Back in December, I wrote about how Jerry Seinfeld maintained perspective by keeping a photo from the Hubble telescope in the Seinfeld writing room. This week I got an email from the spouse of a professional astronomer who said her husband gets through some work days by reminding himself that astronomy doesn’t matter. “He will say, for example: ‘It’s just astronomy. We’re not saving lives here. It’s okay if we finish this tomorrow instead of today.’” I loved that.
Cosmic perspective
Jerry Seinfeld kept photos from the Hubble Space Telescope up on the wall in the Seinfeld writing room. “It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important,” he told Judd Apatow, in Sick in the Head. “You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it.” When Apatow said that sounded depressing, Seinfeld replied, “People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.”
This is one of the reasons I look at the moon.
Which direction the earth spins
With fall arriving, finally, the almost-five-year-old has become interested in the seasons. I ordered Gail Gibbons’ The Reasons For Seasons, and we made paper planet balls and talked how the Earth tilts on its axis, and then, some magic happened: I realized I had no freaking idea which direction the Earth spins! No idea at all. But I didn’t pull out my phone. I sat there with the ball and thought about the sun rising in the east, setting in the west, and I figured it out, along with a few other things. It feels so amazing, as a grown adult, to teach yourself something just using your sense and your senses.
Once again, by helping him learn, I myself am learning how to learn.
Partial to the partial
The two-year-old banged on the front door and shouted “Moon!” this morning, so, as we do, we went out to take a look. Crescent, waxing, almost new. It resembled all the wonderful photos people had taken of the crescent-shaped shadows that the partial eclipse cast earlier this year:
Full moons have their charms, but I am drawn towards the phases in between them, just as I am drawn, or even biased towards, art that exists only in part, art that is in-progress or unfinished, cut-up or fragmentary, incomplete or imperfect…
I am partial to the partial.
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Photo links:
I can’t stop looking at the moon
This morning I took another picture of the moon. It was at the top of the sky — I couldn’t see it without breaking my neck — so I lied down in the driveway on my back, lining up my iPhone camera with the eyecup on my binoculars, fiddling with the exposure and focus on Camera+.
A neighbor drove past on his way to work, and I wondered if he saw me, and, if he did, what on Earth he thought I was doing.
Back in the house, drinking my coffee, I checked my camera roll and tried to pick the best shot. I started thinking about how I like looking at all the little moons together more than any single moon.
Taking one picture of the moon isn’t all that interesting, but seeing all the pictures of the moon you’ve taken together, that’s a little more interesting:
The artist Penelope Umbrico, of her gigantic collages of moon photographs uploaded to Flickr, says the opposite: “Seen individually any one of these images is impressive. Seen as a group, however, they seem to cancel each other out.”
We disagree on that point, but I sure do like what Umbrico has assembled in these pieces, especially when she starts sorting by color:
The moon actually doesn’t give off its own light, it only reflects the sun’s, so add that fact to the atmospheric conditions and the time of day you happen to see it, and it’s always taking on some interesting color. (I have started to prefer morning moons to evening moons.) When you read books like Moon: A Brief History or watch movies live Moonstruck, you realize how much of that reflective quality is essential to how we feel about it: the moon reflects our own light back at us, in a way.
I can’t really remember when I started going so nuts for the moon. I think it started when we moved into this old house. We used to live in a townhouse that didn’t have much of a view of the night sky from any of its windows. Then we moved into our current house, which sits on a bigger lot, surrounded by suburban ranch houses, so there are better sky views to be had. But I think it really has to do with our master bathroom, which has a window you can look out of while you pee. I get up in the middle of the night and peer out into the backyard, and when the moon’s out, it always makes me feel a little wild. A bit mysterious. A bit less willing to go back to bed.
When it’s my morning to get up with the boys, one of the first things we’ll do if the moon is out is run out the front door into the driveway to take a look. They’ve grown up on books like Papa, Please Get The Moon for Me, and The Moon Seems To Change and The Moon Book, so they share in my joy, for now. And one of the best moments of any day is when, unprompted, my two-year-old will stick his index finger in the air and shout, “Moon!”