I am a PhD student studying the history of Renaissance natural history focusing on French accounts of Brazil. Chicago born, longtime KC resident, SUNY Binghamton grad student.
I am a Historian of the History of Natural History, or a Stáir ar Stáir an Nádúir in Irish. This means that I study how animals and plants were understood by naturalists in the past, in my case during the mid-1500s, or what I like to call the Late Renaissance. Central to all of this is the fact that the animals I study are all from the Americas, so they were brand new to the French and Swiss naturalists whom I study. In a sense then, natural history seeks to provide a history on human terms for nature. It seeks to bring something so vast as nature down to our level and make it familiar.
In my research this story focuses on the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus), a species of three-toed sloth that’s native to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. It was first recorded in a work of natural history by the Frenchman André Thevet in his 1557 book The Singularities of France Antarctique. Thevet has become famous in the history of natural history for using local names for local animals, rather than calling it a “sloth” he called it a “haüt“, his rendering of the local Tupinambá name. To me this is critical to understanding the History of Natural History, for while you could look at an animal and call it a “sloth” because it moves very slowly another option is to turn to the people who’ve lived alongside it for generations and ask them what they call it. This is what Thevet did.
Last week I got the chance to spend a couple days down in New York City, during which time I wanted to pay a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, arguably one of the preeminent institutions dedicated to the study of nature in this country. It’s a nice enough place, though I’ll admit the exhibits tend to be a bit dated now in 2022. Still, the American Museum offers a good foundation for the layout of such museums around the country. Like its Chicago counterpart, the Field Museum, my favorite such museum, the American Museum has sections focusing on Zoology, Paleontology, Botany, Astronomy, and Anthropology. It seeks to be an encyclopedia of nature in one big building on the edge of Central Park, something it does quite well.
What has struck me the most over the last few years of choosing to visit natural history and science museums in every city that I visit is how all of them try to tell the same story, a history of nature from the Big Bang down to the present. The Field Museum does a wonderful job of capturing this in their Deep Time exhibit, the place where you can find the dinosaurs, in that it begins with that first primordial burst of energy that got everything started and it ends with a wall showing all the species that have gone extinct already in our current age alongside a ticker counting the number of species currently going extinct. We model our natural history on our own history, and frankly our own history is one bookended by a lack of life, whether it be before we exist or after we’ve died.
It’s important that we understand the fact that our perspective is born entirely out of our own experiences. So, we understand the course of time as a linear and finite thing. Past generations have thought of trees and plants as animated creatures like us, while today we recognize they are living if perhaps not as sentient as we animals are. Many among us have understood nature through faith, prescribing that energy which drives all creation to a Creator, a Divine Essence as I like to call the most paradoxical and incomprehensible. (One of these days maybe I’ll release an episode all about the idea and promise of God.)
Thevet understood the sloth to be “most deformed” because of its strange shape and notable slowness. To his perspective it wasn’t a normal creature, natural to its own world yes, but not normal as he understood normal. We still today describe things that are “normal” or “ordinary” as things that we find familiar and comforting. I do it just as much as the next person (see the episode two weeks ago about cultural homogenization). In moderation this is a good thing, it allows us to formulate a baseline, a control, against which we can better understand the unusual and extraordinary around us. The beautiful thing about Nature is as much as our science has made great progress in seeking to describe and understand it, there’s always more out there for us to learn about.
I’m going to leave it there this week. If you haven’t noticed, my voice is failing me today. Let me finish with the thing that I myself will eventually want written as my epitaph (however many decades away that is): stay curious.
Over this last weekend I went to the Twin Cities for the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society. Their conference, always held over Halloween Weekend, was referred to by one attendee on Twitter as “history camp” and that’s certainly one feeling I got out of the experience. I attended to present my own research into how three-toed sloths were initially compared to monkeys in how they were described in the works of the sixteenth-century naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), who got his sloth information from the guy at the center of my research, André Thevet (1516–1590). Looking at the world as a sloth historian means there’s always a lot of work to do, but there also always seems to be plenty of time for naps. Not a bad life, eh?
I’ve always been a frequent traveler from my earliest days. Growing up I was very familiar with air travel; I’ve got to say I miss those old phones they used to have in the back of the center seat in each row. So, traveling as an adult is a bit of a continuation of something I’ve enjoyed throughout my life, only more so on my terms. I’ll book a first or business class seat from time to time if I get the chance, as in my trip home a month ago, but perhaps the biggest thing I’ve gotten down is a routine for travel. I don’t have a “go bag” necessarily, but I have gotten the packing down to maximum 30 minutes for most trips.
These last few years in Binghamton have made travel a bit more complicated than any of my previous trips leaving from Chicago, Kansas City, or London. Binghamton has a local airport, but with only 1 flight per day at the moment to Detroit, a flight that is pretty expensive on most days, so it’s not my first choice. Rather, over the last three years I’ve driven at least an hour to either Scranton, Syracuse, Albany, Newark, or last weekend to LaGuardia to fly to that trip’s destination further afield. I’ve gotten used to the 3 hour drives between Newark and Binghamton, though there are times that I’ll wish I’d flown to a closer airport, especially after my one long haul transatlantic flight that got into Newark after 9 pm, seeing me return to Binghamton at midnight after flying 8 hours from Germany.
I learned early on in the Boy Scouts that what you pack you have to carry, no matter how far that hike will end up being. Because of this, I’ve learned to travel light. My biggest suggestion here is figure out how many clothes and shoes you really need to bring on a given trip. In my own case I’ll usually have the total number of travel days + 1 of underclothes, with a couple shirts, trousers, and sweaters that I can rotate through over a 3 or 4 day trip, and one pair of shoes which I’ve found are better carried in a tote bag separate from the backpack where everything else is, that way when I arrive my clothes don’t smell like my gym shoes. If necessary, as in this conference trip or the family funeral I flew home for last month, I’ll usually wear the suit I intend to wear for the big event (my panel or the ceremony) on the plane, that way it’s not getting wrinkled in my bag. On this trip to the Twin Cities, I did bring a winter coat, folded compactly into my bag alongside all my other clothes and toiletries in that bag. It turned out to be useful to bring that coat, even though it wasn’t ever really cold while I was on the ground in Minnesota (a rare thing), as I was able to put on that coat instead of the suit jacket on several occasions when I wanted to go explore the area, as in my afternoon visit to the Bell Museum’s dioramas across the river from Downtown Minneapolis.
A mammoth at the Bell Museum
The same logic applies to any souvenirs I might want to bring back with me. Anything I buy on the ground has to return in my bag that was already fairly full upon arrival. With this in mind the only new things I returned with were a stack of receipts for funding purposes, some notes from my panel, the conference program, and a printed version of the script for my presentation. I didn’t buy any souvenirs this time around at any of the museums, nor any other knick-knacks while I was there. Again, anything I have with me upon leaving has to either be left behind or carried in my bag for the entire return trip.
That return trip ended up being 15.5 hours long. I was traveling with my good friend Marco Ali’ Spadaccini from the History Department here at Binghamton, and we initially were set to wake up on our return travel day, Halloween, at 3:30 am Central to catch our 7:00 am flight. The first catch appeared when our first flight from MSP to Chicago-Midway was cancelled without any notice as to why. So, at 3:30 am we discovered we were instead leaving Minnesota on an 8:55 am flight to St. Louis. I wasn’t able to go back to sleep, thus starting my own travel clock then at 3:30 am. After getting an Uber to MSP Airport we caught our first flight on time and landed a few minutes early at St. Louis’s busy Lambert Field, where we had a quick hour connection to our flight to LaGuardia. That plane also arrived in New York a few minutes early, which meant in the end after our 3.5 hour drive from LaGuardia back to Binghamton through the Catskills, I returned to my apartment at 7:00 pm instead of 7:30 or 8:00 pm like I had predicted.
At this point I’m used to long travel days, it’s become more of a common thing for me in recent years coming to Binghamton, but even returning to Kansas City can be a taxing experience with the frequent need for connections going into an airport that as of now doesn’t host an airline hub. On this trip Marco and I considered traveling to Minneapolis by train and by car, both would’ve taken longer than flying, though Apple Maps’ estimated drive time was only 90 minutes longer than what it actually took us to fly between MSP and LaGuardia and then drive from Queens up to Binghamton. By train the trip would’ve taken us 30 hours with one connection between the Lake Shore Limited and the Empire Builder in Chicago, but the real kicker to that idea was the $3,000 price tag for two sleeper tickets roundtrip. Flying became the most economical option, and in the end, it was better that I was only fully focused on driving for a good 4 hours getting to LaGuardia rather than a full 17 hours trying to drive the entire route to the conference hotel in Minneapolis.
This was my last fly-away trip from Binghamton, the last in a long line of such trips that I’ve taken since arriving here in August 2019. I think back to one of my first, the trip 3 years ago this weekend to the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in St. Louis, when on the return journey I had a 4 hour connection at O’Hare. That day was the first time that I really felt like a business traveler rather than a guy off on another adventure. It’s a feeling I got throughout this trip too.
One of my favorite YouTubers is J.J. McCullough, a Vancouver-based political columnist for The Washington Post who creates videos discussing topics of culture, politics, and society here in North America. In the summer he made a video discussing the topic of cultural homogenization, of how all cities here in the US and Canada tend to have a fair number of similar things going on. It’s a thesis that I agree with, though with some hesitancy.
I for one am happy with this idea that you can go to any major city in these two countries today and generally feel rather familiar with your surroundings. It’s why I’ll often prefer to stay in chain hotels over smaller super-local B&Bs or even use Air BnB or VRBO when I’m traveling. I like the fact that I know what to expect in a hotel room from the generic furniture to having the same soaps and shampoos to having the same set up with the TVs. When I travel, I’m not traveling to spend my time in a hotel, rather I want that consistency as somewhere I can return to and feel familiar in after a day of going around a city that I may not know quite as well.
Likewise, on the long drives I’ve done four times a year for the past 3 years between Kansas City and Upstate New York, I’ve often mentioned along the way that I feel at home in the suburbs of the various cities I tend to stop in. In particular, my usual overnight hotel in Columbus felt quite familiar, in part thanks to its modern décor and highly suburban surroundings, far more so than Binghamton, NY where I’ve been working on my PhD. This has led me to often remark that leaving Columbus is like leaving the familiarity I’ve come to know and appreciate in the urban Midwest as I head into the Appalachians of New York.
The biggest difference here that I’ve noticed between Binghamton and the other American cities I’ve lived and worked in––Chicago & Kansas City––is that Bing has had a rougher recent economic history than either of the two. While Chicago was able to survive the decline of older industries in the Great Lakes Region, aka the Rust Belt, through its sheer size and the diversity of its economy, and while Kansas City has had a renaissance of its own in the last twenty years to the point that it is today a thriving, growing metropolis with ever increasing opportunities, Binghamton has never really had the size or the economic diversity to stay as strong throughout the bad last few decades of outsourcing jobs and closing down old factories in some of these older towns and cities in the Northeast. There are some hints of this continental North American culture here in Binghamton and in Broome County more broadly, just look at the national chains that line Vestal Parkway, but in its current state I argue that this city has far more in common with the other old industrial centers of the Northeast, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania that have seen their main industries move away within the last 40 years than it does with the broader North American culture.
Still, there are moments when I’ll be driving around suburban Broome County where I’ll find myself remarking how similar the houses are to some of the older Cook County suburbs of Chicago, albeit built in a valley surrounded by what the US Geological Survey calls “small mountains.” I myself am a child of the western DuPage County suburbs of Chicago, and after moving grew up on the far western edge of Kansas City, Kansas, whose older neighborhoods to the east are equally similar in their character and in the age of the buildings to some places here in Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott.
