A 94-Year-Old English Teacher and Her Former Students Reunite in Their Old Classroom & Debate the Merits of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize
In fiction the inspirational high-school English teacher is a cliché, despite (or indeed due to) the fact that so many of us have had at least one of them in real life. For generations of students who passed through San Francisco’s prestigious Lowell High School, that teacher was Flossie Lewis. Long after her retirement, she went surprisingly viral in a 2016 PBS interview clip about her thoughts on aging. It seemed she retained her power to inspire, not just for her more than seven million online viewers, but also for the PBS producers who later reunited her with her former students in the very same classroom where she once taught them.
You can see this reunion take place in the video above, which also includes Flossie telling her own story of having fled Brooklyn spinsterhood on a Greyhound bus headed west. “I could command the attention of a class,” she says of the source of her power as a teacher. “I had a voice. I had that kind of personality that did not seem teacherly, but was provocative.”
Onetime student Daniel Handler, better known as the novelist Lemony Snicket, credits Flossie with an “ability to startle.” Another, now an architect, remembers “gravitas” — and his having been “intimidated by her name. Flossie is a very unusual name.” Or at least it is today, its popularity (driven, it seems, by the Bobbsey Twins books) having peaked in the early 20th century.
Flossie is also representative of her generation in another way: not particularly caring for the music of Bob Dylan. Though she can’t have been thrilled with that guitar-playing (relative) youngster’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, she’s willing to hear her students out on the subject. “The trivial task before us is to decide whether Bobby Dylan is worth the laureate,” she declares to the group of Lowell alumni gathered in her old classroom. Now all middle-aged, her former students include Dylan defenders and Dylan deniers alike, but what unites them are their undimmed memories of their teacher’s mixture of rigor, compassion, and sheer eccentricity. As one of them recalls, “You read us a sonnet from Shakespeare and said, ‘It’s no good.’ ” Whatever his generational relevance, the poet from Hibbing may never have stood a chance.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Chinese Youth Announce That They’re “Lying Flat” and Resisting the Pressures of Modern Life
The “Lying Flat” movement taking hold among young people in China involves doing exactly what it suggests: working little, resting a lot, and cultivating the most minimalist lifestyle possible. Unlike Timothy Leary’s 1960’s mantra, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” lying flat, or tang ping (躺平), takes no stance on a countercultural ethos or the consumption of mind-altering drugs. But it has caused the authorities alarm, even among English-language observers. Consider the Brookings Institute headline, “The ‘lying flat’ movement standing in the way of China’s innovation drive.” Standing in the way of innovation is a cardinal sin of capitalism, one reason the “niche Chinese Gen Z meme” of tang ping, Jane Li writes, “is ringing alarm bells for Beijing.”
The phenomenon began — where else — on social media, when 31-year-old former factory worker Luo Huazhong “drew the curtains and crawled into bed,” Cassady Rosenblum writes at The New York Times. Luo then “posted a picture of himself [in bed] to the Chinese website Baidu along with a message: ‘Lying Flat is Justice.’”
His manifesto (above) claimed the “right to choose a slow lifestyle” by doing little work to get by, reading, gardening, exercising, and, yes, lying supine as often as he liked. To further elaborate, Luo wrote, “lying flat is my sophistic movement,” with a reference to Diogenes the Cynic, the Greek philosopher “said to have lived inside a barrel to criticize the excesses of Athenian aristocrats.”
Diogenes did more than that. He and his followers rejected everything about Athenian society, from work and marriage to the abstract reasoning of Plato. Luo might have turned to a more traditional source for “lying flat” — the Daoist principle of wu-wei, or non-doing. But lying flat is not so much about living in harmony with nature as it is a state of exhaustion, a full-body admission that the promises of capitalism — work hard now, rest hard later — have not and will not materialize. They are phantoms, mirages, precisely the kind of fictions that made Diogenes bark with laughter. The truth, Rosenblum writes, is that for “essential” workers at the bottom all the way up to the “inner sanctums” of Goldman Sachs, “work has become intolerable. Rest is resistance.”
