“For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint at the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” The Great Gatsby (1925) , F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 106.
NASA video. More on the Cassini Space Probe here
In the 4.7 billion years since each took shape, Earth and our neighbor Saturn have floated remote from each other in space. This Wednesday, April 26, 2017, that isolation starts to end. The Cassini space probe starts descending into Saturn. This never happened before. It will never happen again.
Think about who we are. Think about what we might become. Consider what Pico della Mirandola wrote in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486):
…we [humans] can become whatever we choose to become, we need to understand that we must take earnest care about this, so that it will never be said to our disadvantage that we were born to a privileged position but failed to realize it and became animals and senseless beasts. Instead, the saying of Asaph the prophet should be said of us, “You are all angels of the Most High.” Above all, we should not make that freedom of choice God gave us into something harmful, for it was intended to be to our advantage. Let a holy ambition enter into our souls; let us not be content with mediocrity, but rather strive after the highest and expend all our strength in achieving it.
Let us disdain earthly things, and despise the things of heaven, and, judging little of what is in the world, fly to the court beyond the world and next to God. In that court, as the mystic writings tell us, are the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones in the foremost places; let us not even yield place to them, the highest of the angelic orders, and not be content with a lower place, imitate them in all their glory and dignity. If we choose to, we will not be second to them in anything.
The Planets, Opus 32, Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age (excerpt) composer Gustav Holtz
What say you?
The Dance of Life (1929), dir. John Cromwell & A. Edward Sutherland
Writes Professor Robert Gerst:
Novelist Virginia Woolf explained in 1926 what she sought from movies: “…We should be able to see thought in its wildness, in its beauty, in its oddity, pouring from men with their elbows on a table; from women with their little handbags slipping to the floor.” (The Movies and Reality)
In this shot from The Dance of Life (1929), a character prepares for her wedding night. What do you see?
