Inspiration from NASA
When I last wrote, I emphasized the importance and the possibility of poetry in contemporary life, and speculated that the moments of challenge which we are all presently enduring may cry out for the kind of insight, catharsis, and communion that verse can especially provide. While celebrating our arts and letters, however, we can observe the triumphs embedded in our other intellectual endeavors, too. Poetry says something about our shared human capacities; so does threading a needle from 128 million miles away.
Last week, NASA landed its new Mars rover, Perseverance, gently in the Jerezo Crater on the Red Planet, where it will collect minerals and fossils as part of our ongoing attempt to discover Martian environments that may have been (and may one day again be) capable of sustaining habitability. Did you hear about it? In all the news of our day—so much of it tragic and frustrating and uncertain—the spaceshot was perhaps easy to miss. But that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has gotten really, really good at this sort of thing doesn’t mean that it has to be banal. A rover was built in California, launched from Florida, and over 200 days later, touched down safely on another planet, exactly where it had been aimed. Such a thing should always capture our amazement and admiration.
It has been so easy—and so understandable—to focus on what we as a nation can’t do during this period of pandemic: We can’t gather, we can’t travel, we can’t attend school without constraint, we can’t cooperate enough to flatten the curve, we can’t distribute vaccines efficiently, and so on. Yet I don’t think it’s escapist or irresponsible to shine a light on the things that we can and do accomplish, even (or especially) in the face of the tragedy begotten by our pandemic. In this case, a team of women and men who have committed their professional lives to the deep exploration of math and science used that commitment to hit the remotest of bullseyes and open up vital research on life in our solar system.
Of course, most of us are not going to be astrophysicists or rocket scientists, any more than we will be named poet laureates. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t see beauty in great human achievements—stirring stanzas, space exploration—that give form and meaning to that which was once uncertain and unknown. And nor does it mean that the experiences of these experts must be completely alien to us. We may not propel rockets to Mars, but in our own intellectual adventures we can share (and find joy) in the kind of activities that enable such spaceshots: The elegance of mathematical reasoning, the tinkering with scientific inferences, the first glimpse of a previously unseen pattern. One doesn’t have to hold a PhD from CalTech to have fun playing with their toys—because they’re our toys, too, and we can bring them out with every math class, every science lab, every robotics construction. They can be as available to the Browning student as they are to the NASA specialist; indeed, that availability is very much the point of our liberal arts education, which seeks to deepen our relationships with ideas, the world around us, and our ways of discovering that which is new, no matter our age or level of experience. Even as we rightly marvel at and draw energy from the magnificent achievements of our finest practitioners, we can remember that we are also on intellectual journeys of our own. While they may be humbler, these journeys are no less meaningful—and no less inspiring—if we can use them to find beauty and goodness and hope not only in our world, but also in our own capacity for transforming ourselves through learning.