Why Astronomy and Storytelling?

Many folks tell me I need to blog, so here I go. The primary motivation is to promote my debut scifi novel, “From the Shadows of the Landscape”, launched in April of this year, but I also want to share, with a much larger audience, the insights gained by chatting about the book at author events. In the first few issues, I’ll tell you how and why I came to write the novel and what that was like. Then, who knows? Right now, the plan is to post short announcements for each new blog episode on Facebook and LinkedIn and keep the complete blog plus an archive of previous blogs on my website under the menu item “Blog”.

As for insights, here’s the big one. My astronomical career and my compulsion to write a science fiction novel sprang from a common source — a compelling sense of wonder. There are two levels to this: wonder about this strange Universe of ours as we currently understand it and wonder about what may be possible that we do not yet know or perhaps cannot know, only imagine.

Faust by J. W. von Goethe. Illustrated by H. Clarke.

Now I’m not claiming to live in a constant glow of rapturous wonder. Hardly! Stupor might be more like it, if you ask my wife or son. Nevertheless, despite living on a broken planet full of suffering and conflict, I still maintain that existing at all is a miraculous and magical gift. As often as I get a chance, I take comfort from, or escape into, the larger Cosmos and my own imaginings.

Let me elaborate, starting with imagining. At an early age, while growing up in Maspeth, Queens NYC, I would entertain myself by enacting complicated stories and adventures, especially mornings in my bedroom. These were sometimes serialized, with episodes involving the same hero and story line occurring on successive days. Even as a young adult, my head buzzed with stories. Only much later did I write anything down. While still a child, however, I did sketch out some of my adventures as crude stick-figure graphic novels on the blank backs of order form pads. My dad worked in the shipping department of the B.P.S. (Best Paint Sold) factory in Long Island City and brought the pads home for me. So, I was always a storyteller, at least for myself if not for others.

Now, for the Cosmos. This is one of those real-life stories about how strangely our lives can be shaped. When I was growing up, I had an uncle who lived upstairs from me with my paternal grandmother. He was an extreme recluse who worked alone at night as a railroad crossing guard and avoided interactions with other people. He slept during the day, except for listening to opera. He dressed completely in black, had shock white hair, and looked about twenty years older than he was. Even as his nephew, living right under the floor of his apartment for years, I heard or glimpsed him only a handful of times. To my recollection, we never spoke, even though he employed me as a tween, through my parents, to deliver the NY Times on Sundays. I was just supposed to leave it outside his door, knock, and go away. I lingered at a distance once just to see him, but he didn’t even notice me. 

Anyhow, he had evidently once been a bright, self-educated man and accumulated a small library of books that, for some reason, were locked up in a cabinet downstairs in our apartment. Some of them were very fancy. After I found the key, I remember sneaking a peek at a leather-bound volume of Goethe’s “Faust” with gilt-edged pages. The Harry Clarke illustrations it contained, reproduced on glossy stock and protected by tissue paper, were mindboggling, but not something a young child should have seen.

One day, my sister took down a comparatively benign astronomy book and showed me the pictures in it. She and my father explained what the pictures were in general terms, including how big and far away. The everyday veil lifted to reveal a dazzling huge reality. Why wasn’t everyone constantly aware of such amazing information? Why was I allowed to believe that the puny day-to-day world was everything there was when we already knew that the Universe was so vast, strange, and ancient? Once popped like a kernel of corn, my awareness could not be stuffed back into its shell.

 I must have been a preschooler or around first grade when this seminal event happened, because I remember swearing to myself that, once I learned to read well enough, I would read that book. Years later, toward the end of grammar school, I decided I was ready. Although dated, the information in the book felt more important than anything else I knew. I resolved to become an astronomer, and from then on, with only occasional lapses, I directed my life toward that goal. 

That was how, early on, the seeds were planted for me to pursue life activities fueled by wonder, imagination, and storytelling.