Words

Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife, wrote a beautiful piece for the Skeptical Inquirer back in 2003. It’s about science and religion, from a naturalist point of view, expressed in graceful and uplifting prose. An excerpt was shared around on Facebook recently by Michelle Agnellini Yaney, and is worthy of wider distribution. It’s a personal note at the end of the piece — as good a summary of how naturalists view the preciousness of life as you’ll find anywhere.

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.

I can’t resist tacking on the previous paragraph, worthy of contemplation for its own sake:

And there were other instances of Carl’s remarkable persuasiveness. One was a great story of a so-called “creation scientist” who watched Carl testify at a hearing about creationism in schools. Carl testified for about four hours. It was somewhere in the South, I can’t remember where. And six months later a letter came from the “creation scientist” expert who had also testified that day, saying that he had given up his daytime job and realized the error of what he was doing. It was only because Carl was so patient and so willing to hear the other person out. He did it with such kindness and then, very gently but without compromising, laid out all of the things that were wrong with what this guy thought was true. That is a lesson that I wish that all of us in our effort to promote skepticism could learn, because I know that very often the anger I feel when confronting this kind of thinking makes me want to start cutting off the other person. But to do so is to abandon all hope of changing minds.

It’s hard to live up to Carl Sagan’s example.

Andy Lawrence, Edinburgh astronomer by day and e-Astronomer by night, has participated in a Five Books interview at The Browser. You’ll remember that I did one where I picked five books about relativity and cosmology. Most of the other interviewees (and they have a great list) have been a bit more playful, mixing in different genres. Andy takes a judicious middle tack, including some straight-up astronomy but also some biography.

I was glad he picked Dennis Overbye’s Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, which is one of my favorite books about science and scientists. It manages to show the human side of science in all its quirky glory, without either creating fake scandals or putting anyone on a pedestal.

A website called The Browser has been doing a fun collection of interviews, where they ask experts in different fields to recommend five books, either starting points for non-experts or books that they were influenced by themselves. Read Randall Grahm on wine, Jim Shepard on short stories, Deborah Blum on science and society, or Qiu Xiaolong on classical Chinese poetry.

They asked me about relativity and cosmology, and I decided it would be more helpful to pick recent books that would bring people up to date rather than go for the classics I was reading back in the 70’s. Some of these books aren’t light reading, but it’s a matter of dedication rather than preparation; I think an interested and intelligent person who didn’t know anything about relativity or cosmology could read these and come away with some deep insights.

For more thoughts, check out the full interview.

Update: for obvious reasons, it wouldn’t be considered quite kosher to recommend one’s own books in an interview like this. This has led to the misimpression that I think my books are less than the very best. Not so!