slow rehabilitation
17. twenty-three stories
18. a far-off point
19. fifteen years quiet
20. a one-beer fella
21. luminescence
22. one-sided conversation
23. hearts big and stupid
24. nineteen seventy-eight
25. first light
26. a hundred years
27. too long to stop now
28. plainswept
29. a widower in training
30. spies and assets
31. thirty years and then some
32. leaping over couches
33. cricket song
34. eleanor's first kiss
35. like so much ballast
36. too much
37. the longest wait
38. the second ice storm
39. rocket summer
40. waiting
41. wax wings
42. breakup
43. tough beans
43. the heavy gray sea