In a work culture that celebrates “996” — 12-hour days, six days a week– rest may be the only form of resistance. Political repression and lack of upward mobility have fostered “an almost monastic outlook” in China, writes Li, “including not getting married, not having children, not having a job, not owning property, and consuming as little as possible.” Since picking up tens of thousands of followers online, the lying flat movement has become the target of a censorship campaign aimed at stopping young Chinese workers from checking out. One government-backed newspaper called the movement “shameful,” and news agency Xinhua unfavorably compared “lying flattists” to front-line medical workers. The original manifesto, Lying Flat groups, and message boards where users posted photos of seals, cats, and themselves lying flat have been taken down.
Zijia Song writes of tang ping as partly a response to a traditional Chinese culture of competitiveness and overwork, but notes that there are similar movements in Japan, Korea, and the U.S., where “Black activists, writers and thinkers are among the clearest voices articulating this spiritual malaise and its solutions,” writes Rosenblum, “perhaps because they’ve borne the brunt of capitalism more than other groups of Americans.” Whatever their national origin, each of these statements defiantly claims the right to rest, posing a threat not only to the Party but to an ideal of human life as endless overwork for shiny trinkets and empty promises, during a global pandemic and climate crisis that have revealed to us like nothing else the need to slow down, rest, and completely reimagine the way we live.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...An Archaeologist Creates the Definitive Guide to Beer Cans
Image via Wikimedia Commons
As a beverage of choice and necessity for much of the population in parts of the ancient world, beer has played an important role in archaeology. Beer cans, on the other hand, have not. Unlike millennia-old recipes, beer cans seem like no more than trash, even in a field where trash is highly treasured. This is a mistake, says archeologist Jane Busch. “The historical archaeologist who ignores the beer can at his site is like the prehistoric archeologist who ignores historic pottery.”
David Maxwell, an expert in animal bones who trained as a Mayanist, has recognized the truth of this statement by turning his passion for beer can collecting into beer can archaeology, a tiny niche within the smaller field of “tin can archaeology.” Maxwell became the reigning expert on beer can dating when “in 1993, he published a field-identification guide in Historical Archaeology,” notes Jessica Gingrich at Atlas Obscura, “which has since become an industry standard and his most-read work.”
The first commercial canned beer appeared in 1935, after several unsuccessful experiments starting in 1909. Experiments in beer canning took a hiatus during Prohibition, and canned beer itself went off the market during WWII as supplies of tin plate were rerouted to the war effort. During that interregnum, only the military shipped canned beer, to soldiers overseas in olive and camo-colored cans. When sales resumed after the war, beer cans assumed more routinized design elements. Maxwell himself became fascinated with beer cans from afar. “While canned beer sales exploded in the United States after World War II, Gingrich writes, “the industry failed to take off in Canada until the 1980s.”
As a child in Canada, Maxwell collected bottle caps. “All the beer came in the same shape bottle,” he says. Cans seemed exotic, especially those of an older vintage. “They had punches to open them instead of pull rings, and all I knew was that they predated me.” The value of disposable artifacts less than 100 years old isn’t immediately apparent to most people, says Jim Rock, a pioneer of tin can studies who calls cans “the Rodney Dangerfield of archeology. They just don’t get any respect.” But the fact is “all archeology is garbage,” says Maxwell.
Dating cans gives archeologists a picture of modern consumption patterns — and patterns of ecological destruction — in the refuse tossed on highways and the strata of trash found in construction sites, landfills, and even ancient dig sites, where dating beer cans can tell archeologists when earlier trespassers might have arrived, removed or altered artifacts, and left their trash behind. Maxwell, who has recently downsized his collection from 4500 to 1700 cans to save space, admits that a narrow focus on the beer can takes a special combination of skills.
“Collectors are a fabulous resource for academics,” he says. “These are the guys who do the grunt work” — the endlessly curious citizen scientists of archaeology. “I can’t think of anyone else who would do that except someone who is obsessive about what it is that they are collecting.” In Maxwell, the obsessive collector and rigorous academic just happened to come together to produce the definitive guide. (See Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist online.) But even he has had to “face the question of what deserves to be archived and kept,” Nicola Jones writes at Sapiens. In discarding 3,000 of his own cans, most of them acquired through collectors online, he had to admit that “though the rusty cans were a part of history, they weren’t worth much to the rest of the world.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Build Wooden Models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Building: The Guggenheim, Unity Temple, Johnson Wax Headquarters & More
Frank Lloyd Wright had his eccentricities, in not just his personal and professional conduct but also the very language with which he described the world. Among the enduringly fascinating elements of his idiolect is the word Usonian, which refers to things of or pertaining to the United States of America. Wright didn’t coin the term: its earliest recorded user is the early 20th-century writer James Duff Law, who declared that “We of the United States, in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title ‘Americans’ when referring to matters pertaining exclusively to ourselves.” The most famous architect in American history took Usonian further, using it to label an American architectural sensibility — of, naturally, his own design.
