My Stardust Melody
We are all children of the universe — but can we go to Jupiter?
Note: Dan Szczesny is an award-winning New Hampshire journalist, author, and speaker. His latest work, The White Mountain, along with all other things Dan can be found at his website here. For the last four years, Dan published daily “live essays,” such as this one, on his Facebook feed each day for the month of November. We are grateful for his permission to reprint some of these essays here at Monadnock Underground over the next few weeks. Dan has recently announced that his next book, a collection of essays about parenthood (like this one!), will be released in early June 2020. You can find the original (classic!) post, from November 26, 2018 here. — CJD
The other day, your mother and I were talking about something that happened years before you were born, and you asked why we didn’t take you along.
“That was way before you were here, baby,” your mother said.
“Before I was in your tummy?”
“Before that,” I said. “You were just stardust, up there in the universe, just waiting for somebody to bring you home.”
Surprisingly, you didn’t ask me what the heck I was talking about. Being stardust seemed reasonable.
Neil deGrasse Tyson spills a lot of ink talking about the connectivity of our own atoms to the universe, how we are not figuratively, but literally stardust. “It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
How reassuring, then, to be OF and to be UNIQUE at once. To be a daughter of the cosmos and to be our own specific, universal bundle at the same time.
To have you — and for you to have us — as the briefest of flashes against the backdrop of the endless darkness and then to return to the darkness. Each of us our own pinprick flash of light, like millions of light bulbs exploding every moment. Individually, providing barely enough light to matter, but as a whole, lighting up the world.
As a boy, I never set my sights on being an astronaut, or NASA. Though I was deeply interested in space in the way that most children are drawn to the mysterious and unknown. I loved science fiction and movies about space ships and exploration. I loved reading about robots — memorized Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics; felt drawn to the concept of created life, felt sorry for Frankenstein’s monster and the Runway Robot alike.
I remember a moment in my parent’s car coming home at night from a family visit and watching the moon out my window, and asking, “Daddy, why is the moon following us?”
But I never actually wished to leave the Earth. Do you, baby? Over the last few months, we’ve seemed to breach the subject of infinity over and over. Why is it sometimes cold and sunny at once. Can we go to Jupiter? Why is Earth called Earth? How far to the moon? Sometimes I don’t know the answers and we’ll learn them together. Sometimes, I get the feeling that you’re more interested in the questions than in the answers.
There are real answers to all these questions, grounded in astronomy and physics; but how miraculous is it, my stardust child, that you are even here to begin with, asking them.