John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck
Steinbeck in Sweden during his trip to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962
Born	John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. February 27, 1902 Salinas, California, United States
Died	December 20, 1968 (aged 66) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, war correspondent
Notable works	Of Mice and Men (1937) The Grapes of Wrath (1939) East of Eden (1952)[1]
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1940) Nobel Prize in Literature (1962)
Signature

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception".

 Early life

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent.^[2] Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, had shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he emigrated to the United States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still today named "Großsteinbeck."

His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing.^[3] The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church,^[4] although Steinbeck would later become an agnostic.^[5] Steinbeck lived in a small rural town, no more than a frontier settlement, set in some of the world's most fertile land.^[6] He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in such works as Of Mice and Men.^[6] He also explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.^[6] While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he would sometimes work in their laboratory, which gave him time to write.^[7] He also had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for making his own repairs to things he owned.^[7]

The Steinbeck House at 132 Central Avenue, Salinas, California, the Victorian home where Steinbeck spent his childhood.

Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went from there to study English Literature at Stanford University in Palo Alto, leaving, without a degree, in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to have his work published, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker^[7] at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife.^[3][7][8] The two were married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money manufacturing plaster mannequins.^[7]

When their money ran out six months later, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the border of the city of Monterey, California. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During this period of the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crab that he gathered from the sea, as well as fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When that didn't work, he was not above getting welfare, or rarely even stealing food from the local produce market.^[7] Whatever food they had, they would share with their friends.^[7] Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row.^[7]

In 1930, Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and a philosophical and biological mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade.^[7] Usually very quiet, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, Ricketts became a focus of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college class from Warner C. Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became an exponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand.^[7] Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterrey, selling biological samples to schools and colleges.

Between the years 1930 to 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. In the lab were small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles and other marine forms. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookeeper.^[7] Steinbeck himself began helping out on an informal basis.^[7] They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy.^[7] When Steinbeck had emotional upsets, Ricketts would sometimes play music for him.^[7]

Career

Writing

Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of the city of Panama, sometimes referred to as the 'Cup of Gold', and on the woman, fairer than the sun, who was said to be found there.^[9]
After Cup of Gold, between 1930 and 1933 Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consists of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood.^[9] To a God Unknown, named after a Vedic hymn,^[7] follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works. Although he still had not achieved the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that he would achieve greatness.^[7]

Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal.^[9] It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life centered around wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression."^[1] Tortilla Flat was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck's. With some of the proceeds he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos.^{[citation needed]}

Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.

Of Mice and Men was a drama about the dreams of a pair of migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed^[9] and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece".^[1] Its stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and starring Broderick Crawford as George's companion - the mentally childlike but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect" and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck would write two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).

Of Mice and Men was also adapted as a 1939 Hollywood film, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lennie (he had filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production) and Burgess Meredith as George.^[10] Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades.^[7] Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.

Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.^[11] Later that year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction^[12] and it was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award.

Grapes was controversial. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home.^[13] Claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.^[14]

Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."

The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.

Ed Ricketts

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing^[15] and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their joint book about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did not sell well.^[15] However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.^[16]

Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book.^[7] In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger.^[17] With his second wife Steinbeck had two sons—Thomas ("Thom") Myles Steinbeck (born 1944) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).

Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Ecological themes recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.^[18]

Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced his wife Carol.^[15] Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm notes that, except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death in 1948.^[18]

1940s–1960s work

Steinbeck's novel The Moon Is Down (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the Nazis, and in 1945 Steinbeck received the Haakon VII Cross of freedom for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.

In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA).^[19] It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang, Jr. of Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and helped capture Italian and German prisoners, using a Tommy Gun. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War (1958).

Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), and the film A Medal for Benny (1945) with screenwriter Jack Wagner about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he wrote Cannery Row (1945) which became so famous that Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the location of the book, was eventually renamed Cannery Row in 1958.

After the end of the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947), already knowing it would be filmed. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World." It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script (Viva Zapata!) directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.

In 1947, Steinbeck made the first of many trips to the Soviet Union, this one with photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences, A Russian Journal, was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1952 Steinbeck's longest novel - East of Eden - was published. According to his third wife, Elaine, he considered it his magnum opus - his greatest novel.

In 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, O. Henry's Full House. Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; despite some stiffness, the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.

Following the success of Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on East of Eden, James Dean's film debut.

Rocinante, camper truck in which Steinbeck traveled across the United States in 1960

Travels with Charley (subtitle: In Search of America) is a travelogue of his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing both criticism and praise for America. According to Steinbeck's son Thom, Steinbeck went on the trip because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time.^[20]

Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), examines moral decline in America. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him.^[21] The book is very different in tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance of the novel but were disappointed that it was not another Grapes of Wrath.^[21] In the Nobel Prize presentation speech next year, however, the Swedish Academy cited it most favorably: "Here he attained the same standard which he set in The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad."^[1]

Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962,^[22] Steinbeck published no more fiction in the next six years before his death.

Nobel Prize

In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper.^[22]
The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising", noting that "[T]he international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing.... [W]e think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age".^[22] Steinbeck himself, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no."^[7][22] Biographer Jackson Benson notes, "[T]his honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value."^[7][22] In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said:

the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

—Steinbeck Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech^[23]

In 2012, (50 years later), the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen.^[22] The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot,^[22] "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry Olsson.^[22] Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders Österling believed the release of his new novel The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961 showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained his position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway."^[22]

Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical Li'l Abner, "possibly the best writer in the world today."^[24] At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote."^[7]

In September 1964, Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war there. Thinking of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture, he was considered a hawk for his position on that war. His sons both served in Vietnam prior to his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield (at one point being allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase, while his son and other members of his platoon slept).^[25]

Personal life

In May 1948, Steinbeck went back to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when his car was struck by a train. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in August. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression.

In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship and in December 1950 Steinbeck and Scott married, within a week of the finalizing of Scott's own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third (and final) marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968.^[9]

In 1966, Steinbeck traveled to Tel Aviv to visit the site of Mount Hope, a farm community established in Israel by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Grosssteinbeck, was murdered by Arab marauders in 1858 in what became known as the Outrages at Jaffa.^[26]

Death and legacy

The Steinbeck family graves in the Hamilton plot at the Salinas Cemetery

John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.^[9]

In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred (March 4, 1969)^[27] at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had earlier written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.^[15]

The day after Steinbeck's death in New York City, reviewer Charles Poore wrote in the New York Times: "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: The Grapes of Wrath." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain— and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize— the Nobel judges needed him."

Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published in 1976.

Many of Steinbeck's works are on required reading lists in American high schools. In the United Kingdom, Of Mice and Men is one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools.^[28]

At the same time, The Grapes of Wrath has been banned by school boards: in August 1939, Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries.^[14] It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions.^[29][30] In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity.^[31] According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.^[32][33]

 Literary influences

Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct sense of place.^[6][9] Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country".^[15]
Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel, Cup of Gold, which concerns the pirate Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child.

In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of his life in California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as inspiration for The Red Pony. Later he used real American historical conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century, which he had experienced first-hand as a reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history and mythology. One of his last published works was Travels with Charley, a travelogue of a road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover America.

Commemoration

Cannery Row in Monterey

National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California

Steinbeck's boyhood home, a turreted Victorian building in downtown Salinas, has been preserved and restored by the Valley Guild, a nonprofit organization. Fixed menu lunches are served Monday through Saturday, and the house is open for tours during the summer on Sunday afternoons.^[34]

The National Steinbeck Center, two blocks away at 1 Main Street is the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to a single author. Dana Gioia (chair of the National Endowment for the Arts) told an audience at the center, "This is really the best modern literary shrine in the country, and I've seen them all." Its "Steinbeckiana" includes "Rocinante," the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in "Travels with Charley."

His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives.^[15]

In Monterey, Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in Cannery Row, also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the Hovden Sardine Cannery next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. However, the street that Steinbeck described as "Cannery Row" in the novel, once named Ocean View Avenue, was renamed Cannery Row in honor of the novel, in 1958. The town of Monterey has commemorated Steinbeck's work with an avenue of flags depicting characters from Cannery Row, historical plaques, and sculptured busts depicting Steinbeck and Ricketts.^[15]

On February 27, 1979 (the 77th anniversary of the writer's birth), the United States Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Steinbeck, starting the Postal Service’s Literary Arts series honoring American writers.^[35]

On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.^[36] His son, author Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf.

To commemorate the 112th anniversary of Mr. Steinbeck's birthday on February 27, 2014, Google displayed an interactive doodle utilizing animation which included illustrations portraying scenes and quotes from several novels by the author.^[37][38][39]

Political views

John Steinbeck, with his 19-year-old son John (left), visits his friend, President Johnson, in the Oval Office, May 16, 1966. John Jr. is shortly to leave for active duty in Vietnam.

Steinbeck's contacts with leftist authors, journalists, and labor union figures may have influenced his writing and he joined the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935.^[40] Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the Communist Party USA’s John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union.^[41] In 1939, he signed a letter with some other writers in support of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established puppet government.^[42]

Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the Agency in 1952, while planning a European tour, and the Director of Central Intelligence himself, Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer.^[43] What work, if any, Steinbeck may have performed for the CIA during the Cold War is unknown, but the correspondence itself is curious, given his earlier history with leftist organizations and individuals.

Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1957, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by standing up for him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials.^[29] Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced."^[29]

In 1967, when he was sent to Vietnam to report on the war, his sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his liberal past. Steinbeck's biographer, Jay Parini, says Steinbeck's friendship with President Lyndon B. Johnson influenced his views on Vietnam.^[9] Steinbeck may also have been concerned about the safety of his son serving in Vietnam.^{[citation needed]}

Government harassment

Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore used his power to encourage the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to annoy him. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."^[44]

In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, he wrote: "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome."^[45] The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.

Major works

In Dubious Battle

In 1936, Steinbeck published the first of what came to be known as his Dustbowl trilogy, which included Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. This first novel tells the story of a fruit pickers' strike in California which is both aided and damaged by the help of "the Party," generally taken to be the Communist Party, although this is never spelled out in the book.

Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written in the form of a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930s America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Pearl, Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works. It was made into a movie three times, in 1939 starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., and Betty Field, in 1982 starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake and Ted Neeley, and in 1992 starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl. The title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some critics found it too sympathetic to the workers' plight and too critical of capitalism but it found quite a large audience in the working class.^{[citation needed]} It won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction (novels) and was adapted as a film starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

East of Eden

Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas Valley saga. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories about the Biblical Adam and his progeny. The book was published in 1952. It was made into a movie in 1955 directed by Elia Kazan starring James Dean.

Travels with Charley

In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built camper top – which was rare at the time – and drove across the United States with his faithful 'blue' standard poodle, Charley. Steinbeck nicknamed his truck Rocinante after Don Quixote's "noble steed". In this sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Steinbeck describes what he sees from Maine to Montana to California, and from there to Texas and Louisiana and back to his home on Long Island. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

Bibliography

Title	Year	Fiction	ISBN
Cup of Gold	1929	Yes	0-14-018743-X
The Pastures of Heaven	1932	Yes
The Red Pony	1933	Yes
To a God Unknown	1933	Yes
Tortilla Flat	1935	Yes
In Dubious Battle	1936	Yes
Of Mice and Men	1937	Yes
The Long Valley	1938	Yes
The Grapes of Wrath	1939	Yes
The Forgotten Village	1941	Yes
Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research	1941	No
The Moon Is Down	1942	Yes
Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team	1942	No
Cannery Row	1945	Yes
The Wayward Bus	1947	Yes
The Pearl	1947	Yes
A Russian Journal	1948	No
Burning Bright	1950	Yes	0141186062
The Log from the Sea of Cortez	1951	No
East of Eden	1952	Yes
Sweet Thursday	1954	Yes
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication	1957	Yes
Once There Was A War	1958	No
The Winter of Our Discontent	1961	Yes
Travels with Charley: In Search of America	1962	No
America and Americans	1966	No
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters	1969	No
Viva Zapata!	1975	Yes
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights	1976	Yes
Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath	1989	No
Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War	2012	No

Filmography

• 1939—Of Mice and Men—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Betty Field
• 1940—The Grapes of Wrath—directed by John Ford, featuring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine
• 1941—The Forgotten Village—directed by Alexander Hammid and Herbert Kline, narrated by Burgess Meredith, music by Hanns Eisler
• 1942—Tortilla Flat—directed by Victor Fleming, featuring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield
• 1943—The Moon is Down—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Lee J. Cobb and Sir Cedric Hardwicke
• 1944—Lifeboat—directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Tallulah Bankhead, Hume Cronyn, and John Hodiak
• 1944—A Medal for Benny—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Dorothy Lamour and Arturo de Cordova
• 1947—La Perla (The Pearl, Mexico)—directed by Emilio Fernández, featuring Pedro Armendáriz and María Elena Marqués
• 1949—The Red Pony—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, and Louis Calhern
• 1952—Viva Zapata!—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn and Jean Peters
• 1955—East of Eden—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring James Dean, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet, and Raymond Massey
• 1957—The Wayward Bus—directed by Victor Vicas, featuring Rick Jason, Jayne Mansfield, and Joan Collins
• 1961—Flight—featuring Efrain Ramírez and Arnelia Cortez
• 1962—Ikimize bir dünya (Of Mice and Men, Turkey)
• 1972—Topoli (Of Mice and Men, Iran)
• 1982—Cannery Row—directed by David S. Ward, featuring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger
• 1992—Of Mice and Men—directed by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise

NASA's Next Mars Lander Will Peer Deep into Planet's History

The InSight Mission will measure the planet's rotation, weather at the landing site and magnetic disturbances to reveal more about Mars' inner workings and early development

Aug 18, 2014 |By Leonard David and SPACE.com

 

Original link:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-s-next-mars-lander-will-peer-deep-into-planet-s-history/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter 

A still from an animation shows NASA's new InSight Mars Lander lowering a drill onto Mars to analyze the planet's interior.
Credit: NASA/JPL

DENVER — NASA's next Mars lander, now under construction, will probe the inner workings and early stages of the Red Planet's development billions of years ago.

The InSight mission (short for Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), a NASA Discovery Program spacecraft, is built to respond to highly focused scientific goals.

"Things are coming together," said Stu Spath, InSight program manager here at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, the aerospace firm building the Mars spacecraft for its 2016 liftoff. [The Boldest Mars Missions in History]

Powered descent

In many ways, InSight is a technological kissing cousin to the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander of 2008, which was equipped to investigate ice and soil on Mars's far-northern region.

InSight's will mirror the Phoenix mission in its blistering entry into the Martian atmosphere; parachute deployment; self-controlled, powered descent; and gentle meeting with the planet's surface on three outstretched landing legs.

"The lander structurally looks extremely similar to Phoenix," Spath told Space.com. However the new craft's internal electronics, such as its power distribution unit and command and data handling hardware, have been updated.

InSight's avionics draw from other spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin, Spath said. Specifically, it takes cues from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) en route to the Red Planet, the Juno craft headed for Jupiter, and the now-completed twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission probes that were sent to the moon.

Two chief instruments

The InSight mission will last a Mars year, or roughly two Earth years. That is 630 days longer than the Phoenix mission lasted, which means that the lander will have to endure a wider range of environmental conditions on the Martian landscape, Spath said.

InSight will study a different aspect of planetary history with instruments never previously used on Mars, Spath said.

The Mars lander's scientific payload consists of two chief instruments:

• The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure provided by the French Space Agency.
• A Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package provided by the German Space Agency.

Additionally, the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will use the lander's X-band radio system to make ultra-precise measurements of planetary rotation.

Wind and temperature sensors from Spain's Centro de Astrobiologia and a pressure sensor will monitor weather at the landing site. A lander magnetometer will measure magnetic disturbances caused by the Martian ionosphere.

NASA's InSight lander mission would add to the number of successful touchdowns on the Red Planet. Credit: NASA/JPL

Come together

"It is very exciting, seeing the flight hardware start to come together," said Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for the InSight mission to Mars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"At the same time, this is a very nerve-wracking period in the project, as testing of our instruments and spacecraft subsystems uncover subtle design and manufacturing problems that inevitably occur, and that must be corrected in the short time, just over one and a half years, before launch," Banerdt told Space.com via email.

The cost of the InSight mission, excluding the launch vehicle and related services, is capped at $425 million in 2010 dollars.

California to Mars

An upcoming milestone for the project, in aerospace lingo, is Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO), Spath said. That evaluation begins in early November. Next June, the InSight spacecraft will face a suite of critical tests, with ship and shoot dates in December of 2015 and March of 2016, respectively, Spath said.

After those tests, InSight won't see a speedy sendoff from Florida.

Rather, the lander will travel to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket will give the craft a boost. This will be the first interplanetary mission ever to launch from California — although in 1994, the joint Ballistic Missile Defense Organization/NASA Clementine spacecraft that studied the moon and an asteroid headed off from that launch area.

Once Mars-bound, InSight will fly a quick trip. After roughly 6.5 months in transit, the craft will stick a landing in the southern Elysium region of Mars in September 2016.

The specific touchdown zone is still under discussion, with Mars researchers making use of super-sharp imagery from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) to decide InSight's precise destination.

Work space

In August of last year, researchers trimmed the number of candidate landing sites for InSight from 22 down to four.

JPL's Banerdt said that NASA has a lot of HiRISE images now that largely confirm that the candidate sites are safe for landing.

NASA is looking for the same sort of landing features as Phoenix used. "We're using the same rock-abundance measurements that we used on Phoenix. Same with the slope requirements," Spath said. "So not too sloped, not too rocky, then it's fine to land and do the science there."

Once down on Mars, after a few days of spacecraft checkout, the lander will begin compiling pictures of the "work space," the available terrain suitable for setting up scientific equipment.

Then InSight's real legwork begins: making use of the lander's robotic arm.

"The robotic arm is critical to the success of the mission," said Spath. That camera-equipped arm will pick up the seismic and heat flow hardware from the lander's topside deck, then set it on the Martian surface.

Mars gets hammered

The first measurement tool to be placed on the Martian surface will be the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) device.

"It's a top priority. We'll pick a nice, level spot. It has a self-leveling mechanism inside, but we want to get it on a flat area," Spath said. Following seismometer checkout, the lander will place a JPL-built wind and thermal shield over the device to protect it from the environment.

"We don't want the seismometer buffeting in the wind," Spath said. Such wind effects would make the device falsely record quakes or even meteorite hits on the Martian surface.

Then, the lander's robot arm will deploy the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3). This device consists of a so-called "mole" that will spend a few weeks hammering itself 10 to 16 feet (3 to 5 meters) deep into Martian terrain. [Quiz: Mars Myths and Misconceptions]

"We're allocated something like 30 to 40 days to drill down to the final depth," Spath said.
From there, the device will monitor heat coming from the planet's interior. The mole pulls an instrumented tether behind it, a ribbon that is equipped with temperature sensors to find out the thermal gradient in the ground — the rate of temperature change with distance. A second cable provides an electrical connection to the lander.

Mix of investigations

InSight will study a mix of Red Planet vital signs, including seismic, geodetic and thermal features. That will help scientists characterize the Martian crust and mantle, as well as the properties of the Martian core.

But the findings will shed light on more than just the Red Planet, Spath said.

"Even though we're going to Mars, this is not a Mars mission … as much as it is a terrestrial planet mission," Spath said. "This mission is applicable to Mercury, Venus, Earth, the moon and Mars.”
Mars is big enough to have undergone most of the early processes that fundamentally shaped the terrestrial bodies in the solar system, yet small enough in stature to have retained the signature of those processes for the next 4 billion years, signs that Earth has lost.

Indeed, in that sweet-spot sense, InSight is a mission to a "Goldilocks" planet, Spath said. "It"s a world not too big, not too small. It's just right."

New Method Reveals Hidden Genetic Landscape

Neuroscience News

August 18, 2014

Original link:  http://neurosciencenews.com/indels-psychology-genetics-autism-1226/

Scientists develop algorithm to uncover genomic insertions and deletions involved in autism and OCD.