Though Wright did envision an ideally Usonian city, his clearest expressions of the aesthetic stand today in the form of the Usonian houses. Built between 1934 and 1958, these sixty or so residences take advantage, as Wright saw it, of the range of distinctive settings offered up by the landscapes of the United States.
Designed with features like garden terraces, clerestory windows, flat roofs with wide overhangs, and easy visual and physical passage between the indoors and outdoors, these urban-rural hybrids still today draw the admiration of architects and non-architects alike. But truly to understand a Usonian house, perhaps you must build one yourself: luckily, the Little Building Company offers a model kit that lets you do just that.
Their Wright lineup also includes miniature wooden versions of his 1908 Unity Temple in Oak Park, his 1937 Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, and his 1937 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The differences in scale and complexity between these buildings make for a natural model-building difficulty curve: once you’ve done a Wright house, you’ll be ready for a Wright temple; once you’ve done a Wright temple, you’ll be ready for a Wright corporate headquarters, and so on. Not only will the effort hone your manual dexterity, it will heighten your appreciation for the American architecture-defining innovations Wright pulled off in the early 20th century. But do you have to be from the United States to understand the Usonian? Based in Australia and selling to the world, the Little Building Company suggests not.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch Lost Studio Footage of Brian Wilson Conducting “Good Vibrations,” The Beach Boys’ Brilliant “Pocket Symphony”
After Brian Wilson created what Hendrix called the “psychedelic barbershop quartet” sound of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, he moved on to what he promised would be another quantum leap beyond. “Our new album,” Smile, he claimed, “will be as much an improvement over Sounds as that was over Summer Days.” But in his pursuit to almost single-handedly surpass the Beatles in the art of studio perfectionism, Wilson overreached. He famously scrapped the Smile sessions, and instead released the hastily-recorded Smiley Smile to fulfill contract obligations in 1967.
Smiley Smile’s peculiar genius went unrecognized at the time, particularly because its centerpiece, “Good Vibrations,” had set expectations so high. Recorded and released as a single in 1966, the song would be referred to as a “pocket symphony” (a phrase invented either by Wilson himself or publicist Derek Taylor). Even the jaded session players who sat in for the hours of recording — veterans from the famed “Wrecking Crew” — knew they were making something that transcended the usual rut of pop simplicity.
“We were doing two, three record dates a day,” says organ player Mike Melvoin, “and the level of sophistication was, like, not really sophisticated at all.” The “Good Vibrations” sessions were another experience entirely. “All of a sudden, you walk in, and here’s run-on songs. It’s like this section followed by that section followed by this section, and each of them with a completely different character. And you’re going, ‘Whoa.’” Wrecking Crew bassist Carol Kay, who sat in for the sessions but didn’t make the final mix, remembers thinking, “that wasn’t your normal rock ‘n’ roll…. You were part of a symphony.”
Wilson’s pop symphonies were created and arranged not on paper but during the recording sessions themselves, which accounted for the 90 hours of tape and tens of thousands of dollars in expenses, the most money ever spent on a pop single. He made creative decisions according to what he called “feels,” fragments of melody and sound that formed his avant-garde pastiches. “Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt,” he recalled, “and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.” Not everyone could see the plan at first.
But when Wilson finally emerged from months of isolation after cutting and mixing hours and hours of tape, the rest of the band was “very blown out,” he says. “They were most blown out. They said, ‘Goddamn, how can you possibly do this, Brian?’ I said, ‘Something got inside of me.’… They go, ‘Well, it’s fantastic.’ And so they sang really good just to show me how much they liked it.” In the edited footage at the top, taken over the six months of recording in four different studios, you can see drummer Hal Blaine, organ player Mick Melvoin, double bass player Lyle Ritz, and the Beach Boys themselves all recording their parts.
