The Precipice of Discovery

Posted on | November 28, 2008 | 1 Comment

Camus casts the actor as existential hero, laughing in the face of death and our own isolated, limited experience of being by allowing us to step into the lives of others – to change realities as easily as we change costumes.

At the very least, working on a character with a different life path than mine encourages me to go back to school, gives me the excuse I need to go explore all the people I was sure I was going to be when I got to the age I am now.

In preparing for Touch, I’ve become eight years old again, fascinated by the stars and planets and indulging the roller-coaster-drop feeling in my stomach every time it hits me that we are hung precariously in an unimaginably vast void, hurtling at thousands of miles an hour around a sun around a galactic center around a universal core headed toward god-knows-what.

Weeks ago I bought a planisphere and took it out to Welles Park. Of course, the light pollution obscured all but the brightest stars but I still laughed out loud when I saw, for the first time, Draco – long my favorite constellation because it had the coolest name to a kid obsessed with fantasy novels and Double Dragon.

On the beach in North Carolina the weekend of my sister’s wedding, I spent many hours staring up at more stars than I ever thought possible, feeling overwhelmed and vaguely worried about coming unmoored from Earth’s gravity and drifting silently into space.

Today I went to the Adler Planetarium and spent hours soaking in the astronomical world. I played with every toy they had – high and low tech. I watched two presentations on the giant, dome-shaped screens of the planetarium theatres and remembered looking out my bedroom window one morning almost twenty years ago and seeing the sun and the moon in the sky together and feeling so, so small. Next to me was a kid no older than I was then who laughed – really laughed – at a word play on “general relativity” and I thought instantly of the electronic sign upstairs counting down to the upcoming moon mission asking “Will YOU be next?” Walking outside after the Sky at Night show I immediately found Venus and Jupiter, hovering brightly over the South Side, exactly where their phantom twins had been moments before.

I was primed for all this before I even walked in the door. By complete coincidence, I was working on a particular passage from the opening monologue as I walked east along the museum campus:

“When I was finishing my doctorate, sometimes I was at school long past midnight, so immersed in my work that at certain moments I would have been hard pressed to remember my name. I am capable of looking through a telescope for many, many, many hours uninterrupted … It’s like I am walking along the precipice of discovery the way I walked along the edges of the curb as a child, arms outstretched, keeping my balance with difficulty and knowing that at the end of the block lays an unparalleled feeling of accomplishment. I believe we who live on earth are not the only prescient beings in the universe. It is that belief that helped me begin to understand what Zoe meant by the spirit. The billions of galaxies, the thousands and thousands and thousands of unknowns about atmospheric conditions in those galaxies, the mind-boggling infinite number of possibilities – those are the places – the galaxies, all of them, those are the places where science and the spirit meet.”

I fucking love this job.

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