With three billion letters in the human genome, it seems hard to believe that adding a DNA base here or removing a DNA base there could have much of an effect on our health. In fact, such insertions and deletions can dramatically alter biological function, leading to diseases from autism to cancer. Still, it is has been difficult to detect these mutations. Now, a team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has devised a new way to analyze genome sequences that pinpoints so-called insertion and deletion mutations (known as “indels”) in genomes of people with diseases such as autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome.

The letters in the human genome carry instructions to make proteins, via a three-letter code. Each trio spells out a “word;” the words are then strung together in a sentence to build a specific protein. If a letter is accidentally inserted or deleted from our genome, the three-letter code shifts a notch, causing all of the subsequent words to be misspelled. These “frameshift” mutations cause the protein sentence to become unintelligible. Loss of a single protein can have devastating effects for cells, leading to dysfunction and sometimes to serious diseases.

A simple sentence illustrates the dangers of indels. The letters in the human genome carry instructions to make proteins, via a three-letter code. Each trio spells out a word, and the words are strung together in a sentence to build a specific protein. Inserting or deleting a letter (‘e’ in this example) shifts the three-letter code. Known as frameshifts, these mutations cause the remaining words to be misspelled and the protein sentence to become unintelligible. Credit Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

DNA insertions and deletions vary in length and sequence. Each indel can range in size from one DNA letter to thousands, and they are often highly repetitive. Their variability has made it challenging to identify indels, despite major advancements in genome sequencing technology. They are, in effect, regions of the genome that have remained hidden from view as researchers search for the mutations that cause disease. A team of CSHL scientists, including Assistant Professors Mike Schatz, Gholson Lyon, and Ivan Iossifov, and Professor Michael Wigler, has devised a way to mine existing genomic datasets for indel mutations. The method, which they call Scalpel, begins by grouping together all of the sequences from a given genomic region. Scalpel – a computer formula, or algorithm – then creates a new sequence alignment for that area, much like piecing together parts of a puzzle.

“These indels are like very fine cuts to the genome – places where DNA is inserted or deleted – and Scalpel provides us with a computational lens to zoom in and see precisely where the cuts occur,” says Schatz, a quantitative biologist. Such information is critical to understand the mutations that cause disease. In work published today in Nature Methods, the team used Scalpel to search for indels in patient samples. Lyon, a CSHL researcher who is also a practicing psychiatrist, worked with his team to analyze a patient with severe Tourette syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, identifying and validating more than a thousand indels to demonstrate the accuracy of the method.

The CSHL team performed a similar analysis to search for indels that are associated with autism. They explored a dataset of 593 families from the Simons Simplex Collection, a group composed entirely of families with one affected child but no other family members with the disorder. While the researchers discovered a total of 3.3 million indels across the 593 families, most appeared to be relatively harmless. Still, a few dozen mutations stood out to be specifically associated with autism. “All this adds to our body of knowledge about the spontaneous mutations that cause autism,” says Schatz.

But the tool can be applied much more broadly. “We are collaborating with plant scientists, cancer biologists, and others, looking for indels,” says Schatz. “This is a powerful tool, and we are looking forward to revealing new pieces of the genome that make a difference, throughout the tree of life.”

Notes about this genetics research

This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health, US National Science Foundation, the CSHL Cancer Center Support Grant, the Stanley Institute for Cognitive Genomics, and the Simons Foundation.
“Accurate de novo and transmitted indel detection in exome-capture data using microassembly” appears online in Nature Methods on August 17, 2014. The authors are: Giuseppe Narzisi, Jason O’Rawe, Ivan Iossifov, Han Fang, Yoon-ha Lee, Zihua Wang, Yiyang Wu, Gholson Lyon, Michael Wigler, and Michael Schatz.
Source: Michael Schatz – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Contact: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory press release
Image Source: The image is adapted from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory press release
Original Research: Abstract for “Accurate de novo and transmitted indel detection in exome-capture data using microassembly” by Giuseppe Narzisi, Jason A O’Rawe, Ivan Iossifov, Han Fang, Yoon-ha Lee, Zihua Wang, Yiyang Wu, Gholson J Lyon, Michael Wigler and Michael C Schatz in Nature Methods. Published online August 17 2014 doi:10.1038/nmeth.3069

Wondering About The Sky

Wondering About The Sky

Starting at the beginning of our journey, I believe that the human child, looking at the world beneath his feet and the sky overhead, and wondering about it, is as good place to begin it as any. The child is not merely curious about the color of the daytime sky (see Appendix B) of course, but also the blackness of the night. But it is not just the blackness which attracts him but the things that shine within it and take that otherwise monotone of darkness away, revealing the full glory of the universe through the tapestry of night.

When the child gazes upwards at the night sky he sees not only the blackness but the many myriad of points of lights sprinkled against that inky backdrop. How many and how bright the points are depends upon from where he gazes, but they are spectacular nonetheless. Some of the lights stand out as special, or so he notices if he is keen enough an observer over many nights. They are generally brighter than the rest and appear to move slowly, thought stately, across the sky. Some appear only in the evening or the morning skies, while others traverse the entire arc of night, yet are not always there. They appear to ride, more or less, along a single line, which is known to astronomers as the ecliptic. The ecliptic, though our child does not know it, is simply the path the sun takes throughout the sky as a result of Earth orbiting her. The special lights seem to trail in her wake like fireflies.

These lights have special names. The ancient Greeks called them planetes, or wanderers, from which we derive the term planets. Of those visible to the naked eye, they include Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. One might add the moon and the sun to the list, and speak of the seven stars (although only one, the sun, is truly a star) as did the fool to the king in King Lear: (Fool: “The reason why the seven Starres are no mo then seuen, is a pretty reason”. King: “Because they are not eight.” Fool: “Yes indeed, thou wouldn’t make a good Foole.”).

What are these wandering “stars” that stand out so spectacularly in the night sky, and why do I begin my journey there? Certainly, they have piqued our curiosity as much as anything else in the natural world. The child eventually learns that the reason they wander against the seemingly fixed backdrop of stars is that they are members of our own solar system, planets in their own rights like our own, and so are relatively close by compared to the stars. He – by which, I mean I – also learns of two more planets, discovered over the last two hundred plus years, mighty in their own respects but too dim to be seen clearly from here on Earth: Uranus (which actually is just barely visible under the most optimum seeing conditions) and Neptune. And indeed, Earth we stand on is a planet as well, which we would easily see from the sky of any of the others should any of us be fortunate enough (and I believe some of us will have that fortune) to stand on one of them some day. But from whence does this knowledge come?

