Save Us, Carl Sagan

A few years ago, a friend called to give me the post-mortem of some aggressively over-regimented wedding she'd plucked out her passport for—real last-days-of-Rome shit for Pinterest brides, coordinated down to the color of her toenail polish. (This was determined twice, actually: once for the bachelorette party, another for the ceremony. Yes, the bride was from Connecticut.) The wildest part, she said, was that during the officiant's address, he quoted the late Carl Sagan's famous "pale blue dot" passage from his book of same name. 

Depiction of current mental state (c/o NASA/Goddard Space Flight Centre Conceptual Image Lab)

Here it is, in case you haven't dated a stoner in awhile:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.


It goes on for longer, eloquently suggesting the grace in acceptance of our unimportance and the responsibility for kindness and ecological protection. In other words, it could very much be interpreted as "no one cares about your centerpieces, Brenda" in this particular setting. The bride was, reportedly, displeased. The increasingly resentful and bankrupt bridesmaids, my friend among them, grabbed this bit of ontological rope for dear life; the moment powered their group chat for months.

Anyway, I've found in the past month, as my particular corner of this world has shrunk within four walls, that watching Sagan's Cosmos and other astronomy documentaries has been incredibly soothing. Considering one's massive inconsequence at length, giving space to be awed—I certainly took that feeling for granted before, out in nature, when the world was brighter. But this has been an ok proxy for now, watching extremely lit animations of dwarf star implosions and close-ups of beaming guys in turtlenecks over-enunciating the phrase "Trans-neptunian region" like they're auditioning for Kraftwerk. (Neil deGrasse Tyson also made a lot of fun dad jokes before he was reportedly problematic, which does temper that joy, admittedly.)

What I'm saying, is, this passive experience of trying to replicate wonderment in enormity, when the outside world is not available, has helped. I'm clinging to it. Humility seems a sustainable antidote to anxiety. That and going through Pringles like water. 

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is 2014 the revamp of Sagan's groundbreaking 1980s series (which is utterly wonderful and, unfortunately, dips in and out of availability to stream; it's available on Twitch at the moment?). I love the Cosmos continuation because it's splashily animated, sequenced to cover human evolution as it also unpacks the universe, and—not least—it was, like the original series, cowritten by Ann Druyan, the creative director of the 1977 Golden Record project. (As in, she's the one who decided to send Beethoven and Chuck Berry songs into space for aliens to bop to someday. She's also Sagan's widow.) Her enthusiastic, accessible tone is unmistakeable throughout this version of Cosmos; there is such love and reverence in the journey of questioning. It's cheapest to view by buying the season on Amazon.

Here I admit that I'd love to tell you about the currently airing follow-up series Cosmos: Possible Worlds, but a combination of spotty access to my parents' cable login and the National Geographic Channel not offering it on demand means I'll be waiting awhile to see it. (Yet they're glad to offer unlimited full-length episodes of a show called Yukon Vet? Anyway.)

I'd also recommend poking around the Netflix documentary section: They descend in production value rapidly but can still be fun. I'm partial to one called NOVA: Death Dive to Saturn, which is every bit as restrained as it sounds, and pivots on historians in blazers pointing at ink illustrations that have clearly been lying on their desks for ages and going, "Whoa!" 

Obviously, listening to Bowie in the background and wearing sequins heightens this experience significantly.