A couple weeks ago, I put out a plea for a Carl Sagan quote for an Ignite NYC talk I was going to do. I had to paraphrase the line as “This is the kind of problem that is fun to think about while walking in the woods on a winter morning.”
My friend Parfait found the quote last week!
“They are books you ponder over as the water is running out of the bathtub or as you walk through the woods in an early winter snowfall.”
Not crazy about the bathtub water image (or image of me), but it still works. It’s still the romantic, “Papa Carl makes the world of science and cosmology so interesting” line I remembered. Except:
The actual line is in reference to three Robert Heinlein novels (Oi!)! Not only that, but Sagan refers to them as “remarkable efforts! (Oi! Oi!). Not only THAT, but one of them has the word Zombies in it! (Oi! Oi! Oi!).
While I’m wondering if maybe he doesn’t use a similar image somewhere else (hard to imagine since I got the book right), it’s now more interesting to me how my initial processing of the quote meshes with my current memory of it and how I matched that memory to science problems and lofty things. I was every bit the snob then as I am today when it comes to Heinlein (not much, but enough to cringe at calling any of them “remarkable efforts”), so I must have been so overwhelmed by the romance of the image of walking in the woods with Saint Carl contemplating something rich and deep on a crisp winter morning that I glossed over it.
Novelist (and fellow alum of my alma mater) Nicholson Baker, went through an interesting exercise in U and I, a memoir of his obsession with John Updike. One of his many exercises in intellectual self-flagellation was to mortify his literary sensibilities by trying to reconstruct, from memory, the passages from Updike that made him want to be a novelist. Then he compared them to real one. He generally was further off in his memories than I was . . . though he didn’t stumble into praising Heinlein’s literary genius.
