For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World - Softcover

Sagan, Sasha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 073521879X ISBN 13: 9780735218796

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

"A charming book, ringing with the joy of existence." --Richard Dawkins

The perfect gift for a loved one or for yourself, For Small Creatures Such as We is part memoir, part guidebook, and part social history, a luminous celebration of Earth's marvels that require no faith in order to be believed.

Sasha Sagan was raised by secular parents, the astronomer Carl Sagan and the writer and producer Ann Druyan. They taught her that the natural world and vast cosmos are full of profound beauty, and that science reveals truths more wondrous than any myth or fable.

When Sagan herself became a mother, she began her own hunt for the natural phenomena behind our most treasured occasions--from births to deaths, holidays to weddings, anniversaries, and more--growing these roots into a new set of rituals for her young daughter that honor the joy and significance of each experience without relying on a religious framework.

As Sagan shares these rituals, For Small Creatures Such as We becomes a moving tribute to a father, a newborn daughter, a marriage, and the natural world--a celebration of life itself, and the power of our families and beliefs to bring us together.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sasha Sagan holds a degree in dramatic literature from NYU. She has worked as a television producer, filmmaker, editor, and speaker in New York, Boston, and London, and her writing has appeared in The New York Magazine, O., the Oprah Magazine, Literary Hub, Mashable.com, The Violet Book, and elsewhere. For Small Creatures Such as We is her first book.

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chapter one

 

Birth

 

Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of [. . .] ashes.

 

-Marcus Aurelius

 

After our daughter was born, Jon and I said to each other a thousand times day, "I can't believe she's here!" "I can't believe we have a kid!" "I can't believe we made a person!" Every day for months and months we said it out loud as if we were just discovering how reproduction worked. We struggled to wrap our minds around it. I actually don't suppose I'll ever truly get over this idea. My mother never has. She sometimes still joyfully says to my brother Sam and me, "You don't understand, you didn't exist, and then we made you! And now you're here!" We roll our eyes and say, "Yes, Mom, that's how it works." Which is true, but no less astonishing, beautiful, or thrilling. Being born at all is amazing. It's easy to lose sight of this. But when a baby comes into the world, when a new human appears from inside of another, in the accompanying rush of emotion, we experience a little bit of the immense brazen beauty of life.

 

Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. There is so much change in this universe. So many entrances and exits, and ways to mark them, each one astonishing in its own way. Even if we don't see birth or life as a miracle in the theological sense, it's still breathtakingly worthy of celebration.

 

Typing these words, I am, like you, experiencing the brief moment between birth and death. It's brief compared to what's on either side. For all we know, there was, arguably, an infinite amount of time before you or I was born. Our current understanding is that the big bang gave birth to the universe as we know it about 13.8 billion years ago. But the big bang may or may not be the beginning of everything. What came before, if anything, remains an unsolved mystery to our species. As we humans learn, create better technology, and produce more brilliant people, we might discover that which we currently think happened is wrong. But somehow, something started us off a very long time ago.

 

In the other direction there will, theoretically, be an infinite amount of time after we're dead. Not infinite for our planet or our species, but maybe for the universe. Maybe not. We don't know much about what that will entail except that the star we orbit will eventually burn out. Between those two enormous mysteries, if we're lucky, we get eighty or one hundred years. The blink of an eye, really, in the grand scheme of things. And yet here we are. Right now.

 

It's easy to forget how amazing this is. Days and weeks go by and the regularity of existing eclipses the miraculousness of it. But there are certain moments when we manage to be viscerally aware of being alive. Sometimes those are very scary moments, like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Sometimes they are beautiful, like holding your newborn in your arms. And then there are the quiet moments in between, when all the joy and sorrow seem profound only to you.

 

On one particular day a few winters ago I felt this intensely. I had just found out that I was pregnant, full of wonder and nausea. Everything was about to change forever. It was also the twentieth anniversary of my father's death. Twenty years feels like a shockingly long time. It's significantly longer than the time I had with him. I miss him very much. Sometimes, still now, so much that it feels intolerable.

 

Feeling the entrance of one new being and the loss of another brought on a series of paradoxical emotions, and a powerful sense of my place in the universe. I remember walking around the city, stunned that everyone I saw, the owner of every wise and wizened face, was once a baby. This seemed revelatory, despite its obviousness. I couldn't help reflecting on how any of us got here in the first place. Human beings do not go back to the beginning of this universe. In our present configuration we've only been around about a few hundred thousand years-the number changes as we uncover more of our fossilized ancestors-but the planet we live on is more than 4.5 billion years old. We're new here. We evolved from slightly different creatures who evolved from somebody else and so on back to one-cell organisms that we would not recognize as our relatives, but nonetheless, they are. How those one-celled forebears came to be is just now beginning to become clear. Even less clear is how exactly it will end for us: we will either destroy ourselves, be destroyed by an outside event, or evolve into something unrecognizable.

 

As the small creature inside me expanded my midsection, I was reminded of how many pregnant girlfriends over the years have looked at me with a kind of mild, jokey horror and exclaimed, "It's like there's an alien inside me!"

 

My dad spent a lot of time thinking about aliens, trying to determine if they existed. He never found out, because so far there's no evidence we've ever had contact with life from elsewhere in the universe. For my dad, as for me, belief required evidence. To say "I don't believe" in something doesn't mean that I am certain it doesn't exist. Just that I have seen no proof that it does, so I am withholding belief. That's how I think about a lot of elements of religion, like God or an afterlife. And it's the same way my dad thought about aliens. As he once said, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." We don't have proof, so we don't know. And yet we all seem to have a vivid idea of what an alien is like. We almost always imagine they look like us but they're smaller. They have large eyes and no hair. They don't talk. They don't know the social mores. They might be good or they might be evil, but they definitely want something from us and as soon as they arrive, everything will be different forever.

 

Babies are not like aliens. Our idea of aliens is like our idea of babies.

 

Maybe that's part of what my dad was thinking when I arrived. My mother tells me that when I was born, my father lifted me up, looked at me, and said, "Welcome to the planet Earth."

 

Then they didn't name me for three days.

 

When they finally did, I got the middle name Rachel, for my dad's mom. She was both magnetic and impossible, a mesmerizing storyteller with a one-of-a-kind laugh. She had a very difficult childhood. Her mother died in childbirth when Rachel was two. Her father (who may or may not have come to America to escape a murder rap in Russia) sent her back to Europe to live with aunts she had never met until he remarried a few years later. But Rachel grew up in New York, found true love with my grandfather Sam, and in many ways made my father who he was. It's a complicated legacy.

 

When I was a small girl, family members were often astonished, alarmed even, at how clearly my mannerisms resembled hers. It was not learned behavior. I was born close to nine months to the day after her death. My parents would get chills at the sound of Rachel's distinctive laugh emerging from their little daughter. It was "very eerie," I was told. It would have been easy for me to make a leap from these reactions to something ominous, something scary. I might have guessed that I was possessed by my dead grandmother, or that she was somehow haunting me.

 

When I was eight, my younger brother was born, and named for our grandfather Sam. Soon he bore such a resemblance to our father that, when invitations to my dad's birthday party went out with a black-and-white picture of him a little boy swimming off Coney Island, people called to say, "Yes, we can come to the party, but why is there a picture of Sam on the invitation?" To my parents these family resemblances were something...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 073521879X
• ISBN 13: 9780735218796
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland