Sunday Night Journal — January 25, 2004

When President Bush announced recently that he wants to revitalize our space exploration program with projects for establishing a permanent base on the moon and sending men to Mars, my immediate reaction was excitement. I find it, in fact, a bit surprising that anyone would react otherwise, but then I remind myself that I grew up more or less simultaneously with the space program. Those of us who were born in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s were just old enough to understand the basic principles of space travel as they were presented to us by the team of Walt Disney and Werner von Braun, and at just the right age to expect that the development of space travel would recapitulate that of atmospheric flight in nice synchrony with our own lives.

My grandfather, born in the late 1870s, had seen, by the time I was born in 1948, flight develop from a disputed possibility to a fact so pervasive and influential as to have wrought fundamental changes throughout society. Of course I would witness a similar progress in space flight during my life. Why not? The physical principles were well understood and by the time I was twelve years old the basic engineering had been proven. All that remained was technological refinement: bigger, more powerful, and cheaper rockets. Then would come the expansion of infrastructure, so that the word “spaceport” would enter the dictionary just as “airport” had done, and by the time I was fifty or sixty years old people might well be vacationing on the moon.

This expectation was of course all the stronger in someone who read a lot of science fiction, as I did for several years in my teens. In these stories the inevitability of space flight was assumed: not only flight to our immediate neighborhood in the solar system, which was (and is) perfectly plausible within the limits of our current knowledge and at least somewhat so within the limits of our technology, but also interstellar travel, which requires, for useful fictional purposes, the postulation of a theoretical breakthrough that would eliminate the light-speed barrier, not to mention an as-yet-unimaginable technology to exploit this knowledge. It is very easy for a storyteller to set down terms like “hyperspace” and “warp drive” and hold them sufficient to explain convenient travel over distances of hundreds or thousands of light-years. It is so easy that we can easily overlook the lack of evidence that such a thing will ever be possible, and assume not only the inevitable progress of rocket flight toward routine near-space flight, but the equally inevitable supplanting of rockets by something capable of transcending the laws of physics as we presently know them.

The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (which, by the way, I consider the best science-fiction movie ever made, or at any rate the best one I’ve ever seen) perfectly captures the expected earlier stages of this progression. The earth-to-moon shuttle is like an airliner. The space station is somewhere between a military installation and a hotel. The first outpost on the moon is under construction. Plans are under way to visit the other planets. (The quasi-miraculous transition to interstellar flight is delegated to god-like aliens who are never seen and don’t have to explain themselves.)

Of course it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. We landed on the moon a year or so after 2001, but space travel has been fundamentally stagnant since then. It’s as if in 1957, thirty years after Lindbergh’s flight, air travel had still been something engaged in only by pilots, and at considerable risk. Some argue that this is due to a failure of will, but I suspect the difficulties are more fundamental: the amount of energy necessary to lift a useful object into space is prodigious and still beyond our ability to generate safely and inexpensively. Satellite launches are somewhat routine, but every trip of a human being into space remains an extremely risky business and so costly that the only economic justification for it is the possibility that it may lead to something else.

What keeps us wanting to do it? What (besides reflexes left over from my youth) accounts for my instant sense of excitement at the idea of a Mars mission? The single biggest factor is the question of whether there is life out there. To judge by the news stories about the mobile probes in place on Mars right now, the interest in this question is obsessive on the part of both the public and at least some of the scientists pursuing it. I suppose the scientists may emphasize it because they know that that is where public interest lies, and thus the continuing support of their research. But it is perfectly understandable. We can hardly conceive of a planet without life, and if we manage to do so we are likely to lose interest in it at once. The human mind that can muster a great deal of interest in pure inorganic matter for its own sake is rare. In the end most of us have only two questions about Mars: is there life there? And if there is not, is there mineral wealth? If the answer to both those questions is “no,” then only those who care about pure research into the nature of the solar system will have further inquiries, and they will find it hard to convince the rest of us that such inquiries warrant the enormous expenditures required to complete them.

