Vanity in the Space Age

Stephen O’Connor

Gazing out of the window of the Apollo space craft, Neil Armstrong had an epiphany. “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

I imagine that this cognitive shift stayed with Armstrong. He was not beguiled by the ticker tape parades, by the cheering crowds that greeted him and the other Apollo astronauts at airports around the world, by fawning reporters, by the Presidential Medal of Freedom, or the numerous other medals and trophies that showered the first human to walk on the moon. In spite of his “giant leap for mankind,” he didn’t see himself as a giant, but as a “very, very small” being trekking about a tiny blue marble suspended in a dark void of dimensions incomprehensible to the human mind. Who can conceive of this spaceship Earth orbiting one star out of 400 billion in our Milky Way galaxy, which NASA estimates is but one of two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

It’s not likely that we will ever have the view of the Earth that so humbled Armstrong and the other astronauts. We humans have always lived with illusions of grandeur, often connected to ideas of fame and immortality. Both the Greek hero Achilles and the Irish hero Cú Chulainn accept an early death provided that the glory of their deeds would live forever. “The Hávamál, The Sayings of the High One,” are Norse verses probably composed orally in the 9^th century that stress the immortality of reputation:

Cattle die, kinsmen die.
The self must also die.
One thing now that never dies,
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.

We are so accustomed, despite Copernicus, to see ourselves as living at the center of the universe, that vanity comes naturally. Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Julius Caesar sought immortality as conquerors. And yet, what are any of them when viewed from Neil Armstrong’s window on the universe? I think of Yeats, writing three years after the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin:

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

Shakespeare claimed an immortality through his verse. In Sonnet 55, he writes, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” In Sonnet 18, he promises his beloved that “thy eternal beauty shall not fade.” His words grant immortality, for:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

In more unsentimental, yet still lyrical moments, Shakespeare wrote of the futility of our dreams of immortality. At the conclusion of The Tempest, we have Prospero’s oft-quoted speech:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

Shelley mocks the vain human desire for immortality through fame in the poem “Ozymandias,” in which he speaks of meeting “a traveller from an antique land” who describes to him the tumbled ruins of a monumental stone statue:

“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ozymandias never suspected that he was just another weasel fighting in a hole. He might have saved himself the trouble of constructing self-aggrandizing monuments if he had considered the words of Marcus Aurelius, “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

When Odysseus travels to the Underworld and meets the ghost of Achilles, who had traded life for eternal glory, he tries to comfort him, telling the “breaker of ranks” that at least he is an honored lord among the dead. The shade of Achilles responds, “Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils. Better to be a hired hand to a poor man, a dirt-poor man who scrapes to keep alive, than lord it over all the strengthless dead.” Fame is an illusion in this life and worthless in the next.

Human vanity is not new, though it can be argued, and has been, that it is has assumed a more virulent form than ever in the age of the “selfie” and the TikToc celebrity. Yet I recall my grandfather, in his last days, reminding my father to make sure not to forget, before he was “laid out,” to tell the undertaker to put his teeth in. It’s difficult for me to imagine that I would be concerned about dentures as I lay dying, but there you are. It would be his last appearance in public, and he wanted to look his best. A modest vanity, I suppose, compared to the grand vanities that impel so many to live for their obituaries or to leave Ozymandian monuments behind.

The British physicist Brian Cox speaks of what it means to live a finite life in a vast eternal universe or possibly multiverse. He says that there may be no intrinsic meaning other than the meaning that we highly evolved beings give it. Joni Mitchel wrote in her song “Woodstock,” that “we are stardust,” and this is true of the atoms that make up our bodies. Brian Cox believes that we are “the cosmos made conscious,” or as I once heard someone say, “We are the eyes of the universe looking at itself.”

It’s a privilege to be alive to wonder, in both senses of the word, and to find meaning in a finite life in those we love, in Nature, philosophy, art or our conception of the divine. I can no more get to the bottom of it all than my dog could learn to play chess, but perhaps the simplest and most essential directive, in the meantime, comes once again from Shakespeare: “To love that well which thou must leave ‘ere long.”