Ebook Size : 4.4 MB
Download : The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
"SCIENCE AS A CANDLE IN THE DARK"
It
was a blustery fall day in 1939. In the streets outside the apartment
building, fallen leaves were swirling in little whirl winds, each
with a life of its own. It was good to be inside and warm and safe,
with my mother preparing dinner in the next room. In our apartment
there were no older kids who picked on you for no reason. Just the
week before, I had been in a fight – I can't remember, after all
these years, who it was with; maybe it was Snoony Agata from the
third floor - and, after a wild swing, I found I had put my fist
through the plate glass window of Schechter's drug store.
Mr
Schechter was solicitous: 'It's all right, I'm insured,' he said as
he put some unbelievably painful antiseptic on my wrist. My mother
took me to the doctor whose office was on the ground floor of our
building. With a pair of tweezers, he pulled out a fragment of glass.
Using needle and thread, he sewed two stitches.
'Two
stitches!' my father had repeated later that night. He knew about
stitches, because he was a cutter in the garment industry; his job
was to use a very scary power saw to cut out patterns - backs, say,
or sleeves for ladies' coats and suits - from an enormous stack of
cloth. Then the patterns were conveyed to endless rows of women
sitting at sewing machines. He was pleased I had gotten angry enough
to overcome a natural timidity. Sometimes it was good to fight back.
I hadn't planned to do anything
violent. It just happened. One moment Snoony was pushing me and the
next moment my fist was through Mr Schechter's window. I had injured
my wrist, generated an unexpected medical expense, broken a plate
glass window, and no one was mad at me. As for Snoony, he was more
friendly than ever.
I
puzzled over what the lesson was. But it was much more pleasant to
work it out up here in the warmth of the apartment, gazing out
through the living-room window into Lower New York Bay, than to risk
some new misadventure on the streets below. As she often did, my
mother had changed her clothes and made up her face in anticipation
of my father's arrival. We talked about my fight with Snoony. The Sun
was almost setting and together we looked out across the choppy
waters. 'There are people fighting out there, killing each other,'
she said, waving vaguely across the Atlantic. I peered intently. 'I
know,' I replied. 'I can see them.' 'No, you can't,' she replied,
sceptically, almost severely, before returning to the kitchen.
'They're too far away.'
How
could she know whether I could see them or not? I wondered.
Squinting, I had thought I'd made out a thin strip of land at the
horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and duelling
with swords as they did in my comic books. But maybe she was right.
Maybe it had just been my imagination, a little like the midnight
monsters that still, on occasion, awakened me from a deep sleep, my
pyjamas drenched in sweat, my heart pounding.
How
can you tell when someone is only imagining? I gazed out across the
grey waters until night fell and I was called to wash my hands for
dinner. When he came home, my father swooped me up in
his arms. I could feel the cold of the outside world against his
one-day growth of beard. On a Sunday in that same year, my father had
patiently explained to me about zero as a placeholder in arithmetic,
about the wicked-sounding names of big numbers, and about how there's
no biggest number ('You can always add one,' he pointed out).
Suddenly, I was seized by a childish compulsion to write in sequence
all the integers from 1 to 1,000. We had no pads of paper, but my
father offered up the stack of grey cardboards he had been saving
from when his shirts were sent to the laundry.