I look at the pictures of Mars sent back by the rovers and find them thrilling. But the thrill derives mainly from the fact that I know they are of Mars, and that never before in human history have we been able to look upon this landscape. Its desolation is appalling. As I ponder it I find that I cannot help assuming that over those hills, or beyond that horizon, there is something green. There must be at least a bit of water and a little scrub or cactus. There must be. If not nearby, then perhaps a hundred miles away, or a thousand. If I try to imagine that no matter how far or in what direction I traveled on this world I would encounter nothing but more dust, rock, and, at the poles, sterile ice, I falter. And to the extent that I can conceive of this dead world the idea induces anxiety. To imagine myself standing on its surface is a little like imagining myself under water, unable to survive without artificial support, but with an edge of panic arising from the fact that the nearest breathable air, liquid water, and vegetation are millions of miles away.

Perhaps next week we will learn something different, but as far as we now know the red planet consists of millions of square miles of absolutely pure desert. Put that way, it seems nightmarish. And it makes the fantasies of hundreds of science fiction writers only the same sort of fancy that the mind of man has always raised up for its own entertainment, only composed of materials available in a technological culture.

What, then, of President Bush’s proposal? In spite of all I have just written, I would, given a chance, vote for it. It is a challenge and an adventure we shouldn’t refuse. And something utterly unforeseeable may come of it. There are those, like the Mars Society, who believe we could introduce life to Mars and create conditions under which it could sustain itself permanently. But this dream (a stirring one, I admit) strikes me as very unlikely, a serious underestimation of the complexity of nature and overestimation of ourselves. I think it most likely that after a century or two of exploring as best we can as much of interplanetary space as we can reach, we will face the fact that God has provided us with one world only, and that we are quarantined upon it.

Sunday Night Journal — January 18, 2004

As if to remind me of a fundamental contrariness in the nature of things, certain signs of illness began to make themselves known to me around 4pm on the Friday before this three-day weekend. Apart from a few chronic structural problems, such as a bad back, I’m quite healthy—rarely ill and even more rarely ill enough to miss work. I’m also fairly sedentary and don’t generally ask much beyond the minimum from my body, or pay very much attention to it. So I’m always a little surprised when it suddenly resists or refuses the more or less automatic functioning that comprises most of its duties.

What I’ve experienced over the past couple of days is nothing much: it’s what my mother has always called “a bug,” making its presence known by mild nausea, weakness, and headache. If survival depended on my walking ten miles I could do it, but I really would rather not move any more than necessary, and so have spent most of the weekend in the recliner in the living room. And I can’t say that it has been a totally unpleasant experience. I’ve had a little reading, a little music, a little television, and a lot of looking out the window.

It rained all day Saturday. I live on the Alabama Gulf coast where even in January there is still a lot of green in the woods across the way, including the dark gleam of a magnolia. Throughout the day I watched the curtain of rain grow now more dense, now more thin, constantly varying the mixture of silver, grey, and green presented to me until the picture faded to black.

Because it is such a rare experience, this sort of temporary incapacity always serves me as a useful reminder that the body is not only subject to temporary failure but will indeed fail entirely one day. At the age of fifty-five this fact is increasingly of interest to me. Once I had no particular uneasiness about death, but that was only a failure of imagination. Some Christians have, or say they have (I don’t know whether to believe them or not) perfect certainty that when death comes they will close their eyes and wake up in heaven. I have some faith and a great deal of hope, but I'm also a man of reason and I don’t consider it utterly impossible that Christian beliefs are false, or that if they are true there is any guarantee that I will find myself among the sheep and not the goats. The one thing of which I’m absolutely assured is that, barring the Second Coming or some other direct intervention by God, I am, as the old song says, going to walk that lonesome valley, and I’m going to walk it by myself.

