Something so brief and magnificent
Good morning!
Today my parents texted to let me know they’ve officially received the vaccine. The version they were given requires just one injection, not two; after twenty-eight days, they’ll be considered fully vaccinated.
I knew I’d feel relieved when this happened. I did not know it would feel like such a weight being lifted. My parents are special, and now they’re a step closer to being safe.
I’ve been thinking about my family a lot today. Our numbers shrank in 2019 and 2020, though not because of COVID-19.
Going to start here, though, which will get me to there:
One of my favorite novels is Carl Sagan’s Contact. I’ve written about this many times before, I know, and several times about my favorite chapter, Chapter 10: Precession of the Equinoxes.
Chapter 10 kicks off with this epigraph:
Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world? —Euripides, Hecuba
The chapter’s enormously wordy (like this newsletter is today, fair warning) and one can’t read it without imagining Sagan letting his characters say things he personally wished he could have said to his own critics. In it, the scientist Eleanor Arroway travels to the Bible Science Research Institute and Museum in Modesto, CA—which I don’t think is a real place, after eleven seconds of research—to have a conversation with two very different religious figures: The extremely conservative Christian, Richard Rankin, and the spiritual man of the people, Palmer Joss.
What follows is a nearly twenty-five-page dialogue about faith and science.
At one point, Ellie debates the meaning of atheism vs. agnosticism with Joss, and says:
When I say I’m an agnostic, I only mean that the evidence isn’t in. There isn’t compelling evidence that God exists—at least your kind of god—and there isn’t compelling evidence that he doesn’t.
I discovered this novel half my life ago, in a used bookstore in Reno, Nevada. I’d never read Carl Sagan before; I knew his name, but that was about it. But I’d seen the movie made from this novel, and it resonated with me (then, and now).
Oh, this book is marvelous. It sprawls larger than the movie could have hoped to in its two-and-a-half-hour runtime; it is more intimate and wondrous. After I finished it, I sought out Sagan’s other work, and I’m not overselling it to say that his approach to the world changed my approach to mine. (It’s why the character Vanessa, in Awake in the World, dreams of going to Cornell to study under Sagan.) I’d been struggling with the notion of faith and belief in god for some time, and reading Carl Sagan’s way of thinking about such things helped me to find a way to focus all of my scattered feelings.
In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote about a famous photo of Earth, in which our planet is merely a scrappy little pixel in a sea of black, taken by Voyager I on Valentine’s Day, 1990, from six billion kilometers away:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
That paragraph alone rewrote me. Changed me.
Ann Druyan, who in addition to being Sagan’s widow is the creator, writer, and producer of Cosmos, a respected advocate for scientific discovery, and who served as the creative director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, collected a number of his essays in a book called The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God.
In the foreword, she wrote:
(Carl) took the idea of God so seriously that it had to pass the most rigorous standards of scrutiny. … For Carl, Darwin’s insight that life evolved over the eons through natural selection was not just better science than Genesis, it also afford a deeper, more satisfying spiritual experience. He believed that the little we do know about nature suggests that we know even less about God.
His argument was not with God, but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science’s permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed.
The methodology of science, with its error-correcting mechanism for keeping us honest in spite of our chronic tendencies to project, to misunderstand, to deceive ourselves and others, seemed to him the height of spiritual discipline.
If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.
All of this is on my mind because today, as I worked on my novel, I remembered something that my aunt, Teresa, said to me in an email:
I just finished your book. I thought about you on just about every page. I would be reading and then I would stop and think, Jason wrote this. I’d think about you writing it and that process and how crazy it must have been.
That was how she began our final conversation two years ago. Her email arrived out of the blue. We didn’t see each other frequently, or keep in constant touch. She’d lived in Alaska for most of the last many years, on Unalaska Island, way out in the Aleutian Chain:
I’d always hoped to visit her there—what a wonderful, distant, isolated place to live!—and sadly, never made it.
My aunt grew up, as I did, in a Christian family, as members of the United Pentecostal Church. Two of her brothers (one is my father, who sometimes reads these, I think—hi, Dad!) are UPC pastors today, and have been for decades. She and I were alike in that we’d both left the Pentecostal church; different in that she, her faith not linked to any particular denomination, still fervently believed, and I don’t, really.