In seeing those similarities I’m seeing the broad cultural trends of a century ago. Just as today there are particular architectural styles that are in fashion across this continent, from the renovation of old urban industrial buildings into lofts to the big glass buildings that mark the styles of the later 2000s and into the 2010s, a time when after the worst of the Great Recession had passed, I do think in retrospect we’ll say was a time of optimism, however short it ended up being.
In the media I consume, I’ve often found it interesting that I’ll prefer to watch the national evening news broadcasts over the local news. In my own case I’m a PBS Newshour guy, and there’s something about watching that broadcast that I know millions of other people around the U.S. are also watching, and that it’s coming from a studio in in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. (a place I know very well), that makes me feel like I’m a part of a wider community. The same goes for watching Jeopardy! every weeknight. It’s a show that I know a big number of people watch from all living generations, and it’s 30 minutes a day when I can feel like I’ve got something in common with all of them. I don’t otherwise watch much popular TV, and when I do watch shows that’ll catch the headlines like the recently released Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I often have to ignore those same headlines and subreddits for how negative they often become. In those moments, that hour a week, I want to enjoy the story and not be caught up in what other people might think about it.
Our world is built on mass-production in every sense of the word. We wouldn’t be able to sustain the lifestyles we lead, nor our current population, without industrialization. So, while I will go on a limb and try out the local cuisine when I’m traveling, whether that’s crab cakes in Maryland or the breakfast burritos in Austin, I still like to see what my usual staples are like in a given place. I’ll freely admit to preferring to get a burger or pizza or chicken when I’m doing overnight stops in cities in part because after a day of traveling, I don’t want to be as adventurous, yet also because I can use that baseline, that control, to see how they do the same sorts of meals in a given restaurant in one city and compare it to all the others I’ve tried that in. In some cases, like at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage in Cambridge, Massachusetts it was a wonderful choice, in others like at many of the places I’ve ordered burgers at higher altitude in the Rockies, it’s been a poor choice seeing as I’m less of a fan of well-done beef.
Yet with all this mass-production it strikes me as funny that we often have our very particular ways of distinguishing ourselves, from monograms to those new Facebook avatars, that are themselves mass-produced. I first started seeing this style of monogram, one large letter surrounded by two smaller letters, when I was in college. They often became near logos for the people who used them, yet those very personal symbols were themselves created from templates and used by millions of other people. I did the same thing with the logo for this podcast, which I chose out of a set of templates as a matter of convenience when I was creating it, my own meager attempts at making a logo had all been rejected by Anchor’s formatting.
When it comes to some of the very local sayings that J.J. mentioned, like the often-heard Kansas Citian remark, “if you don’t like the weather just wait five minutes,” it’s something I’ve also heard in many other cities. When I moved to London, I found that our North American customs surrounding weather & seasons made a lot more sense there. The dates when we demarcate our seasons, Winter & Summer starting at the solstices, Spring & Fall at the Equinoxes, makes sense in Europe. It doesn’t make sense here in North America where the weather fluctuates dramatically within a given day. Even now, I’m wearing short sleeves on a 66ºF (19ºC) day in Upstate New York and watching the leaves now past their Fall peak begin to be blown off the trees by the impending winter air. Last week, by comparison, I was wearing thick wool sweaters, wool socks, with a coat, hat, and gloves when outside. Our weather makes a lot more sense when you think of it continentally, after all no one place is entirely separated from everywhere else in North America when it comes to the weather. The snow that strikes the Dakotas one day could well fall in the Mid-Atlantic States a day or two later.
I love Kansas City, and Chicago, the two cities I consider to be my hometowns. I love the things they do that are different from other cities, like Chicago’s hot dogs, Italian beef, and deep dish, or Kansas City’s barbecue. They are the two cities where my own experiences, and my family’s American experience has played out, both in their old urban neighborhoods and in the postwar suburban sprawl where I grew up. I appreciate all the things they have in common, things which they share with much the rest of the metropolitan cities of North America. That’s what’s made places like St. Louis, Denver, Columbus, Indianapolis, suburban Maryland & Virginia, and even Toronto feels like a place where I could settle down. I’ve heard Toronto referred to as a cleaner version of Chicago. It’s what’s made the big merging metros of the Northeast––Philly, New York, and Boston––feel less foreign to me than the cities that lie between them and the Midwest.
I’m happy that we have so much in common in this time when we seem so set on dividing ourselves into parties and camps constantly at odds with each other. Our commonalities demonstrate how much we depend on one another.
When I returned to Binghamton after a trip home at the beginning of October, I was stunned to see the leaves had changed over that weekend that I was away. The deep green of late summer had been overcome on the trees by the creeping wave of red, gold, and orange that danced down from the highest elevations and into the Susquehanna Valley until the forests surrounding this valley became a sea of radiant color. It’s the first Fall that I’ve spent here where the leaves have changed so early, let alone so fully before winter’s wind inevitably blows in from the north and strips the trees of their leaves for the season.
All my life, I’ve enjoyed the chance to live in circumstances that kept me somewhat removed from the natural world around me. I’ve grown up in air-conditioned houses in the warm months and well-heated houses in the cold months. I’ve been able to escape from Winter’s grasp and travel to warmer places, as in last Fall’s trip to San Diego for the Sixteenth Century Society Conference, which this year is being held in the far less tropical climate of Minneapolis. As such my expectations of how my body would react to different temperatures and circumstances has been transformed by my own upbringing far more secluded from nature.
So, for the couple of weeks every Spring and Fall when my Dad would insist we open the windows in our house and turn off the A/C, I’d find myself in a new form of agony as with the open air flowing through my normally secluded indoor spaces I had no refuge from my seasonal allergies. They honestly felt worse when I was younger than they do today, even though now as I write this, I am feeling their effects well and truly. By living apart from the whims of nature, I was not acclimated to it. All this made my seasonal allergies all the worse.