As I watched the rain fall I thought about the two live oaks we’ve recently planted, one in the front yard and one in the back. A few weeks ago my wife and I drove spikes of fertilizer in the ground around them and have been waiting for just such a good soaking rain as this. I thought with satisfaction of the spikes getting wet, and wetter, slowly dissolving, the nutrients seeping into the soil and being picked up by the roots of our young trees. A full-grown live oak is one of the most heartening sights in the world to me. They grow slowly, and I won’t live to see these trees in their full glory. But with some care and some luck (including a settlement of a now-distant but inevitable territorial dispute between one of the trees and the power lines) they will be magnificent one day, and someone will get the joy of them. That is a fine thought.

Sunday Night Journal — January 18, 2004

As if to remind me of a fundamental contrariness in the nature of things, certain signs of illness began to make themselves known to me around 4pm on the Friday before this three-day weekend. Apart from a few chronic structural problems, such as a bad back, I’m quite healthy—rarely ill and even more rarely ill enough to miss work. I’m also fairly sedentary and don’t generally ask much beyond the minimum from my body, or pay very much attention to it. So I’m always a little surprised when it suddenly resists or refuses the more or less automatic functioning that comprises most of its duties.

What I’ve experienced over the past couple of days is nothing much: it’s what my mother has always called “a bug,” making its presence known by mild nausea, weakness, and headache. If survival depended on my walking ten miles I could do it, but I really would rather not move any more than necessary, and so have spent most of the weekend in the recliner in the living room. And I can’t say that it has been a totally unpleasant experience. I’ve had a little reading, a little music, a little television, and a lot of looking out the window.

It rained all day Saturday. I live on the Alabama Gulf coast where even in January there is still a lot of green in the woods across the way, including the dark gleam of a magnolia. Throughout the day I watched the curtain of rain grow now more dense, now more thin, constantly varying the mixture of silver, grey, and green presented to me until the picture faded to black.

Because it is such a rare experience, this sort of temporary incapacity always serves me as a useful reminder that the body is not only subject to temporary failure but will indeed fail entirely one day. At the age of fifty-five this fact is increasingly of interest to me. Once I had no particular uneasiness about death, but that was only a failure of imagination. Some Christians have, or say they have (I don’t know whether to believe them or not) perfect certainty that when death comes they will close their eyes and wake up in heaven. I have some faith and a great deal of hope, but I'm also a man of reason and I don’t consider it utterly impossible that Christian beliefs are false, or that if they are true there is any guarantee that I will find myself among the sheep and not the goats. The one thing of which I’m absolutely assured is that, barring the Second Coming or some other direct intervention by God, I am, as the old song says, going to walk that lonesome valley, and I’m going to walk it by myself.

As I watched the rain fall I thought about the two live oaks we’ve recently planted, one in the front yard and one in the back. A few weeks ago my wife and I drove spikes of fertilizer in the ground around them and have been waiting for just such a good soaking rain as this. I thought with satisfaction of the spikes getting wet, and wetter, slowly dissolving, the nutrients seeping into the soil and being picked up by the roots of our young trees. A full-grown live oak is one of the most heartening sights in the world to me. They grow slowly, and I won’t live to see these trees in their full glory. But with some care and some luck (including a settlement of a now-distant but inevitable territorial dispute between one of the trees and the power lines) they will be magnificent one day, and someone will get the joy of them. That is a fine thought.

Sunday Night Journal — January 11, 2004

I’ve been watching the eight or ten episodes of The Twilight Zone which I taped from the SciFi channel’s marathon in the days leading up to New Year’s Day. Based on these, it seems to me that this show was surely one of the high-water marks of television, and even when one makes the obvious stipulation that such a mark is still not terribly high, it is high enough that many of these spooky and melancholy half-hours remain, some forty years later, enjoyable for their own sake and not just as nostalgia.

What makes them so good?—those that are good, anyway, which is by no means all of them. The technical aspects of film-making have, obviously, come a long way since Rod Serling’s time and whenever the shows require what we now call “special effects”—the rendering of anything that doesn’t exist in the real world—the results make particularly strong demands on one’s suspension of disbelief, and even on the ability to suppress one’s sense of humor. Within their technical limits, though, the shows are visually intriguing and atmospheric (and for my part I like black-and-white photography anyway, whether still or motion). And I’m willing to make an effort to overlook the defects because the stories engage and sustain my interest.

