A Healthy World
This year, find your way through the universe, and then back home again, with a little help from the library.
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This piece was inspired by many works of art, science, and philosophy, all of which can be found at the library. Among them:
Astronomer Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot:
A Vision of the Human Future in Space, in which he wrote “[E]very hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Poet Maya Angelou’s A Brave and Startling Truth, which she read before the United Nations and which begins with this stanza:
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
The life and music of composer Ludwig van Beethoven, whose 250th birthday was celebrated in December. The segment of Piano Sonata No. 15 in D Major: Pastorale (Andante) is played by Karine Gilanyan, and made available via the website Classic Cat.
Other sources:
The trees are by Michal Boym, found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives, and part of a global library ecosystem that shares its resources with everyone.
The clouds and birds are from various volumes by Athanasius Kircher, found in the HathiTrust Digital Library and in the library’s special collections.
The image of earth is from NASA.
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