Often the two biggest weekends on the Kansas City Irish community’s social calendar, St. Patrick’s Day & Irish Fest, are also two weekends when my allergies rise to their worst levels. In part that’s because they fall right at the changing of the seasons, Irish Fest at the end of Summer at the beginning of September and St. Pat’s because it’s right at the end of Winter and beginning of Spring. In the last few years, I’ve learned a great deal from living in an apartment without any built-in air conditioning, and from having to self-medicate when my allergies return, and as such I’d say they’re not as bad as they ever were during my teenage years.
Yet amid all the sniffling and sneezing there is a lesson to be found here. We are foolish to think we can truly divorce ourselves from Nature, from the very complex web of life of which we are an intrinsic part. We need to recognize that our bodies are going to change with the seasons. And in our time where travel is far easier than ever before, where you could be on the far side of the planet in an entirely different environment in a matter of hours, we need to recognize that our bodies will need time to catch up with their new surroundings. I’ve often wondered during my many trips in Britain and Ireland if it’s possible that I as the descendant of immigrants from those two islands might have some built in genetic strength when it comes to the allergens native to those two places? That statement could be entirely false, after all I’m not someone who studies this sort of stuff, but it’s still something I’ve often wondered. The climates in my own hometowns of Chicago and Kansas City are nothing like those of Ireland or Britain, leading me to wonder if my own biological predispositions to certain places hasn’t kept pace with my own family’s migrations from Europe to North America. It remains a question of mine.
Winter’s chill is fast approaching. This morning I pulled out one of my thickest Irish wool sweaters and may even put on a pair of wool socks to keep the chill to a minimum. I could turn up the heater in my apartment from 65ºF where it’s currently set to around 68ºF but putting on extra layers is more cost efficient. Like my Dad has done throughout my life, now as an adult I’m open to the idea of keeping the heater off for as long as possible and opening the windows if the weather suggests it. With our climate changing overall, and often warming, it’s been suggested that by the middle of the century Kansas City’s climate will be more like that of Dallas today. This means perhaps milder winters but far hotter summers. I may be cold now, but I know in 7 to 8 months I’m going to be sweating again as the summer heat returns. And when it does return, I’m sure my body will react in ways that annoy me, like the stomach aches I get when I eat chocolate when it’s either too hot or too humid, a relatively new thing for me in the last few years. We’ve created that new world for ourselves, a world where the old web of life is reworked to fit a warmer planet. It leaves me wondering how my seasonal allergies will change, or will they like the weather in recent years become only more extreme?
This July, while I was preparing for the Longest Commute, I made my usual pre-trip browse of the audiobooks available on Audible that I might be interested in listening to during the long hours in the car. On this particular trip I had even more driving time than usual to listen to books, podcasts, and music as I made my way through the varied scenery of the Midwest, South, and Northeast. I already had a biography of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on my listening list, and there were other books I’d downloaded for previous long drives that I had yet to touch such as a memoir by actor Cary Elwes about his time making The Princess Bride. But I wanted something that related to the trip itself, something to get me even more excited about the things I’d be seeing along the way.
I settled on an Audible original called The Space Race which tells the history of NASA and Roscosmos from the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 up into our current generation of public and private spaceflight agencies and companies competing and cooperating in our continued reach for the stars. The whole story was narrated by Kate Mulgrew, an actress I know best from her role as Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager and seeing her name on the billing was among the reasons why I chose this particular thing to listen to. I won’t call it a book, it was more of a series of radio shows with a combination of narration, talking heads, and scenes set in the next century.
Those scenes, the ones set in the future are the ones I want to talk to you about today. They posit that the only way humans can ever hope to reach a habitable planet orbiting our closest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, would be by a generational ship, one where the original passengers’ grandchildren would be the ones to set foot on that planet, and would only be possible through genetic engineering to ensure that those humans who made it there would be well suited to the environment they found and would soon call home, after all any trip that takes three generations to complete would have no path of return.
I for one am eager to see humanity reach beyond Earth and our Moon towards Mars and beyond. We have the potential to do really tremendous things, to learn so much from those experiences about our universe and about ourselves. Why else would TV series and films like the ones from Star Trek be so intriguing to me? They offer us a vision of a future where our introduction to our cosmic neighborhood makes us better people and ushers in a veritable golden age here on Earth. Why would that not be a thrilling prospect?
I listened to the last few scenes of The Space Race while I was driving east along I-10 in the Florida Panhandle, and the moment when they acknowledged that in the world of their story that genetic engineering would be necessary for such a voyage, I felt chills. So, let me ask you this question: if the purpose of exploration at any scale is both extroverted and by equal measures introspective, if the curiosity at the heart of any exploration is a part of what makes us human, then to what lengths should we go to satisfy that curiosity? Should we go as far as to transform our very genetic code, the most essential biological parts of who we are?
This is a question I really worry about. I’m as much an everyday explorer as anyone else, yet there are limits for me as to how far I’m willing to go to satisfy my curiosity; I don’t know that I would want to push myself to such a point that I’d be willing to change who I am just to see over the next horizon. We are who we are because of so many complex and intricate pieces to our identities. Untangle any of those threads and are we still the same person? It makes logical sense that future explorers would consider adapting themselves to the environment of the planet they’re seeking to visit, yet among the things that make us human are our roots to this our home planet. What would the humans who first set foot on that alien world be like if they have no memory of their own world?
If we are to engineer ourselves in any way to adapt to life as a spacefaring or interplanetary species, then let it be technological rather than biological engineering. Let’s create the habitats we would need to survive on Mars so that we can travel to other worlds as ourselves and not as some engineered offshoot of humanity growing ever distant from the source. Let’s take with us our collective memory of all our triumphs and our faults. Let’s bring our stories & music, our proclivities & our imperfections with us for they are what make us human.
And if our explorers should meet anyone out there who is just as curious about the unknown as we are then let them meet us as we are. Let them see us for who we are. Let them see both our problems and our possibilities.