To the press, Wilson told one story — “Good Vibrations” was “still sticking pretty close to that same boy-girl thing, you know, but with a difference. And it’s a start, it’s definitely a start.” But the song — which he first wanted to call “Good Vibes” — is very much meant to suggest “the healthy emanations that should result from psychic tranquility and inner peace,” wrote Bruce Golden in The Beach Boys: Southern California Pastoral. In that sense, “Good Vibrations” was aspirational, almost tragically so, for Wilson, who could not fulfill its promises. Yet, in another sense, “Good Vibrations” is itself the fulfillment of Wilson’s creative promise, an eternally brilliant “pocket symphony” — and as Wilson told engineer Chuck Britz during the sessions, his “whole life performance in one track.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Two Haruki Murakami Stories Adapted into Short Films: Watch Attack on a Bakery (1982) and A Girl, She Is 100% (1983)
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Award for Best Screenplay went to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, an adaptation of a story by Haruki Murakami. So did FIPRESCI Prize, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and no small amount of critical acclaim, suggesting that the code for translating Murakami onto the screen might finally have been cracked. Every now and again over the past forty years, a bold filmmaker has taken on the challenge of turning a work of that most world-famous Japanese novelist into a feature. But until recently, the results have for the most part not been received as especially consequential in and of themselves.
In general, short fiction tends to produce more satisfying adaptations than full-fledged novels, and Murakami’s work seems not to be an exception (as underscored a few years ago by Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong’s Burning). Hamaguchi’s film spins some 40 pages into a running time of nearly three hours, doing the opposite of what other Japanese filmmakers have done with Murakami’s short stories. In 1982, Naoto Yamakawa made one of them into Attack on a Bakery, a short film running less than twenty minutes; the following year, he made another into the even shorter A Girl, She is 100%, running less than fifteen. Today Murakami fans everywhere can watch them both on Youtube, complete with English subtitles.
The material will feel familiar to English-language Murakami readers. A main character of the story “The Second Bakery Attack” reminisces about a robbery he attempted as a hungry young man that went comically off the rails, in a manner similar to the one in Yamakawa’s first short. (In 2010 “The Second Bakery Attack,” wherein the now-married narrator robs a fast-food joint with his new bride, itself became a short film directed by Carlos Cuarón, brother of Alfonso.) Though “The Bakery Attack” has never been officially published in English, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” has, and it now stands as one of Murakami’s representative short works in that language; it also, in the original, provides the basis for A Girl, She Is 100%.
“She doesn’t stand out in any way,” Murakami’s narrator says of the titular figure. “Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either — must be near thirty, not even close to a ‘girl,’ properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me.” Yamakawa dramatizes a similar fleeting encounter and the romantic speculations that resonate in the man’s mind. Like the half-baked philosophical and political convictions of the would-be robbers, these inspire the director to the kind of visual and formal inventiveness one would expect given his background in Godard and Scorsese scholarship. But the only filmmaker name-checked is Woody Allen, which fans will recognize as a characteristic Murakami reference. So as are the inclusions of Wagner, D.H. Lawrence, jazz music — and of course, an unexpected cat.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...An 18-Year-Old Spends a Year Alone Building a Log Cabin in the Swedish Wilderness: Watch from Start to Finish
Henry David Thoreau has at times been upbraided by critics for “everyone’s favorite incriminating biographical factoid,” writes Donovan Hohn at The New Republic: “During the two years he spent at Walden Pond, his mother sometimes did his laundry.” The author who became “America’s original nature boy “played at rugged self-sufficiency,” it is said, “while squatting on borrowed land, in a house built with a borrowed axe”; he played at rugged individualism while relying on friends and family to support him.
Who did Erik Grankvist’s laundry, we might wonder, while he built a log cabin alone during the year he recorded in the edited video above? Grankvist shows how, at 18, he “ventured out alone with only a backpack full of simple hand tools to actualize my dream… [to] build my own traditional off grid log cabin by hand from the materials of the Swedish wilderness. Just like our Forefathers did.” You may notice, or not, the cleanliness of Grankvist’s clothing. You may wonder, “who washed his forefathers’ clothes?”…
Or, you might say, “this isn’t a video about laundry but about building a log cabin!” And you would be correct. As an experiment in building a log cabin from scratch with (mostly) just a few hand tools, it is an extraordinary document: “I had no previous experience in building, gathering materials or filming,” Grankvist writes. “So I started studying myself the old arts and learning from my grandfather and mentor Åke Nilsson. I began to cut down trees and film with my phone, learning as I go.”