In her letter, Teresa said she wondered what God wanted me to write. That opened the door to a conversation we’d never had before. Over the next many replies, she shared with me her beliefs and worries, and I shared with her my own thoughts about faith these days. If we’d had this conversation twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready for it; as I get older, I think I’ve settled comfortably into what I believe, and don’t feel an urge to change another person’s mind so I can ‘win’ the conversation. (Boy, I was probably insufferable to talk to in my twenties.) So I’m glad this chat happened when it did. It was one of the most civil and kind dialogues I’ve ever had about spiritual matters; I learned a lot from how she conducted her side of it. She was a gentle, loving person, and it showed in her words.
Teresa wrote excitedly that her son and his wife were expecting their first child (she literally used the word ‘yippee,’ with many exclamation points). She said the previous day she’d visited an island, and wrote about the peace the sand and waves brought her. She told me her philosophy about belief: That everyone’s allowed to believe what they wish, and it’s not her job to force them to believe otherwise.
In that last bit, we were on the same page. The year before, Squish had asked Felicia and me about god. She’d heard friends talking about it at school, and wanted to know what that was all about. I told her that many people believed the whole universe and everything in it was created, and that we can talk to that creator. Squish nodded, then asked me what I believed. I shared with her what Carl Sagan said in Cosmos:
The cosmos is also within us; we’re made of star stuff.
I explained a bit of what that meant, and how wonderful such a simple concept was to me. Being six at the time, Squish announced that she believed this, too. She asked if anyone we knew believed in god, and I said, sure, lots of people do. Not yet seeing where this might lead, I added, “Your grandparents believe in god.”
The next time Squish visited my folks, she interrogated them. “So how come you believe in god? I don’t believe in god. I believe in the Big Bang.” My mother called me later, very worried about how to handle the whole conversation. We used this as an opportunity to instill a bit of respect and tolerance for others who believe differently; so long as their beliefs aren’t actively harming you or someone else, Squish, it’s not your job to intervene.
About Sagan, Teresa wrote:
Yesterday morning I did wake up thinking about Sagan. I wonder what he knows now?
In a 2003 essay, Ann Druyan wrote about being asked if her husband converted in the end, or if she thought she’d ever see him again:
Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.
Teresa and I had different beliefs about what happened after death. I wrote to her that I think consciousness ends, that we return to the “star stuff” we came from. But perhaps it was telling, I admitted, that so many of my stories deal with the exact opposite of what I actually believe. There are afterlives all over the place in my fiction. There’s clearly some conversation still happening between the person I once was and the person I am now, I replied; it seems to come out in the writing.
Teresa’s reply that day ended this way:
I’m not going to change your mind. But I love you. I pray for you. We see things differently, don’t we?
It was the last thing she wrote or said to me; she died unexpectedly about six months later, and never had the chance to meet her new grandchild.
I’ve re-read our email thread a dozen times since. I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong about the existence of any sort of higher power; we’re humans, we’re feeble, and we see only a sliver of the universe that enfolds us. As much as we’ve accomplished, we’d still be forgotten by time if we disappeared tomorrow. It’s good to remember how little we still know about anything at all; it’s good to find wonder in the things that are here with us, right now.
Sagan wrote about death and the notion of an afterlife in Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium:
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
I want to grow really old with my wife, Annie, whom I dearly love. I want to see my younger children grow up and to play a role in their character and intellectual development. I want to meet still unconceived grandchildren. There are scientific problems whose outcomes I long to witness—such as the exploration of many of the worlds in our Solar System and the search for life elsewhere. I want to learn how major trends in human history, both hopeful and worrisome, work themselves out: the dangers and promise of our technology, say; the emancipation of women; the growing political, economic, and technological ascendancy of China; interstellar flight.
If there were life after death, I might, no matter when I die, satisfy most of these deep curiosities and longings. But if death is nothing more than an endless dreamless sleep, this is a forlorn hope. Maybe this perspective has given me a little extra motivation to stay alive.
The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
At the end of the tenth chapter of Contact, Eleanor Arroway offers a challenge to the two religious men she’s been debating. (I used the words ‘conversation’ and ‘dialogue’ earlier, but ‘debate’ is much more appropriate in the end.) Arroway turns their attention to a giant Foucault pendulum nearby; the pendulum’s bob, she observes, is enormous, and probably weighs five hundred pounds.