If there are any reasons why I find myself drawn to Galileo, this distant Italian astronomer who lived 400 years ago it’s that we have two things in common: we’re both stubborn and occasionally grumpy. I’ve known the basics of Galileo’s story for most of my life; he was an astronomer who was born in Florence and worked in the Venetian Republic at the University of Padua who was one of the first to use a telescope to look out into the night sky, making him the first to observe the Galilean moons of Jupiter, collectively named today for the man himself. His support of Copernicus’s heliocentric model––that the Earth revolves around the Sun––contributed to his falling out with the Papacy and his eventual arrest and trial by the Roman Inquisition who put him under house arrest for the last few decades of his life.
Of course, the real story isn’t quite that simple, after all many of his opponents agreed in principle with what he was arguing, they just didn’t like how he argued it. Still, Galileo’s contributions to science and to human knowledge of our cosmos overall are undeniable. In the last few weeks, I’ve thought about Galileo quite a bit as Jupiter has come the closest to Earth in its orbit for the first time in decades. I got a good look at Jupiter both through a telescope and with my own eyes on Friday night a few weeks ago up at the Kopernik Observatory and even was able to take a better-quality picture of it than I’ve gotten before with my phone.
Jupiter as seen with an iPhone camera on the 4th Friday in September at the Kopernik Observatory in Vestal, NY. Photo: Seán Kane.
I see in Galileo an inspiration of sorts because of the things he did. He was able to prove that the Moon wasn’t perfectly spherical by observing the shadows of the crater walls (what he called mountains) on the lunar surface. Using those shadows, the effects of the lunar geography, Galileo could prove the existence of something he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to see. It’s like how when it rains the best way to actually see the raindrops falling on your head is to look at them with a dark background like a tree or a darker-colored house. Otherwise, the water droplets will blend in with the ambient colors surrounding them. Likewise, we can see the Moon and the planets because it’s the light of our Sun shining on them that is reaching us here. The Moon doesn’t light itself up, nope, nor does the Earth, rather it’s the Sun that naturally does the job.
Here lies an interesting development in this story: the Sun lights up the Earth during the day, but the Earth is now still lit up at night. Only a few generations ago our ancestors figured out how to use electricity to light up our lives and turn the darkness of night into something new entirely. As long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by this idea, that even at night some places are well lit. I wonder today if our cities might even be built with night in mind, if there’s more artistry in the architecture when the buildings are lit up by electricity rather than by the Sun’s rays? Certainly, we have more control over how our buildings are lit in this context rather than during the daytime. One of my favorite ways to experience a museum is after dark when all the lighting being done has been devised by an exhibit designer trying to control all aspects of how the exhibit is lit through their own lighting patterns. The British Museum does a really awe-inspiring job with lighting the Parthenon Marbles in such a way that their great shadows climb up the walls of their room making them seem even larger-than-life than they already are.
Still, in Galileo’s day before electric lighting they could see more of the night sky. It’s a sign of the world that we live in that it wasn’t until my 28th year that I actually saw the band of the Milky Way up in the night sky. Even in my youth growing up on the farm on the western edge of the Kansas City metro I never saw it. I think seeing the night sky in all its splendor gives us a chance to reconnect with our past before our industrialized modern world, to reconnect with the lights that illuminated our ancestor’s nights and memories. I’ve talked before here about how profound it seemed to me to be able to see light from Vega that had left that star when I was a child, well the same is true for seeing the same moons of Jupiter that Galileo first saw in 1610 from his telescope in Padua.
As winter approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere we’ll get to see a lot more of the night sky. The days are already here when the sun is setting in Binghamton during dinner time. The fall chill is in the air. It amazes me that October is already upon us, after all it feels like we were just in August; but then again, I probably say the same thing a few times every year. When I was little and first learning the names of the months in school, I remember being given worksheets that included pictures for each month to personify that time the better to remember it by. March was shown as a lion, April as a storm cloud, and May as a flower. In the Fall, September was a tree having reached its fullest bloom after the summer heat, and October was a collection of fallen leaves surrounding a Jack-o-Lantern.
I wonder how Galileo would’ve personified those months, or if he even would’ve thought of doing that? The month of my birth, December, is often associated with the beginning of the Holidays, in my tradition of Christmas specifically. Yet it’s also often thought of as the beginning of winter even though the worst of the winter cold and snows don’t come until January. Yet the seasons here in North America are different than those in Europe; in fact, I found that our months and seasons make more sense in Britain than they do in America where the weather changes at a more expected time than its fluctuations here in America allow. In my Midwestern home I’ve experienced Halloweens in the snow and Halloweens in summer conditions. In my year living in London though, admittedly now a heat island, when it got cold in October it stayed cold until March.
How different then is our world from Galileo’s? How much has our industry and development changed the world we live in? And how different will the world be at the end of this century from the world I knew as a child at the end of the last century? These are all questions I’m going to leave you with today.
I’ve always been someone who has a hard time focusing on the world around me in the immediate aftermath of leaving a cinema. The story played out before my eyes in rich and large visual colors and resounding about my ears in the surround sound systems used in modern cinemas is entrapping and beguiling to say the least. Every film I have ever gone to see, that I can remember, has been met by this same internal thought process as soon as the picture ends and I wander back out into the lobby. I imagine myself in the story, in its settings, walking and talking with its characters. I guess I’ve always been a bit of a day dreamer.
I’ve also been a storyteller for much of my life. Much of those energies that were once spent inventing fabulous fables of remote realities and fantasies in my youth are now often spent trying to think through my professional writing, both here at The Wednesday Blog and in my research. Still, I do like to daydream from time to time. I find it helps me focus on the good things in life. Those dreams are less extraordinary than they used to be, they are populated less by characters from the books and films I enjoy than by my own hopes for the future, however domestic and ordinary those hopes may be.