The project really picked up steam once Grankvist graduated high school, he writes, suggesting he did not actually live full time in the woods but that someone fed, housed, and clothed him while he worked. We see none of this in the video. We do see a tractor at one point, and Grankvist admits he’d rather the modern extravagance have been a horse.
Does it ruin the magic a little to wonder about the mundane details of the builder’s life — food, clothing, healthcare, etc. — while watching him cut his own timber, clear the land, build a stone foundation and, on top of it, a rustic little cabin? Maybe a little. But as extraordinary as it is to watch an 18-year-old Swede build a log cabin by himself, one also can’t help but remember it takes a village worth of forefathers, and mothers, to make an 18-year-old Swede. But Grankvist does not present his visual Walden as a how-to guide (any more than Thoreau did), but as his own statement of independence, one worth making even if it doesn’t tell the full truth about self-sufficiency.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Vintage Public Health Posters That Helped People Take Smart Precautions During Past Crises
We subscribe to the theory that art saves lives even in the best of times.
In the midst of a major public health crisis, art takes a front line position, communicating best practices to citizens with eye catching, easy to understand graphics and a few well chosen words.
In March of 2020, less than 2 weeks after COVID-19 brought New York to its knees, Angelina Lippert, the Chief Curator of Poster House, one of the city’s newer museums shared a blog post, considering the ways in which the CDC’s basic hygiene recommendations for helping stop the spread had been touted to previous generations.
As she noted in a lecture on the history of the poster as Public Service Announcement the following month, “mass public health action… is how we stopped tuberculosis, polio, and other major diseases that we don’t even think of today:”
And a major part of eradicating them was educating the public. That’s really what PSAs are—a means of informing and teaching the public en masse. It goes back to that idea … of not having to seek out information, but just being presented with it. Keeping the barrier for entry low means more people will see and absorb the information.
The Office of War Information and the District of Columbia Society for the Prevention of Blindness used an approachable looking raccoon to convince the public to wash hands in WWII.
Artist Seymour Nydorf swapped the raccoon for a blonde waitress with glamorous red nails in a series of six posters for the U.S. Public Health Service of the Federal Security Agency
Coughing and sneezing took posters into somewhat grosser terrain.
The New Zealand Department of Health’s 50s era poster shamed careless sneezers into using a hankie, and might well have given those in their vicinity a persuasive reason to bypass the buffet table.
Great Britain’s Central Council for Health Education and Ministry of Health collaborated with
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office to teach the public some basic infection math in WWII.
Children’s wellbeing can be a very persuasive tool. The WPA Federal Art Project was not playing in 1941 when it paired an image of a cherubic tot with stern warnings to parents and other family members to curb their affectionate impulses, as well as the transmission of tuberculosis.
The arresting image packs more of a wallop than this earnest and far wordier, early 20s poster by the National Child Welfare Association and the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis.
Read Poster House Chief Curator Angelina Lippert’s Brief History of PSA Posters here.
Download the free anti-xenophobia PSAs Poster House commissioned from designer Rachel Gingrich early in the pandemic here.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...MoMA’s Online Courses Let You Study Modern & Contemporary Art and Earn a Certificate
The labels “modern art” and “contemporary art” don’t easily pull apart from one another. In a strictly historical sense, the former refers to art produced in the era we call modernity, beginning in the mid-19th century. And according to its etymology, the latter refers to art produced at the same time as something else: there is art “contemporary” with, say, the Italian Renaissance, but also art “contemporary” with our own lives. You’ll have a much clearer idea of this distinction — and of what people mean when they use the relevant terms today — if you take the Modern and Contemporary Art and Design Specialization, a set of courses from the Museum of Modern Art (aka MoMA) in New York.
Offered on the online education platform Coursera, the Modern and Contemporary Art and Design Specialization promises to “introduce you to the art of our time.” In its first course, Modern Art & Ideas, you’ll learn “how artists have taken inspiration from their environment and responded to social issues over the past 150 years.”
