Literature About Exploration

This is an infinitely marvelous and beautiful universe which we are privileged to inhabit. Look inward to the molecules of life and the heart of the atom, or outward to moon, sun, planets, stars, the Orion Nebula where new suns and worlds are coming into being even as you watch, the Andromeda Nebula which is actually a whole sister galaxy: it is all the same cosmos, and every part of it is part of us. The elements of our flesh, blood, bones, and breath were forged out of hydrogen in stars long vanished. The gold in a wedding ring, the uranium burning behind many a triumphantly ordinary flick of an electric light switch, came out of those gigantic upheavals we call supernovas. It is thought that inertia itself, that most fundamental property of matter, would be meaningless--nonexistent--were there no stellar background to define space, time, and motion. Man is not an accident of chaos; nor is he the sum and only significance of creation. We belong here.

Once literature recognized this simple fact. Lightnings blazed around Lear; Ahab sailed an enormous ocean and Huck Finn went down a mighty river; McAndrew saw God in the machinery that man created according to the laws of the universe. But this is seldom true any longer. Barring a few, today's fashionable writers are concerned exclusively with Man, capitalized and isolated - who usually turns out to be a hypersensitive intellectual, capitalized and isolated among his own hang ups. This is not necessarily bad, but may it not be a little bit limited?