Mars On Tuesday
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
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| Curiosity rover on Mars - NASA |
My generation will always look up at the sound of an airplane. One of my favourite spots where I don’t look up is when I hear the inimitable sound of a De Havilland Beaver’s Pratt & Whitney radial engine as it flies overhead while I am driving on the Lions Gate Bridge.
Some of my generation understand
the mechanics of an airplane that makes flight possible as the distance from
one end of the top of a wing (back to front) is greater than on the bottom. Since
air has to get from one end to the other on top and bottom, lift is generated.
The present touch-screen
generation can only understand the brute power of a rocket taking off from Cape Canaveral. The subtlety of flight and its wonder is lost.
Watching the moon landing
on our TV set in Mexico City
in July 1969 was a special thrill for Rosemary and me. And yet those touch-screeners
after having seen Interstellar would pooh-pooh the special effects of that moon
landing. There would not have been any shaking thunder sound effects.
We (not all of us)
have almost lost our ability to wonder with our imagination as we wander into
the distraction of instant, but mostly banal, communication.
Tuesdays are special
with us. This is the day that our NY Times includes that special section
Science Times. By sheer coincidence (?I am not sure) Tuesday in Spanish is
martes (never capitalized in Spanish) and it plainly tells us about its origin
to the planet Mars (Marte). In Spanish speaking countries a military field is
sometimes called a Campo Marte.
The coincidence of
martes, Marte, Mars is that most of today’s Science Times is about Mars. The
photographs and the articles are superb as are the slide shows and videos if
you explore the Science Times on line. I can any time as I pay a hefty sum for
my daily delivered newspaper.
But most charming of
all are little excerpts by famous people who may have said or written something
about the red planet. These are found on the paper on narrow columns (up to
down) on the edges. I will reproduce here the most charming:
Fran Lebovitz
Metropolitan Life 1978
Mars is the third
smallest planet and therefore of interest only to collectors. It is bleak and rocky
with no coastline to speak of – a feature that has made it one of the few beach
areas within the financial grasp of this writer. Finding a taxi is next to
impossible and visitors are advised not to. Natural resources run heavily to
alien vapors and strange stones.
Shel Silverstein
“The Planet Mars”
On the planet of Mars
They have clothes just like
ours,
And they have the same
shoes and the same laces,
And they have the same
charms
and same
graces,
And they have the same
heads and same faces
But not in the
Very same
Places.
Matthew Rohrer
“There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier”
There is absolutely
nothing lonelier
that the little Mars rover
never shutting down,
digging up
rocks so far away from
Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If
so
he is lonelier still. He fires
a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A
shiny
thing in the sand turns out
to be his.
This whole Tuesday Science Times in Mars is
a plane overhead and the thrill has given me a joy that surpasses the little
sun that came into my living room today.
In 1980 I was invited by a beautiful ecdysiast to watch the mini-series The Martian Chronicles (based on Ray Bradbury's novel). I must assert here that I did not rove and that I stuck to my designated mission of watching the series from a comfortable sofa (for one). In short there were no alien encounters of a third kind.