My faith says that the amplitude of a free pendulum—how far it’ll swing away from the vertical position—can never increase. It can only decrease. I’m willing to go out there, put the bob in front of my nose, let go, have it swing away and then back toward me. If my beliefs are in error, I’ll get a five-hundred-pound pendulum smack in the face.
One of the men seems interested in witnessing this; the other says it’s not necessary. She continues:
But would you be willing to stand a foot closer to this same pendulum and pray to God to shorten the swing?
She doesn’t expect either of them to sign up for this, and they don’t. What she says next has become a sort of north star for me:
Look, we all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to make stories up, you don’t have to exaggerate. There’s wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature’s a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.
Teresa was one of the few people who encouraged me to explore my writing more when I was a teenager; she gave me a book about writing that’s still on my shelf now. I loved that we had this conversation before she was gone. We believed entirely different things, and we were able to talk about it calmly, lovingly, without throwing five-hundred-pound pendulums at our faces.
2019 and 2020 brought more deaths to our family. The same week that Teresa died, my childhood best friend fell catastrophically ill and died after several days on life support. Not long after, my mother’s aunt, Diane, died. In the fall, my family tended to our ten-year-old Boston terrier, who had abruptly become ill then rapidly declined.
And just a few months after Teresa died, her father passed away, too. His name was George; he missed Teresa dearly. He was a quiet man with a powerful, beautiful voice; he often sang hymns, a capella, at church. One of his favorites was an old song called “When They Ring the Golden Bells”:
There’s a land beyond the river that we call the sweet forever
And we only reach that shore by faith, you see
Yes I want to see my Jesus
Shake His hand and have Him greet us
When they ring those golden bells for you and me
He sang it as if he believed it with his entire being, and I’m confident he did. He and I never had the conversation I had with Teresa; I don’t remember having any deep conversations with him. He was a man comfortable with long silences and solitiude. With my grandmother’s assistance, I FaceTimed with him before he passed away. I told him how much he meant to me, and confided that I’d discovered my own fondness for silence and solitude. I told him I loved him.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan had a daughter, Sasha. In an essay that Sasha wrote in The Cut, she recounted a conversation with her father:
One day when I was still very young, I asked my father about his parents. I knew my maternal grandparents intimately, but I wanted to know why I had never met his parents.
“Because they died,” he said wistfully.
“Will you ever see them again?” I asked.
He considered his answer carefully. Finally, he said that there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason—and no evidence—to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn’t give in to the temptation.
The essay’s worth a read; she describes what it’s like to learn about the permanence of death from two people who don’t soften the blow with promises of possible afterlives.
My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever—because it’s not forever—being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful.
It really is that simple, and it’s just not that simple at all.
Ann Druyan, in the epilogue to Billions & Billions, wrote of Carl, lying near death:
…there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other’s eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever.
She closes with:
I sit surrounded by cartons of mail from people all over the planet who mourn Carl’s loss. Many of them credit him with their awakenings. Some of them say that Carl’s example has inspired them to work for science and reason… These thoughts comfort me and lift me up out of my heartache. They allow me to feel, without resorting to the supernatural, that Carl lives.
I miss my aunt and my granddad dearly. I’m grateful to have that last conversation with Teresa. Grateful for my memories of my granddad, contentedly singing or whistling through his days, this otherwise quiet man who completely opened himself up in those still moments. (Here’s a video, if you like, of him singing several years ago. The clip opens with my father, at the funeral, introducing the video, in which Ken, my uncle, introduces my granddad, who then yowls a bit before settling in for his song. It’s not as complicated as it sounds, I promise.)
The end of existence is such a personal thing. When you love someone, you can’t help but wish they got everything they wanted from this life and whatever follows it. It’s a nice thought—a tempting one, as Sagan told his daughter—no matter what I actually believe. My aunt and my granddad were beautiful, unique people; if everything they believed isn’t true, their beliefs still brought them comfort and joy and purpose, and that’s no small thing. For their sake, I hope that they were right about everything, and that I’m completely wrong.
✏️Until next time,
Jg