To the ancient Greeks and Romans the planets were the gods who inhabited Mount Olympus, but when people began in earnest to explore the natural world within the last few centuries, men like Galileo first pointed his primitive telescopes at them and discovered, lo and behold, that they were not the bright points of light the stars remained under even the highest magnifications, but showed clear discs which nobody, even the Catholic clergy of the day, could deny. Some of them even had small bright objects (which we call moons, or satellites) orbiting them, while others, such as Venus and Mercury, showed phases much like our own moon. The results of these simple observations was that the Earth-centered universe of Ptolemy was forever and at last obliterated and a new model of the heavens had to be found, one in which the Earth and the other planets circled the sun and not the other way around (though, as noted, some objects also orbited the planets themselves, such as our own moon or the four satellites orbiting Jupiter that Galileo discovered).

For me, the planets, and their moons, and the myriad other bodies of rock and metal and ice which form our solar system are such a marvelous beginning along our quest into curiosity, if only because so much has been learned about them in my lifetime. Also, as a boy it seemed my clear mandate to become an astronomer when I grew up (instead of the chemist and general scientific dilettante I actually became), so the night sky held a special fascination, perhaps because more than anything else it made me realize just how inconceivably vast the very concept of everything is.

In the early 1960s, when I was a small child just learning how to read and write, very little was known about the other worlds which inhabited our solar system. What was known was largely from the blurry images of ground-based telescopes and the simple spectroscopic and photographic equipment which was all that was available then. We also had some information from microwave and radio astronomy. So we knew some basic stuff; for example, that Jupiter and Saturn were huge gas giant worlds, Uranus and Neptune more modest gaseous worlds (still considerably larger than the Earth), that Mercury was almost certainly a sun-baked ball of rock as tidally locked to the sun as our moon is to Earth – indeed, it was probably a slightly larger version of our moon. Of Pluto, discovered only in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, virtually nothing was known for certain, even its mass and size. Finally, of all these worlds, only thirty two natural satellites were known, with essentially nothing known about any of them except that Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and probably the largest moon in the entire solar system, was the only one showing evidence of a substantial atmosphere, the nature of which was little more than speculation.

* * *

You could not fail to notice that I have overlooked two planets, the two of our most particular interest at that. Venus and Mars capture our imaginations and hopes precisely because they are the nearest worlds to our own, and thus, or so we thought / hoped, were also the nearest in their natures. Even without the benefit of interplanetary probes and the crude, atmosphere befogged instruments we possessed circa 1960, we could see how much promise they held. Rocky worlds like our own, with substantial atmospheres and possibly decent living conditions as good if not better than ours (albeit Mars probably on the cold side, and Venus a tad warm even for the hardiest frontiersmen), they invigorated our imaginations with tales of life and even intelligent beings which even the most skeptical could find believable. Percival Lowell could convincingly describe the “canals” he was certain he spied on Mars (a word which, in fact, is a mistranslation of the Italian word for channels, which their original, equally deluded, discoverer Schiaparelli called them), and the civilization which built them to keep their dying world alive was so believable that when Orson Welles broadcast H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds in 1938 thousands were panicked, convinced the invading Martians were all too real. Even well into the 1950s and 60s it was possible to populate the Red Planet with sentient beings with little in the way of scientific rebuke, as Ray Bradbury did in The Martian Chronicles.

Venus somehow inspired less creativity than Mars, perhaps because the dense foggy atmosphere that perpetually hid its surface from view made it seem less hospitable, at least to advanced, intelligent life such as our own. Still, and despite microwave measurements which suggested the planet too hot to be amenable to any life, legions of minds had no problem envisioning all sorts of exotic scenarios for our “sister” world (unlike the smaller Mars, Venus is almost exactly the Earth’s diameter and mass). From vast, swampy jungles, to an ocean-girdling world, to thick seas of hydrocarbons larger than anything on Earth, Venus was often envisioned as a planet as alive as our own.

* * *

All of these visions seemed plausible, even compelling, to imaginative minds right up until the 1960s, when the initial phase of the Great Age of Planetary Exploration blew them all into dust. We – or more precisely our robotic probes, launched into interplanetary space by Cold War ICBMs designed to drop nuclear bombs onto cities teeming with human life – learned that Venus was a searing carbon dioxide encased hell, hot enough to melt lead and with a surface atmospheric pressure equal to almost one kilometer beneath our oceans. Forget life: even our hardiest robots barely lasted an hour under such conditions. As for Mars, our smaller, brother world turned out to be positively welcoming in comparison to our sister, but Schiaparelli and Lowell were shown to be hopeless wishful thinkers; there were no civilizations, no canals, no sentient beings, no beings at all, not even simple plants.

Sometimes what curiosity discovers is that imagination has overreached itself. This is often considered to be curiosity’s downside; I suspect that much of the antagonism towards science comes from just this fact, that in collecting data about the universe we are to some degree destroying our creativity. Thinking about this complaint, I have come to the conclusion that it is not an entirely unfair one. Why do I say this? Because it is true, that in satisfying our curiosity we narrow the range of what “could have been” down into what is, and that is a real loss to real human beings in the real universe. There is no denying this.

At the same time, however, there is an opposite phenomenon which has to be added to the stew. In satisfying our curiosity, we just as often – indeed, perhaps more often – find that our imaginations have been in fact impoverished. It turns out that “there are more things in heaven and earth” than we ever came close to dreaming; that the ocean of actual realities extends far beyond the limiting horizons, out to lands and seas and possibilities we never suspected were out there. The reason I started this chapter with what the last forty years of planetary exploration has found is that nothing could be a better example of this discovery process in action.

Take Mars. The first Mariner photographs were crushing disappointments. Far from being a verdant world, the Red Planet looked more like our moon: crater-pocked, barren, lifeless. There were no signs either of life or any kind of intelligence. Even the atmosphere was less than what we’d hoped: a bare one percent of Earth’s surface pressure, and worse, composed almost entirely our of carbon dioxide, with no free oxygen or water vapor.

But those were just the initial impressions. More Mariner missions, two Viking orbiters and landers, and a slew of other robots hurled at Mars over the last twenty years, not to forget images from the space-based Hubble telescope, have shown it to be a world even more remarkable than we had thought. For one thing, there are amazing geological structures, some of the largest in the solar system: Olympus Mons, the giant shield volcano, is larger than any mountain on Earth several times over, and Cannis Marineris, a Grand Canyon like our own but which would stretch the entire breadth of North America. As for life, Mars now is probably (but not certainly) dead, but it once clearly once had all the elements for life, if several billions of years ago: a thicker atmosphere, warmer temperatures, flowing surface water, a likely abundance of organic or pre-organic molecules. The photographic and chemical evidence, returned from our probes and telescopes, have shown us this past and opened the door to our understanding of it. With some hard work and a little luck, in the coming decade or two we will finally have the answer to the question of whether life on Earth is unique or not, and, by implication, is common in the universe or not. Or if not, why not. Either way, at the very least the ramifications for our own existence are staggering.