It is not only in their technical means that The Twilight Zone episodes seem clearly of another time. I’m struck also by their highly literary style. Serling’s spoken commentaries are often elaborate and highly figured, as is, where warranted by the plot, the dialogue. They use words in a way—with a weight and complexity—that popular entertainment no longer cares to attempt. This must surely be connected to a general decline in literacy and in the aptitude for the use of language since the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Serling could assume, or at least reasonably hope, that most people would be willing and able to comprehend sentences that no one would use today on television.

There is another quality about these productions which they have in common with many movies and some television shows and music of the period between the early 20th century and the revolution of the mid-‘60s. The best word I can come up with to describe this quality is “adult.” I’m not particularly happy with the term but can’t think of anything better except for synonyms “grown-up” or “mature.” The worship, and faith in the saving powers of, adolescence had not yet taken hold, and many of the characters in The Twilight Zone seem more serious and solid than those in most current popular entertainment. A young man or woman in a Twilight Zone episode seems far more mature and of far more consequence than, say, the characters on Friends. I don't suppose the stars of the ‘50s and early ‘60s were for the most part especially virtuous or noble (but where in the contemporary entertainment world will you find the like of Jimmy Stewart?). Nevertheless they had, at least in their public personae, a dignity that no longer seems attainable. An ironic pose overlaying an essential shallowness and triviality seems to characterize both our entertainers and the characters they play, and if the persons (both real and fictional) seem to want to transcend this they are nevertheless dragged down by the pervasive crudity of the typical movie or television show. The much and justly maligned Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver are improbable but somehow more like what real adults ought to be than the mother and father in Malcolm in the Middle who frequently act like rather unappealing fourteen-year-olds.

Consider what I suppose, on the basis of my fairly limited knowledge, must be the closest thing to The Twilight Zone which has come along since then: The X-Files. I happen to like that show a great deal, mainly for its atmosphere, but Mulder and Scully inhabit, most of the time, the world of prolonged adolescent self-absorption and easy alienation which Hollywood now seems to consider normal at every stage of life. And it seems significant that they are defined by their opposition to the government which employs them. In the tradition of the 1960s, the essential premise of the show is opposition to authority; those in authority are evil or at best weak and untrustworthy, and it is only outsiders who care about the truth.

When the characters in a contemporary movie or television show are not being flip and ironic, of course, they are likely to be self-righteous and self-important and to preach in the most blatant sort of way. The matter of their preaching is for the most part what we loosely call liberalism, often specifically political and nearly always tedious, and I begin to fume, and if possible to escape, the moment it begins.

But The Twilight Zone preaches, too. Of the episodes I taped at random over several days, at least three are fairly thin plots oriented toward making some sort of point about tolerance, the danger of mob psychology, the importance of reason, and generosity toward even the most fallen among us. This was, in the context of the time, liberal preaching. Yet I am not offended or even annoyed; to the contrary, I generally sympathize. This is, I think, because liberalism has suffered, since these episodes were new, a sort of fall.

In Serling’s time liberalism was, or at least wished and tried to be, the advocate of certain virtues, as noted: tolerance, generosity, reason. It is now but a party which proclaims itself the possessor of these virtues, preens itself upon that self-conception, and despises those outside the party. The fatal misstep, perhaps, is found in Shelley’s famous assertion that he would tolerate everything except intolerance. This quickly and I suppose inevitably becomes intolerance of intolerant persons (as opposed to intolerance of the fault itself), then intolerance of persons merely suspected of intolerance, and has now reached a point of intolerance of persons who exhibit any resemblance to persons suspected of intolerance. This (need it be said?) is bigotry.

