My diary entry about a personally significant encounter.
I arrived in the small lakeside town 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.
The upstate rural highways were 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 drove to Lake View Cemetery, deep in thought. 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 my passions and abilities with the image of Carl Sagan, self-assuredly thinking that makes my work stand out. They forced a smile and put me on the waiting list.
That process and those illusions are far behind me. I do associate with Sagan, though.
But in what ways?
I grew to know his name quite late in my childhood. While, yes, 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 (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 through a character with the same initials C.E.S. … do not look it up.
It would also be unwise to say I have taken the time read a large proportion of Sagan’s corpus, technical or popular. He has a citation count that is probably dwarfs mine for my career, and I don’t think I ever finished watching all his Cosmos episodes, preferring listening to sound bites here and there.
But across the great distances in space and time, I do associate.
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.”
— 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 