In recent months as I’ve allowed more of the dolor of our times creep into my thoughts, I’ve found my ability to daydream has become less and less pronounced. Maybe that’s what C. S. Lewis meant in The Last Battle when he said that of all the Pevensie children, the only one not to return to Narnia in its last days was Susan because she had grown up and didn’t believe in those stories anymore. Yet this fading ability to daydream has left me somewhat bereft. I find I’m less able to write when I can’t imagine a happy future. I’m less able to tell the stories I know both recent and quite ancient when I can’t imagine my own near and distant future. So, I hold onto that need for dreams, and do my best to keep that fire of my imagination alive despite the troubles of our time and the worries seemingly inherent in adulthood.
Over the last few weeks since I returned to Binghamton, I decided to watch a series of films that I loved as a child but hadn’t seen in full for at least a decade. Yet now with the extended editions of The Lord of the Ringson HBO Max I figured it’d be fun to see them again, and not only to remember them as I knew them years ago, but to relive those stories as an adult with everything that I know now guiding my eyes and ears through that modern epic. I often like to think of these sorts of stories that I enjoy, whether they be Tolkien’s legendarium or the near future of Star Trek, along the same general continuum of time and thought. Yet I quickly found myself asking the question, “how can these stories of a far distant past fit into what I know of the world and its origins?” The rational thinker in me posed a fundamental question about suspending disbelief.
So, how do I rationalize these stories of some ancient primordial past just before the dawn of human memory when we weren’t the only such people to walk this Earth? That after all is the setting of The Lord of the Rings, a time long lost when the Earth was young. There are plenty of old stories that tell of an age when humans lived alongside more supernatural creatures, whether they be the monsters and demigods of Greek mythology or the Tuatha Dé Dannán of the distant Irish mythic past. Tolkien set his stories in this same vein, they are a modern recreation of those old myths, those old epics & sagas that he loved so much. And those stories come from a different world than our own, one where the long history of the Earth cannot be explained by evolution or science, but where all things are created through divine music, described in the opening of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.
I for one do feel that there’s still a way to balance the old stories with the new. Our modern narrative for the creation of the Universe, of which the creation of the Earth and all life upon it is but a small verse, is yet another one of these stories. Yet among all the stories our modern one, our new one, is grounded in an understanding of the rational roots of Creation; it sings less of God and angels, supernatural spirits guiding the world into being, and more of Creation urging itself into existence through the very energy that burns at the heart of all things. I still think there’s room for these old stories in our new one, there’s room for us to acknowledge and embrace ancient interpretations of how we came to be in that we are richer for knowing what our ancestors thought and believed.
Tolkien’s stories are beautiful in their own way. They echo the great myths and sagas of the myriad cultures of Europe. They remind me of the Penguin translations of the old Irish myths that I read as a boy and could recite from memory today. Suspending disbelief allows us to let ourselves go from our lives, even for a few moments, and experience something incredible that we otherwise would not.
As The Return of the King finished on the evening of Labor Day, I found myself wondering what different characters from the Star Trek series would think of The Lord of the Rings and its characters. What would Spock make of the elves and their similar anatomy to his own Vulcans? What would Worf make of the fierce warriors of Rohan steeped in their honor charging to certain death before the walls of Minis Tirith? What can I learn from these two different yet similar stories of people trying to make their world a better place? I think the answer lies in the question. I’m drawn to stories such as The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek because they offer hope even in the darkest of times. The Hobbits prove that even the smallest among us can save the world, and Star Trek offers us today a vision of a better tomorrow that may still come. And if I need to suspend disbelief, if I need to shake the scales of my worldly cynicism from my eyes in order to see those two hopeful lights in the darkest night, then it’s worth doing.
I first started watching Star Trek a month before the first waves of the pandemic hit the U.S. early in 2020. I knew a fair bit about the characters of the different series and some of the overarching stories, so when Star Trek: Picard was released in February 2020 I figured I wanted to see what it was all about. Thus began the next two years of my life in terms of TV viewing. Since then, I’ve gone all in and seen the entirety of the first two seasons of Picard, with a third coming in February 2023, as well as all seven seasons of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, all four seasons of Enterprise, and what’s so far been released of Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds. I’m now watching the original series, Star Trek starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelly that aired between September 1966 and June 1969 on NBC.
Like with the other Trek series, I’ve found the characters relatable and enjoyable to watch. I’ve also found some of the futuristic settings and technologies depicted on the show inspirational to my own imagination as a storyteller. Yet I’ll freely admit I find this series harder to get excited about compared to the later Trek series released in the ’80s,’90s, and 2000s, perhaps because this original Star Trek sought to depict the future of the late 23rd century as the 1960s dreamed it might be, whereas the later series looked to the late 24th century as the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s aspired it to be. Being a child of the ’90s and 2000s, that post-Cold War worldview fits my own far more closely than the background surrounding the Original Series during my parents’ childhood in the ’60s.
Still, when I do get into an episode of the first of these shows, I often find I do like the stories. They’re in the same spirit as other mid-century sci-fi shows that I’ve always admired like The Twilight Zone or the older William Hartnell era Doctor Who serials. What’s more, the vibrant colors used to light the sets of Star Trekalways catch my eye in a way that keeps me focused on the action of the story.
So, a few months ago when I learned there was a recreation of the sets of the Starship Enterprise in a building in Ticonderoga, New York, I knew I had to pay a visit. I arranged things with my good friend Alex Brisson, and we made a weekend trip out of it, visiting the Star Trek: The Original Series Set Tour around noon on Saturday, 17 September. The sets were built by a local guy named James Cawley, who interned on the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation at Paramount. Over the intervening years, the team in Ticonderoga have built with meticulous detail the sets of that original Enterprise as they appeared on the soundstages at Desilu Studios in the late ’60s. In many ways, the tour is both an opportunity for fans to experience walking on board the Enterprise as much as it is for film and TV buffs like myself to see what a TV set from the ’60s would have looked like.