This alone could justify the time and energy, and money, spent to satisfy our curiosity about other worlds. But this turns out to be just the beginning. The solar system’s biggest surprises have come in the exploration of the outer planets. It turns out that we knew pathetically little about these worlds and their moons, or the forces that have shaped their evolution. We had a few hints, but we mostly dwelled in ignorance and speculation. Starting in the late 1970s with the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions, then the Voyager and other probes, that ignorance was stripped away in the most spectacular fashion. Pioneer and Voyager returned pictures of worlds far more dynamic than what we had expected, in ways we had not foreseen.

Consider tides. Here on Earth the tidal effects of the moon and, to a lesser degree, the sun, make our oceans rise and fall in gentle cycles. The reasons for tides is a straightforward application of the inverse square law of gravity: the closer two objects are to each other, the more strongly they are pulled together, and so the faster they have to move in their respective orbits to avoid falling into each other. The net result of this dynamic is that the near sides of such objects are moving too slowly and try to fall together, while the far sides are moving too fast and thus want to pull away. On Earth, that means that the oceans on the side facing the moon fall toward it ever so slightly, while the oceans on the opposite side try to drift away. It is a very humble effect, just a few feet, or tens or feet, either way. Nothing to write home about.

Tides can do much than rock the seas of a world, however. The rock comprising Jupiter’s innermost large moon, Io, is largely molten, thanks to the heat generated by tidal forces by both the parent planet Jupiter and the other Galilean satellites. The result is the most volcanically active world in the solar system by far, not excluding Earth. Io’s surface is liberally pocketed by volcanic calderas of all different sizes, which spout sulfur and other molten minerals tens to hundreds of kilometers above and across its surface in a steady rain of debris; a surface so new that it contains not a single impact crater. If the tidal stresses in Io’s guts were just a smidgeon stronger than they are, the world would be literally torn apart by them. That indeed might be Io’s ultimate fate, to be fractured and rendered into a new ring for the giant planet.

The tides are cruelest to Io because it is closest to Jupiter, but they do not leave the other large moons at peace either. The next Galilean satellite, Europa, may prove to be the most intriguing place in the entire solar system outside of our own planet. I must make a brief digression to explain why. Most of the solar system’s matter does not consist of rock and metal but of light elements, such as hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and their various chemical combinations – water, ammonia, methane and a variety of small hydrocarbons – chemicals composed of carbon and hydrogen. In the inner solar system these substances are largely in gaseous or liquid form, making it a challenge for the small worlds (including ours) inhabiting this region to even maintain a hold on them in the teeth of the sun’s fierce radiations and her perhaps fiercer solar wind (a steady stream of electrons, protons, and other particles constantly being blown out by the sun, which can easily blow away weakly held atmospheres) , but starting at the distance of Jupiter the sun’s output is diluted enough to let these substances condense into their solid phases: ices. Starting with Jupiter, ice is not merely a thin coating over rocky worlds and moons but comprises the bulk of these bodies. The most predominant of them is water ice, which at the temperatures prevalent in the outer solar system essentially is rock, albeit a low density kind.

The cores of three of the Galilean satellites, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are normal rock like the inner, “terrestrial” planets’, but they are covered with mantles of liquid and solid water many tens to hundreds of kilometers deep. Europa in particular consists of a relatively thin skin of cue ball smooth water ice over an abyssal ocean far, far deeper than any sea on Earth. Again, it is the tidal kneading of Jupiter and its other moons which generate the internal warmth which keeps this ocean in a liquid phase.

Liquid water is one of the most important ingredients to life on Earth, so wherever else in the universe we encounter it we are also encountering the possibility of life. On Mars the presence of flowing water billions of years ago raises that possibility. What Pioneer and Voyager and later missions have done is show how parochial our thinking on this subject has been. The kilometers-thick water ocean beneath Europa’s and other satellites’ icy surfaces no doubt contain their share of organic and other pre-biotic chemicals, as well as free oxygen, and over the eons of being warmed and mixed in this lightless abode who can say what might have assembled itself? We know little enough about life’s origins here to make all kinds of speculation plausible, speculation that will be answered only by sending more and better probes to that world. By, in short, satisfying our curiosity.

Which leads me again to the most important lesson once again, which is in how in satisfying our curiosity we often broaden our perspectives, not narrow them as critics claim. In reaching out, we find more than we ever thought we would, and our lives become immeasurably richer. This is what our science, our passion to know, has given us.

* * *

The fundamental premise, and primary lesson, of science is that there are no magic fountains of truth. There are no books with all the answers, no machines to solve every problem, no authorities with all the answers, no voices in our heads, no golden compasses or other devices waiting to be opened to spoken to in just the right way. All we have are our own limited senses, our own seemingly unlimited minds, our own hard work and perseverance. And this we find true whatever our questions or whatever mysteries the universe puts before us. Actually, there are no mysteries either: there is only what we have not yet understood, because we have not yet figured out how to explain it.

So we press on resolutely, our feet on the ground and heads down but our eyes always facing forward. And we take the pleasure of learning what we learn, in the steps and pieces that we learn it. It is a process that is, at times, grim. But what it yields is pure treasure.

As amazing as the moons of Jupiter have turned out to be, you have to go out still further to find the most amazing moon of them all. The somewhat smaller planet Saturn and its entourage of satellites orbits the sun at a distance twice that of Jupiter’s and ten times further out than Earth’s from the sun. Still a glare too fierce to be gazed at directly, the sun only provides one percent of the warmth and light here that it shines down on us. Furthermore, the effects of tidal interaction between Saturn and its moons is not as potent a force as it is in the Jovian system: there are no raging volcanoes or vast underground oceans of liquid water (with one possible exception). If anything, compared to Jupiter, the Saturnian system would seem to be a quiet backwater where little of interest might be found. Yet something of the most enormous interest is found right here: Titan.

Titan was known to be unique long before we sent any robots to explore it. Unlike all other moons in the solar system, a star passing behind Titan (an “occultation” in astronomer language) will fade and twinkle briefly before disappearing completely, similar to the way the stars twinkle when seen from Earth’s surface. The reason for both phenomena is the same. Atmospheres will refract and scatter the light that passes through them. Titan is the only satellite in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere; one that is, in fact, considerably more substantial than our own.

This in itself would have made it an object worthy of our curiosity. Atmospheres are living things. They continuously grow and regenerate themselves lest they escape away into space, courtesy of the lightness of their molecules, the temperature, the strength of the solar wind, and other factors. They eventually dissipate when left on their own, though this may take billions of years. On Earth, for example, the nitrogen and oxygen which comprise ninety-nine percent of our atmosphere go through chemical and biological cycles which keep them ever fresh throughout geologic time.