Liberalism once appealed to our best instincts. Now it is simply another tribe, as rancorous and suspicious of outsiders as any of its enemies, quick to surrender to the ecstacy of mob hatred when that suspicion is inflamed. In this it may be no worse than other tribes, but it merits the special distaste provoked by those who aggressively accuse others of vices which they themselves flagrantly practice. One of the Twilight Zone episodes I taped is about a small-town neighborhood driven to strife by fear that any one of them might be an alien in human disguise. It’s fairly heavy-handed sermonizing, and yet it works because of the way the accusation of secret treachery flits from one person to another while panic spreads like some kind of fast-acting disease: the character who is now counseling restraint and reason may be, in a moment, defending himself and then in short order leading the attack on someone else. The propensity to give way to unreasoning suspicion and violence is a human failing, and Serling’s liberalism would have us all guard our hearts against it. Today's liberalism would offer a list of persons suspected of suspecting. I will be thinking of this episode—it is called “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”— and its storm of irrational accusations the next time the liberals of the Senate question a conservative judicial nominee.

Sunday Night Journal — January 4, 2004

I finally went to see The Return of the King. I have to begin any discussion of the Peter Jackson’s filmed version of The Lord of the Rings with the observation that it surely is the best possible screen treatment of the book. I do not mean that in a philosophical Panglossian but rather in a very straightforward sense: it is the best for which we could reasonably have hoped. When I first heard that Hollywood was planning a big-budget (to say the least) version of the book, my first thought was that I would not see it. I fully expected that the movie industry could not touch such a work without soiling it.

As I heard more about the project, I began to hope that I might be mistaken. I was pleased to admit, after The Fellowship of the Ring, that I was indeed mistaken, and that the films were going to be at least respectful of Tolkien’s vision. Peter Jackson deserves quite a lot of praise for this. I am happy to be able to say that my numerous criticisms of the films do not include the one I most expected to level—that of a fundamental misunderstanding and distortion—and are instead concerned with specific decisions and strategies.

After Fellowship, I spent, like most devotees of the book, a fair amount of time (too much, my wife would say) analyzing the rights and wrongs of the film: which cast members were and were not well-suited to their roles, which aspects of Middle Earth were and were not portrayed fittingly, which liberties taken with the story were and were not justified. After The Two Towers we had pretty much exhausted that topic—I certainly had— and I find that without going over all that ground again I really do not have a great deal to say about The Return of the King.

It is at least as good as any of the others. It eliminates a few of the most annoying things in the first two, most notably the propensity for making Gimli far too broadly comic and, worse, a vehicle for anachronisms not only intrusive but stupid (e.g. “Nobody tosses a dwarf!”). It suffers as much as they from the requirement that much be left out, for which the filmmakers are not to blame, and from an overall tendency to make everything as loud and spectacular as possible, for which they must surely be at least partially to blame. I would like to think that some of this was against Jackson’s better judgment, and done to help insure the box-office success required to justify the film’s enormous cost and allow him to continue in the business. Whatever the reason, the entire series contains a lot of lily-gilding, if that is not too delicate a term to use for such heavy-handed work. The films seem driven by a compulsion to overstate and overdo, to crowd every possible moment with action, to pile more and yet more noisy dangers, yet more unconvincing physical stunts, onto the story: the combat between Saruman and Gandalf in Fellowship, which ought to have been something subtle; the endless fight with the cave-troll; the unnecessary and unbelievable leaps among the falling stairs in Moria; Frodo’s standard Hollywood fall-and-hang-by-the-fingers at the Crack of Doom. All of this imparts a cartoonish quality to much of the film and has exactly the opposite of its intended effect on me: rather than compelling my attention it breaks the spell, and provokes the rolling of eyes.

But let that go. As Terry Teachout said recently in National Review, Hollywood does not make movies for people who read books. The films are not the book, and never could be, even with the best of intentions and the greatest of skill. But with all their flaws they still attain a vision of pure and noble heroism, and they leave one with images of “beauties that burn like ice and pierce like swords,” if I am correctly recalling C. S. Lewis’ praise. Thanks be to God. And it is time I read the book again.

By the way, my friend Daniel Nichols suggests that the films might rightly have been billed as “The Lord of the Rings, starring New Zealand.”