When we walked on the bridge and saw all the stations set out in their circle, the captain’s chair in the center of the room, most of the people in our tour were hushed, a sense of respect among us. I got a chance to sit in the chair, as did everyone there, and I’ll admit the picture of me sitting there looks a fair bit deer-in-headlights as I couldn’t decide what to focus on with so much around me to see. For me, the original Trek isn’t necessarily the show that I prefer the most, that’d have to be Deep Space Nine with Next Generation and Voyager close behind it, but it spoke to a common thread in my life over the past two years as I’ve continued with my own work and studies while in the evenings taking an hour or two to watch another story set a few centuries down the line.
I think the thing that has kept me so interested in Star Trek is how aspirational it is. Unlike so many other futuristic films and shows out there, in the stories told here humanity has figured out how to get out of our cycles of violence and greed and work with the best parts of our nature to achieve the closest we could ever come to returning to Paradise here in our own mortal lives. They are stories that say, “no matter how bad things may be now, no matter how much the pandemic and all the other troubles that came out of it have become, there’s always hope.”
I’ve always been one to trust in the fundamental goodness of humanity, it’s an idea that really does have some deep roots in my Catholic faith, as well as in my lived experiences. I’ve been fortunate to live the life I’ve led so far, in the places I’ve lived and with the people I’ve known, family and friends who I’ve loved. The seeds of a better future are laid in that fertile soil of hope. Had I grown up in the midst of the wars that my country waged over the last 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq or in a country with less opportunities for success than my own, my worldview would likely be quite different. Yet if we are going to ever get out of this mire we’ve been in for so long, our adolescence as a species as Carl Sagan put it in his novel Contact, then we’ve got to let our hope for a better tomorrow guide us just as much as our cynicism and bad memories of past wrongs guide us now.
In the future that Star Trek depicts humanity finally begins to overcome our faults in the last half of the current century when first contact between humans and an alien species, in this case Vulcans, occurs. Our technology, and their helping hand (however hesitant it may be) moves humanity up from an age of nation states and superpowers battling each other for supremacy and resources on Earth and into a new age where humanity is one small island in the great ocean of Space, learning to live amid our galactic neighbors, and finally contributing to the creation of a Federation of Planets in the mid 22nd century that brings about a new Golden Age of sorts not just to us on Earth but to many other worlds floating in this cosmic sea.
It’s fiction, I’m well aware of that. It’s a collection of stories dreamed up by writers and showrunners over the past six decades that could very well remain stories in our cultural memory. But maybe there is some room for our future to be more peaceful, more prosperous, and more equitable than our present is or our past ever has been. In the decades since Star Trek first premiered in 1966 so many technologies inspired by the shows have become realities from tablets to personal communicators to now virtual reality taking the place of the holodecks and holosuites of the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. I’ve been drawn to these stories because they came at just the right time for me. I began watching Voyager in the long dark winter of 2021 when I was preparing for my Comprehensive Exams. That winter, being so far from home and so isolated by the continuing pandemic, I found the story of a lone ship lost 70,000 light years from home to resound with my own situation. These are stories that laud curiosity and teamwork, and while just stories with the odd bizarre plot or weekly new alien with different nose ridges, they offer us a vision of what our world could be like.
After I released my previous episode “Summer School in Irish” back at the beginning of August, I had a good conversation with one of my best friends and one of my most frequent listeners, past Wednesday Blog guest Alex Brisson, about the utility of keeping smaller languages like Irish alive. How do these languages benefit humanity when we’re moving toward a time of greater linguistic conformity, when there are a handful of global human linguae francae, such as English, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and French (the official languages of the United Nations)?
I responded by lauding the beauty of Irish, by the fact that Irish helps the speaker understand the nature and world around them differently. Take the phrase Tá mé i ngrá leat for example. This means “I love you,” though not quite in the same sense as the English. In English, there’s the subject “I” who’s doing an action “love” to the object “you.” This is the same way that this sentiment is expressed in many other languages from German “Ich liebe dich” to French “Je t’aime” to Spanish’s “Yo te amo” or more simply “Te amo.”
Irish, on the other hand takes a less forceful approach, instead having the subject “mé” being in a state of love ” i ngrá” with the object “leat.” Thus, in Irish the expression Tá mé i ngrá leat says less that one person is expressing love toward another and more that both people are in a state of love with each other, a model of relationship that I personally prefer far more. Losing a language like Irish loses this elegant worldview, it takes away one particular means of understanding how one group of humans has long perceived the world around them.
Another way that Irish does things differently from English is in the use of a habitual copular verb. In plain English this means there’s a version of “to be” that expresses an action that’s done on a regular basis, so Bím ag scríobh colún gach seachtain a The Wednesday Blog atá air. | I write a column every week which is called The Wednesday Blog. This particular verbal construction of Bím rather than the present active tense Tá mé as seen in the last example helps express the regularity of the action, the writing of the blog and podcast itself. It demonstrates that I, Seán, am on a weekly basis writing this string of ideas which you, dear reader or listener, then choose to read or listen to. It also offers a sense of much needed hope that yes, I’ll actually keep writing The Wednesday Blog, something which I’m always not sure about. Today though, looking back at the 40 episodes already written and the 38 blog posts that came before the launch of the podcast, I’d like to think I’ve gotten myself into a good rhythm.
If there’s any other chief argument I’ve made in the past for why Irish ought to be kept alive, even taken off life support one day and spoken as another one of Europe’s vibrant languages, it’s that so many echoes of its once and future vitality still exist on the face of our world today. Take my name, Seán Thomas Kane, which though not intentional is a highly traditional Irish name. In Irish, my name is Seán mac Tomás Ó Catháin, or Seán, son of Thomas, descendant of Cathán. Cathán was a King of Ulster who ruled in the late 9th century CE about the same time as Alfred the Great was on the throne of Wessex. Thomas is my Dad, Tom Kane, meaning that my name actually works quite well seeing as I am actually Seán mac Tomás, or in the more clunky English Seán, son of Thomas. You can often tell when a family over here in the U.S. are Irish Americans by the fact that the parents and kids tend to have similar Irish names like Brigid, Patrick, Maureen, Brendan, or Molly, among others. While we’ve generally lost our ancestral language through the generations spent living in English-speaking countries, we’ve still kept aspects of that culture alive.