Titan’s atmosphere is not only substantial, it is several times as dense as our own. Also, like Earth’s, it is largely nitrogen: ninety-eight point four percent of it is this gas, as compared to seventy-eight percent here. Even more interesting is the other one point six percent, which is largely hydrocarbons – simple, organic molecules – like methane and ethane. Thanks to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which are still potent at this far reach in the solar system, these hydrocarbons have given rise to even more complicated molecules which comprise the orange smog which permanently hides Titan’s surface from all outside eyes. They also form the basis for clouds and various kinds of precipitation which rain down on this moon’s icy surface, forming the terrestrial equivalent of lakes and rivers.

As a possible womb for life, however, Titan has a problem. Its distance from the sun and shielding cover of hydrocarbon smog mean that the surface temperature here is almost three hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. This is so cold that even the nitrogen comprising the bulk of its atmosphere is on the edge of liquefying. Not only is the water so crucial to life on Earth completely frozen into a thick mantle as on other outer moons, but other molecules important to the life’s beginnings here, such as ammonia and carbon dioxide, would be rock-hard solids at these temperatures as well. Moreover, any chemistry which could happen would occur at a pace that would make a snail look like a jack-rabbit on caffeine. Looking over all these factors, biology would seem to be a non-existing subject on Titan.

We shouldn’t think so narrowly, however. Life does not require water so much as it needs some liquid medium, and as noted, compounds like methane and ethane, gasses on Earth, do exist in liquid form both on Titan’s surface and in its atmosphere. True, any biochemistry would proceed with agonizing slowness, but the solar system has been around for almost five billion years, and that might be just enough time for something to happen. We won’t find anything resembling a … well, even a bacterium is probably pushing it … on Titan, but some kinds of self-replicating entities – the most basic definition of life – might exist there. Or whatever could lead up to such entities under more favorable conditions. Either way, when we do find out, we will certainly learn some lessons applicable to how life came to exist on Earth, what that requires and what must be forbidden for that grand event to occur. All of which makes the time and energy and resources necessary to do the finding out worth it.

* * *

Our robotic exploration of the solar system has rewarded us with much more than volcanoes and canyons and possible new possible niches for life. For one thing, knowing about a place is often the first step to going there; it is certainly a necessary step. I call the last forty plus years the initial phase of the Great Age of Planetary Exploration, and there should be little doubt anymore that that is what it is. The twenty-first century will assuredly see us plant our footsteps on our neighboring worlds, the moon and Mars for certain, and the centuries to come will see their thorough colonization and exploitation.

What about beyond? We have come a long way in our travels in my lifetime, but at the same time, we have hardly begun to crack the door open. I loved astronomy as a child, but what excited me the most were not the planets but the stars. In reading about them, I learned that the stars were other suns like our own, possibly with their own worlds and God-knew-what on them, perhaps, one dared hope, some of them even people like ourselves: either way, it was and is an overwhelmingly staggering thought, especially when you contemplate how many stars there are.

Curiosity will eventually take us to the stars, but this is a journey that will take far longer and require much more resources than exploring our own solar system, because the distances involved are so much vaster, by a factor of a million and more. So much greater that it will change what it means to be human in some ways – though our passion to know will hopefully remain intact. We cannot travel to the stars yet, but their light comes to us, rains down on us in fact from every direction we look. And light is a code which, when unlocked, reveals a universe more amazing than dreams.

The six inch Newtonian reflector telescope I received for my eleventh birthday was a wondrous, magical device. With it, I could easily make out mountains and craters on the moon, view the planets as multi-colored discs along with their larger moons, resolve multiple star systems into their components, and in general enjoy many things of the nighttime sky which the naked eye alone can never see. And yet still the stars are so distant that they remained points of light in the blackness, brighter and more variously colored yes, but points nevertheless. Yet even had that telescope been more powerful a device, the miles of air and dust and water vapor I would still have had to peer through would have smeared my vision with unending twinkling and wavering, rendering it of maddeningly limited use. Even the simple question of whether other stars besides our own possessed planetary systems – and so, possibly, life and intelligence – would have been forever beyond its capacities.

The most powerful telescopes humans have ever built can collect a thousand times and more as much light as my childhood toy. They are perhaps the ultimate monuments to our lust for knowledge and understanding, sitting on their mountaintops above much of our world’s blurring atmosphere and now, in the form of the Hubble Space Telescope, even floating in space entirely beyond it. The ones on Earth wield corrective optics and sophisticated computer software to compensate for atmospheric disturbances. Not only do they gather much more light, but that light can be gathered it over hours, even days, of viewing times and stored it on sensitive electronics to be analyzed and manipulated using other ingenious software packages running on other powerful computers.

Light. It is a substance far more valuable than the most precious of metals (it is also far more mysterious, as Appendix A explains). It’s greatest value is not merely allowing us to see the universe around us, however. If you know how to decipher and decode it, and understand what comes out of doing so, light can tell you almost anything you could ever want to know about whatever you are gazing upon. I’m serious: it is that amazing a substance. For example, the science of spectroscopy, the analysis of light by wavelength, allows us to deduce the chemical composition of an object or substance simply by the light it creates, reflects, or transmits. This feature of light, discovered in the nineteenth century, has given us the elemental compositions of the stars and other astronomical objects, a gift we once thought we would never be granted. Light can also tell us the temperature of things and the ways its constituent atoms are chemically bonded together. Not a bad day’s work for something we take so much for granted.

Human ingenuity and the laws of physics are a dynamic combination which seems to have no limits. The question of whether life and intelligence exist elsewhere in the universe hinges partly on whether planetary systems are common or a unique aberration of our own star. Unfortunately, merely looking through our telescopes, or even recording what comes from them with our most powerful technology, can’t answer this most critical of questions: the light from even the dimmest star is so overpowering that it completely masks the feeble reflected glow of any planets it might own. It’s like trying to pick out a the tiny twinkle of a lit match sitting astride a lighthouse beacon’s full fury.

Until the 1990s, that would have been the beginning and end of the quest. But light holds other secrets for the mind clever enough and determined enough to pry them out and exploit them. One of those secrets, which Edwin Hubble used in the 1920s to show that the universe is indeed expanding as Einstein’s General Relativity (but not Einstein himself) predicted, is the ability to tell how fast an object is moving either toward or away from us. The so-called Doppler effect (see Appendix C for a fuller explanation) is easier described using sound rather than light, but the principle is the same: when a sound-emitting object is approaching us, the distance between sound wave peaks and troughs is shortened because the object has moved part of that distance toward us in the meantime; when moving away from us, the distance is increased for the same reason. Thus, in a standard example, a train whistle’s pitch drops suddenly as the train swoops by us.

The same modification of wavelength happens with light, although it is much smaller (because light travels so much faster). It is also trickier to use in an astronomical setting because, after all, we don’t know what the wavelength of the light is when the object is at rest! This is not a problem in planet-hunting, however, as we shall see. The other piece of cleverness in our scheme lies in the fact that, according to Newtonian physics, two gravitationally bound objects revolve around their common center of mass, a point not precisely at the center of either object; the common notion that the moon revolves about Earth, or Earth about the sun, arises because in these cases the larger object is so much more massive than the smaller that the center of gravity of the system is very close to the center of the larger object.

