After I left high school, I spent a year at Northwestern University. Going to St. Paul’s was one of the five best choices I’ve ever made, and going to Northwestern was certainly one of the five worst. Utter misery. I fled after a year. By this point, I had been away from home for five years, and I felt completely out of sync with other 18-year-olds. Dislocated, rootless. So I moved back to Tampa and lived with my mom and enrolled in the theatre department of the University of South Florida.
There are a million stories from those years. This one is about Cosmos.
Cosmos was a television show about science and the universe, presented by Carl Sagan. We loved it. We’d cook dinner and sit on the floor at the coffee table in front of the TV, eating tuna casserole or spaghetti, absolutely enraptured. And then we’d talk and talk about what we had learned.
Sagan was astonishingly good at making science personal. He was luminous with love of the universe, and passionate about stewardship of the earth. He was clear-eyed about the fact that our planet and we ourselves are both cosmically insignificant, and that we are also amazing, astonishing, capable of extraordinary things. He told us that everything here, including us, was made of star stuff. He made me remember that I did have roots — on this little blue planet on the fringes of the Milky Way, itself only one of a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars. He single-handedly restored my sense of wonder in a universe of which, it turned out, I was not the center. Good lessons in so many ways.
I can highly recommend his nonfiction works, of which there are many (The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, and Pale Blue Dot, the list goes on). He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, which was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster.
Every single time I saw or heard or read him, it was so clear that he was stone in love with life, the universe and everything. It was all just amazing to him, and he wanted the rest of us to understand how precious it is.