In the second, Seeing through Photographs (whose trailer appears above), you’ll explore photography “from its origins in the mid-1800s through the present.” The third, What Is Contemporary Art?, introduces works of the past four decades “ranging from 3‑D-printed glass and fiber sculptures to performances in a factory.” The final course, Fashion as Design, affords the opportunity to “learn from makers working with clothing every day — and, in some cases, reinventing it for the future.”
You can view the entire Contemporary Art and Design Specialization for free, by “auditing” its courses. Alternatively, you can join the paid track, which costs $39 USD per month, which at Coursera’s suggested pace of seven months to complete (including a “hands-on project” for each course) comes out to $273 overall. Then, when you finish the specialization, you’ll “earn a Certificate that you can share with prospective employers and your professional network.” Whether you go the audit or certificate route, you’ll earn an understanding of “modern art” and “contemporary art” as they’re created and regarded here in the 21st century: the era deep into modernity in which we live, and one in which the boundaries of art itself — not just the adjectives preceding it — show no sign of ceasing to expand.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...17th Century Scientist Gives First Description of Alien Life: Hear Passages from Christiaan Huygens’ Cosmotheoros (1698)
Astrobiologists can now extrapolate the evolutionary characteristics of possible alien life, should it exist, given the wealth of data available on interplanetary conditions. But our ideas about aliens have drawn not from science but from what Adrian Horton at The Guardian calls “an engrossing feedback loop” of Hollywood films, comics books, and sci-fi novels. A little over three-hundred years ago — having never heard of H.G. Wells or the X‑Files — Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens answered the question of what alien life might look like in his work Cosmotheoros, published after his death in 1698.
Everyone knows the names Galileo and Isaac Newton, and nearly everyone knows their major accomplishments, but we find much less familiarity with Huygens, even though his achievements “make him the greatest scientist in the period between Galileo and Newton,” notes the Public Domain Review.
Those achievements include the discovery of Saturn’s rings and its moon, Titan, the invention of the first refracting telescope, a detailed mapping of the Orion Nebula, and some highly notable advancements in mathematics. (Maybe we — English speakers, that is — find his last name hard to pronounce?)
Huygens was a revolutionary thinker. After Copernicus, it became clear to him that “our planet is just one of many,” as scholar Hugo A. van den Berg writes, “and not set apart by any special consideration other than the accidental fact that we happen to be its inhabitants.” Using the powers of observation available to him, he theorized that the inhabitants of Jupiter and Saturn (he used the term “Planetarians”) must possess “the Art of Navigation,” especially “in having so many Moons to direct their Course…. And what a troop of other things follow from this allowance? If they have Ships, they must have Sails and Anchors, Ropes, Pillies, and Rudders…”
“We may well laugh at Huygens,” van den Berg writes, “But surely in our own century, we are equally parochial in our own way. We invariably fail to imagine what we fail to imagine.” Our ideas of aliens flying spacecraft already seem quaint given multiversal and interdimensional modes of travel in science fiction. Huygens had no cultural “feedback loop.” He was making it up as he went. “In contrast to Huygens’ astronomical works, Cosmotheoros is almost entirely speculative,” notes van den Berg — though his speculations are throughout informed and guided by scientific reasoning.
To undermine the idea of Earth as special, central, and unique, “a thing that no Reason will permit,” Huygens wrote — meant posing a potential threat to “those whose Ignorance or Zeal is too great.” Therefore, he willed his brother to publish Cosmotheoros after his death so that he might avoid the fate of Galileo. Already out of favor with Louis XIV, whom Huygens had served as a government scientist, he wrote the book while back at home in The Hague, “frequently ill with depressions and fevers,” writes the Public Domain Review. What did Huygens see in his cosmic imagination of the sailing inhabitants of Jupiter and Saturn? Hear for yourself above in a reading of Huygens’ Cosmotheoros from Voices of the Past.
Huygens’ descriptions of intelligent alien life derive from his limited observations about human and animal life, and so he proposes the necessity of human-like hands and other appendages, and rules out such things as an “elephant’s proboscis.” (He is particularly fixated on hands, though some alien humanoids might also develop wings, he theorizes.) Like all alien stories to come, Huygens’ speculations, however logically he presents them, say “more about ourselves,” as Horton writes, “our fears, our anxieties, our hope, our adaptability — than any potential outside visitor.” His descriptions show that while he did not need to place Earth at the center of the cosmos, he measured the cosmos according to a very human scale.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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