Topic 143: Earth Bound

Carol:

Star Gazing

My favorite scenes of Huckleberry Finn are those where Huck and Jim left the high adventures of land for the river and the raft.  They hid on shore during daylight  while steamboats and smaller vessels carried passengers and freight along the Mississippi between the North and the South.
 

When dark began to fall and the river traffic subsided, Huck and Jim would set out again on their water journey. As midnight approached and the world nodded off to sleep, Jim and Huck relaxed their vigilance, looked upward at the infinity of stars, and began to philosophize:

We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened- Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. (Ch. 19)

As the two runaways allowed the raft to drift quietly in the current, they must have come as close as one can get, while still earth-bound, to the sensation of floating through space.
 

This scene captures a moment when we look up at the night sky, wonder at the immensity of it all, and consider our tiny part in the pattern of the universe. Such moments often lead to “what if” discussions—what if there is life on those stars, what if they are looking back at us, what if we could travel to the back side of the moon?
 

The great astronomers of the Renaissance, Kepler and Copernicus, must have looked up to the skies in wonder long before they shifted from the philosophy of  “what if” to the science of “what, when and how.” Even before Galileo’s telescope brought the stars closer to earth, people were imagining what it would be like to leave behind the boundaries of earth and fly up to the heavens. In the early 17th century, probably around 1600, an English bishop named Francis Godwin wrote the earliest science fiction book in English, The Man in the Moone, published under the name “Domingo Gonsales.” (source: Wikipedia).
 

About two hundred years later, a young Jules Verne spent summers with his family in a house by the Loire River.  He would later attribute those idyllic summers to awakening in his imagination dreams of voyages to inner and outer worlds. Did he too lie awake at night, gazing up at the starry sky and write stories in his head, the seeds of 54 novels, including From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Around the Moon (1870) and Off on a Comet (1877)?
 

What about Mark Twain?  The man who liked to tell the world he was born in the year of Halley’s Comet made fun of his older brother Orion Clemens for reading the fantastical works of Verne.  Did Samuel Clemens lie awake on the river, gazing up at the stars and imagining far-away worlds and drifting silently  in space?
 

The science and imagination of the 20th century finally made space travel a reality, and the first men to walk on the moon were probably childhood star-gazers themselves. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in July 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong shared the reflections of his crew on their moon walk by beginning with a reference to Jules Verne.  Their historic mission completed, the men of Apollo 11 boarded their space raft and lay back in wonder as, earth bound, they saw above them the water-blue planet Earth hanging in the sky.  

From the Moon to the Earth

 

Sources: 
The Man in the Moone. Wikipedia. 

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  1885.              

Verne, Jules. Wikipedia.

Megan:

Bound to the Earth

Yesterday, I went to a presentation at the Prescott Public Library by Carolyn O’Bagy Davis, about her book Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud, which is this year’s selection for the OneBookAZ project (every year in April, Arizonans are encouraged to read the same book and then talk about it with each other).  

The book is about a Depression-era Massachusetts family who took a 9-month road trip around the country.  In the course of their travels, they spent some time at Hopiland , which sparked a lengthy correspondence between the matriarch of the family and a Hopi potter. It is a true story and the author uses excerpts from a journal and photographs taken on the trip, as well as the letters themselves.  The book, which I have not yet finished, isn’t particularly uplifting, but it’s clear that both the author and her subject share a deep fascination with the Hopi culture.

In the book, Ms. Davis details some of the ceremonies and rituals undertaken by the traditional Hopi to appease the spirits, in particular the sacrifice of an Eagle who they believed acted as a messenger to the spirit world. The eagle would report that the Hopi were living in the proper way, and then the spirits would send rain for their crops. Ms. Davis assured the audience that although tourism and modern technology have altered much about the daily lives of the Hopi, there are still many who adhere to the traditional ways.

Ms. Davis’s presentation made me think about how a dependence on the earth and the weather for survival once led to polytheistic worship of these elements. I wonder if the shift to monotheistic religions which worship a deity “not of this world” has aided the divorce of  people from the land. It used to be that one appeased the gods by showing respect to the earth. I know there are people within the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths who consider stewardship of the Earth part of their responsibility to their god, but for the most part modern religion emphasize that life on earth is a temporary test of an individual, rather than a cyclical rhythm of a collective.

Setting aside religion, science and technology have also created a rift between humanity and the land. Now that we understand the science behind farming and cultivation, it seems that our humility and respect for the earth has been stripped away along with the mystery.

I’m really only musing about this idea and I’m not offering any real solutions. Sometimes I feel like it is too late – we (in the US, at least) are too accustomed to our artificial comforts to be able to return to the earth. And then I see evidence all around me, within my own family, of proof to the contrary. I’m no farmer, but maybe I could be.

Yesterday, when I was too busy to write, I asked Mom if we could delay because I was intrigued by the topic – mostly because it seemed ambiguous. Earth can mean the planet we live on, or the soil below our feet. Bound can mean tied or destined.  But after thinking about the Hopi and the “old ways”, I realize there is no difference between the planet we live on and the soil below, and bound, tied and destined all mean the same thing – inescapable dependence.