The basic picture starts to emerge: if a star has planets, then the star itself is revolving around the system’s center of mass. This causes the star to wobble about ever so slightly as its planet(s) revolves about it. We may or may not be able to detect this wobble; it depends on how large it is and, more importantly, the angle of the wobble with respect to us. If the angle causes the star to alternately approach and recede from us, this will give rise to a, albeit very small, Doppler shift of its light from our vantage point. It is this regular, cyclic change in the shift we are interested in, which is why the rest wavelength is not important; from its size and other details, we can infer not only the existence of planets, but their masses and orbits. This, needless to say, is where the main difficulty of the technique comes into play, in the “ever so slightly” aspect of the wobble. Only the most resourceful analysis of a sufficiently large enough set of observational data has a prayer of picking this wobble out from all the other motions of a star and everything else in its vicinity.

* * *

Resourcefulness is something Homo sapiens sapiens has never been in short supply of, and thanks to modern technology data can be almost as astronomical as the stars themselves. Assuming you can get enough time on the instruments, that is. The most powerful telescopes in the world are difficult to get that time with; curiosity combined plus the size of the universe makes for far more research proposals than time will ever permit conducting. As a result, the powers that control access to them must be convinced that it will be spent on something that is both worthwhile and possible to do, and convincing them is itself a challenge for the resourceful.

Whether our solar system, and by implication life and intelligence, is unique in the universe or not is a question that, at the end of the 1980s, appeared to be unanswerable in my lifetime.

Besides, ours was the only solar system we knew of. Straightforward physics suggests that the inner planets of a system should be terrestrial – composed of rock and metal, like Earth – and that the larger, gas and ice worlds will be found further out. Gas / ice worlds such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are largely made from small molecules like hydrogen, helium, water, ammonia, and methane; these substances are volatile and are boiled off a newly forming world if it is too close to its sun, while further out they can condense in enormous quantities as they are by far the most common materials in the solar nebula.

So you expect Jovian worlds to be found only in stately orbits far from a star, if it has any. Nature, happily, has a way of not cooperating with our expectations – and of rewarding our willingness to test them. When the first extra-solar planet was discovered orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi, only some fifty light-years from our own solar system, it stunned the astronomical community only by showing a mass approximately half of our Jupiter’s, while at the same time being in an orbit which was only some five million miles from its sun (as opposed to Earth’s 93 million miles), with an orbital period of only some four and a quarter days. Similar systems were discovered in the ensuing years, also of gas giants in very close proximity to their stars.

In one sense, this should not have surprised us at all. Such planetary systems ought to be the first discovered as they are the easiest to detect: a large planet orbiting close to its sun will produce the largest Doppler shift effect, and hence be easiest to detect. It was just that no one had suspected such systems to exist at all, or at most, to be exceedingly rare. Gas giants, after all, could only form far from their parent stars, otherwise as mentioned the intense stellar radiation and stellar wind will blow the light elements away. Clearly, that was what had happened with Earth’s solar system. So what had gone awry in systems such as 51 Pegasi?

The basic physics of planetary formation are likely to be correct. Therefore, 51 Pegasi b (the official designation of the planet) must have formed at more Jovian-like distances: a good one hundred or so times further out from the present position. Various interactions with other bodies in the system, or even with other stars, have since gradually spiraled 51 Pegasi b in to its current orbit, very close to its sun. This hypothesis is not unreasonable; it was known that planetary orbits could be highly unstable over time spans of billions of years. No doubt, catastrophic interactions with other bodies in the 51 Pegasi system had occurred in this time: smaller, closer, possibly terrestrial (even Earthlike) planets had been bulldozed out of the system permanently, into cold interstellar space.

This just leads to the next question, however. Why has our own solar system been apparently so stable during its four and a half billion years of existence? If anything, the gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn have done us a good turn by sweeping smaller bodies out of the system which otherwise might have collided with us, or herded them into relatively stable asteroid belts. Have we been just incredibly fortunate in this regard? Why didn’t Jupiter eject our own world, not to mention Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the moon into the interstellar abyss?

The number of additionally discovered systems similar to 51 Pegasi have made this question more than a trifling compelling. It suggests that systems harboring life-bearing worlds are rarer than we had supposed, relying on a mixture of luck and physical laws which we still have but an inkling as to their workings. It seems that once again, in our attempts to gratify our curiosity, we have only given it more fodder to feed on. One thing is for certain: repeatedly, we find our attempts to uncover the secret orderings of things to humble us again and again as to how little we still understand. We think we are taking the Russian dolls apart one by one, into ever deeper levels of understanding, only to find ourselves as baffled as when we had begun.

* * *

I am not trying to sound defeated. I do not believe that we are, or will be defeated. Progress in knowledge, in science, does proceed. Little by little, our curiosity is satisfied. It is merely that it never proceeds in the nice, round, little steps we always expect it to. No, there are fits and starts, backtrackings where we seem worse off than when we had begun, strategic retreats here and there before we make the next jump forward. If anything, this makes the whole journey that much more exciting, and fulfilling. At the end of each day, we can sit and watch the sunset, happy in what we have achieved and that much more edgy and restless for what tomorrow might bring. For we know that, like today, it will bring something, just not the nice, neat packages of knowledge that, actually, would have been quite boring to receive, but a mixture of new questions and mysteries with which we can set out for further explorations – with just enough genuine new understanding to leave us feeling satisfied. That is the way of knowledge, the path that curiosity invariably takes us down. Isn’t it one filled with restless throbbing and hope? I believe that it is.

Furthermore, since the discovery of the 51 Pegasi planet, almost fifteen years ago, astronomers have been aiming their instruments at the sky with the hopes finding more planetary systems, and not only that, planetary systems more like our own solar system. And they have been successful well beyond anyone’s expectations. Over the last few years systems have been found with planets more similar to our own; these includes “super-Earths”, which are rocky terrestrial worlds akin to our own, only much larger, and other large planets, similar to our own gas giants but smaller. Some of these worlds have even revealed the tantalizing tastes of substances such as oxygen and water, absolutely essential to life as we know it. It seems quite likely now that over the next ten-twenty years we will discover Earth-like planets circling other stars in our galactic neighborhood. And where there is life, there is certainly the possibility of intelligence.

* * *

Well, I certainly hope I have whetted your appetite for what is to come. At this point, I myself must admit that it is uncertain just what ground I will cover, what areas will be explored, what mysteries will be unveiled. Perhaps that is as it should be. Curiosity is a passion which you never know for certain where it may lead you. You only know it will go somewhere; that there will be a resting spot somewhere in the future you can perch upon and gaze at the territory covered, while the campfire dims and the last of the evening meal lingers on your palette.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.

He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer song 
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the Snake and Newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.