One thing I would love to see someday is a vibrant, if spread out, Irish-speaking community here in North America. It would be neat to have that sort of communal connection through our ancestral language preserved and even slightly transformed by our own distinct experiences living in North America from the Irish that’s spoken today in Ireland. Perhaps this would be seen in the gradual creation of a North American dialect of Irish alongside the three modern dialects of Connacht, Munster, and Ulster Irish. I for one am finding it easiest to speak a bit of a mix of Connacht Irish (the dialect spoken by my family) and Ulster Irish, though I’ve also learned many a Munster mannerism and mode of doing things as well.
Here in the United States our monolingualism has so greatly influenced our way of thinking that it is strange to consider a life where one might speak one language at home and one out in society. This is something done by people everywhere, even here in the US. In that future, even if we do come up with some sort of universal translator that just renders all linguistic barriers largely null and void, there would still be room for people to speak their own languages in their own way among themselves.
Go raibh maith agaibh go héisteacht! Thanks for listening!
There’s a Thomas Jefferson quote that has stuck with me since the first time I saw it in the room at the Library of Congress that houses his first donation to that institution: “I cannot live without books.” It’s something I think of from time to time, looking around the office here in my apartment at the tall bookshelves lined with volumes covering topics from astronomy to ancient literature in Latin and Greek to Catholic theology to history, politics, and fiction. I collect books, largely to read but also because I love the potential that books hold; all the stories they have waiting to be revealed page by page.
Over the last few years, I’ve found myself more and more gravitating towards electronic books on Kindle, Google Play, and all the academic e-book hosting sites that I use for my research and teaching. E-books are just easier to carry. I can have an entire library right there on my phone for me to choose from when I’m having dinner alone in a restaurant here in Binghamton or when I’m tired of listening to podcasts or reading magazines on a long flight. E-books also make stories more accessible. There’s a now rare novel written by the actor Andrew Robinson about his character Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called A Stitch in Time that I often see people complaining about how hard to find it is in paperback. Yet I was able to download it in just a few minutes on Google Play and read it cover to cover in a few days.
Kindle now even has a feature where if you have the book on their app and the recording of it on Audible you can listen to some segments of it when you’re driving and then your location in the e-book will update with your progress in the audiobook. I haven’t used it yet, there’s a biography I’m listening to now about the explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) that I could probably also be reading on the Kindle app on my phone when I have a free minute during office hours or at dinner, but I’m also enjoying just listening to it while driving around the hills here in Broome County, New York.
As an author, at least with the three books I’ve self-published to date (all available on Amazon) I usually prefer people buy the paperback versions because I’ll get more in royalties out of those than out of the e-book copies. Still, as a reader I admit I would often choose the e-book on a given day over the paperback solely for the convenience.
One thought that keeps coming to mind for me returns me to my own childhood and those wonderful mysterious days spent in the small library that my parents collected in our house in Wheaton when I was little. That same library came with us down to Kansas City and consumed our then-unfinished basement. At one point we had probably around 10,000 books in that collection of all sorts and stripes. Today, though I also picture not only my younger self but my own future children, if I’m so lucky, and ask “if I choose to go with e-books over physical ones, will my children have the same experiences I had pulling the odd book from the shelf because it looks interesting and flipping through it?” Those experiences of lounging around just flipping through books as a young child was instrumental in making me who I am today. There are so many stories that I read that way. Even now I sometimes like going into a library just to wander and see what I’ll find.
On a recent visit to the Bartle Library at my university I had a specific book in mind that I was looking for, Gerald of Wales’s 1188 book the Topography of Ireland, which has been useful for my dissertation. Yet after I found it, I noticed another book next to it that seemed intriguing. It was bound in a blue cover, and called the Annals of Connacht, the westernmost of the four ancient provinces of Ireland, my ancestors’ home province. I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open, quickly figuring out how to navigate its pages. Soon then, I looked up first my ancestors’ old parish, Burrishoole in County Mayo, and secondly, I looked up my own family name, Ó Catháin, to see what was in there. Both Burrishoole and Ó Catháin had entries, the former was less insightful to me than the latter, for it turned out there was a guy with my exact name who lived in Connacht in the 1520s, another Seán mac Tomás Ó Catháin. Maybe he was an ancestor of mine, it’s possible even though there are big gaps in the records during the height of the colonial period.
I could have stumbled upon that same collection of annals online and have done just that many a time with old books such as the Annals of Connacht, yet it doesn’t have quite the same feeling of accomplishment as finding that book in the flesh, holding it in my hands. I’ve joked that I deal with my primal desire as a human to hunt in two ways: firstly I hunt for food in the grocery store, and secondly I hunt for books in the library. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty corny. And while hunting for books in a library surely wouldn’t compare to hunting for a living animal in a forest, matching your wits against its own, I can say that hunting for books online can be more frustrating than hunting for books in person. When on foot in a library all you really need to worry about is that the library’s catalog system is accurate, when online you also have to figure out how to communicate with the various computer systems that are making your e-book hunt possible.
Earlier this year when I was searching for import records and ships logs from the French port of Rouen between 1500 and 1567 for my research I found myself dealing with a third layer of complexity: a computer system that can’t actually read the original 500-year old handwritten documents, meaning you just have to hope that whoever imported the document into the system typed enough information into the computer that you can find what you’re looking for. On that one count: the easier legibility of e-books over printed ones, the easier transmission of their stories and information, and the fact that we can now share knowledge around the globe as fast as our data streams will carry that information gives me good reason to prefer e-books. But still, I want my future kids, if I’m so lucky, to have that experience of pulling books from my shelves and wandering through them, discovering that same love of reading that I’ve had all these years.
The voice of Thomas Jefferson was provided by Michael Ashcraft, voice actor extraordinaire. You can learn more about his work by visiting his website here.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 