Finishing and publishing my diary entry about a personally significant encounter.
I arrived in the small lakeside city of Ithaca, New York at midnight. Driving along Interstate-88 in the twilight hours wasn’t something you can easily forget. As the sky faded behind the Upstate hills surrounding me, the crescent moon, the forests, and eons of ice-age geological vicissitude mixed into an assuringly uniform blend of darkness that the roads inextricably wind around.
It was also quite well-maintained and signposted. I spent appreciable mental resources speculating how my rental Ford’s smart high-beam headlamps worked.
The next day, as the morning mist dispersed, I entered Lake View Cemetery, but also deep in my thoughts. I imagined what I’d ask him had we actually been able to talk. I was thinking about how much I’ve been anticipating this in the context of my American road trip..
I had never been to Cornell before this, but surely my naive admissions essays have, in which I profusely associated with the image of Carl Sagan, self-assuredly thinking that makes my work automatically stand out.
That process and those illusions are far behind me. I do associate, though.
But in what ways?
I grew to know his name quite late in my childhood. While the NASA solar system exploration programs from his life inspired much of my pre-school astronomical literacy, my first exposure to his name wasn’t even directly about him, “Carl Sagan” was Doc Brown’s alias in Telltale’s Back to the Future video game series. Though I now see this as a tribute to Carl himself, who was a real life fan of the BTTF movies in the 1980s. I’ve performed a similar tribute in my first published short story during my freshman year, do not look it up.
It would also be unwise to say I’ve read a large proportion of Sagan’s corpus, technical or popular. He has an H-Index that is probably dwarf mine for my whole career, and I don’t think I ever finished watching all his Cosmos episodes.
I don’t see him as a role model all around, either. It may be the different times, but I don’t look forward to having three marriages, for example — who knows.
But I do see him as a role model.
To me, he was one who “saw beyond this world”: who stood against the ignorance and fears of the collective human existence, and who carried the fire of natural wonder and scientific thinking to a wide public audience, with beautiful proses often.
Years ago, after my Berkeley finals, I’d had a similar road trip to Big Sur, California, where I stopped by the beach he filmed the opening shot of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, “the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”
It’s been a month since this encounter, and I am still at a loss for words to capture my feeling without degrading this diary entry into a soup of various Sagan quotes, which I admittedly sometimes do.
In some sense — in brief — though he’d died before I was born, this was the first time I’d say I met Dr Sagan.
I brought flowers.
Actually, I brought Phobos.
Yourong Frank Wang 