NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( â it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [The Marginalian]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the midweek edition of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova â one piece resurfaced from the sixteen-year archive as timeless uplift for heart, mind, and spirit. If you missed last week's archival resurrection â David Whyte's magnificent love-poem to love (and self-love) â you can catch up [right here](. And if you missed my favorite books of this year, those [are here](. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( â it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: You are among the kind-hearted 1% making this available to the free-riding 99%, and I appreciate you more than you know. [FROM THE ARCHIVE | Let There Always Be Light: Dark Matter and the Mystery of Our Mortal Stardust (Patti Smith Reads Rebecca Elson)]( This is the fourth of nine installments in the animated interlude season of [The Universe in Verse]( in collaboration with [On Being]( celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest [here](. before Edwin Hubble finally published his [epoch-making revelation about Andromeda]( staggering the world with the fact that the universe extends beyond our Milky Way galaxy, a child was born under the star-salted skies of Washington, D.C., where the Milky Way was still visible before a centuryâs smog slipped between us and the cosmos â a child who would grow up to confirm the existence of dark matter, that invisible cosmic glue holding galaxies together and pinning planets to their orbits so that, on at least one of them, small awestruck creatures with vast complex consciousnesses can unravel the mysteries of the universe. Night after night, [Vera Rubin]( (July 23, 1928âDecember 25, 2016) peered out of her childhood bedroom and into the stars, wondersmitten with the beauty of it all â until she read a childrenâs book about the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell, who had [expanded the universe of possibility]( for half of our species a century earlier. The young Vera was suddenly seized with a life-altering realization: Not only was there such a thing as a professional stargazer, but it was a thing a girl could do. Vera Rubin as an undergraduate at Vassar, 1940s In 1965 â exactly one hundred years after Maria Mitchell was appointed the first professor of astronomy at Vassar, which Vera Rubin had chosen as her training ground in astronomy â she became the first woman permitted to use the Palomar Observatory. Peering through its colossal eye â the telescope, devised the year Rubin was born, had replaced the one through which Hubble made his discovery as the worldâs most powerful astronomical instrument â she was just as wondersmitten as the little girl peering through the bedroom window, just as beguiled by the beauty of the cosmos. âI sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,â she reflected in [her most personal interview](. âI think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.â Galaxies had taken Rubin to Palomar, and galaxies â the riddle of their rotation, which she had endeavored to solve â became the key to her epochal confirmation of dark matter. One of the most mesmerizing unsolved puzzles in astronomy, dark matter had remained only an enticing speculation since the Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky had first theorized it when Vera was five. A generation later, a small clan of astronomers at Cambridge analyzed the deepest image of space the Hubble Space Telescope had yet captured â that iconic glimpse of the unknown, revealing a universe [âso brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us backâ]( â to discern the origin of the mysterious dark matter halo enveloping the Milky Way. Spearheading the endeavor was an extraordinary young astronomer back to work during a remission of a rare terminal blood cancer ordinarily afflicting the elderly. Rebecca Elson, 1987 Nursed on geology and paleontology on the shores of a prehistoric lake, [Rebecca Elson]( (January 2, 1960âMay 19, 1999) was barely sixteen and already in college when she first glimpsed Andromeda through a telescope. Instantly dazzled by its âdelicate wisp of milky spiral light floating in what seemed a bottomless well of empty space,â she became a scientist but never relinquished the pull of the poetic dimensions of reality. During her postdoctoral work at Princetonâs Institute for Advanced Study, Elson found refuge from the narrow patriarchy of academic science in a gathering of poets every Tuesday evening. She became a fellow at a Radcliffe-Harvard institute for postgraduate researchers devoted to reversing âthe climate of non-expectation for women,â among the alumnae of which are Anne Sexton, Alice Walker, and Anna Deavere Smith. There, in a weekly writing group, she met and befriended the poet Marie Howe, whose splendid [âSingularityâ]( became the inspiration for this animated season of The Universe in Verse. It was then â twenty-nine and newly elected the youngest astronomer in history to serve on the Decennial Review committee steering the course of American science toward the most compelling unsolved questions â that Elson received her terminal diagnosis. the bodily brutality of her cancer treatment, she filled notebooks with poetic questions and experiments in verse, bridging with uncommon beauty the creaturely and the cosmic â those eternal mysteries of our mortal matter that make it impossible for a consciousness born of dead stars to fathom its own nonexistence. Rebecca Elson lived with the mystery for another decade, never losing her keen awareness that we are matter capable of wonder, never ceasing to channel it in poetry. When she returned her borrowed stardust to the universe, a spring shy of her fortieth birthday, she left behind nearly sixty scientific papers and a single, splendid book of poems titled [A Responsibility to Awe]( ([public library]( â among them the staggering [âTheories of Everythingâ]( (read by Regina Spektor at the 2019 Universe in Verse) and [âAntidotes to Fear of Death]( (read by Janna Levin at the 2020 Universe in Verse). Permeating Elsonâs poetic meditations, the mystery of dark matter culminates in one particular poem exploring with uncommon loveliness what may be the most touching paradox of being human â our longing for the light of immortality as creatures of matter in a cosmos governed by the dark sublime of dissolution. Bringing Elsonâs masterpiece to life for [this series]( is Patti Smith (who read Emily Dickinsonâs [pre-atomic ode to particle physics]( at the 2020 Universe in Verse), with animation by [Ohara Hale]( (who animated Emily Dickinsonâs [pre-ecological poem about ecology]( in Chapter One of this experimental season of The Universe in Verse) and [music]( by [Zoë Keating]( (who read Rita Doveâs [paleontological poem]( at the 2018 Universe in Verse). LET THERE ALWAYS BE LIGHT (SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER)
by Rebecca Elson For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things: To weigh us down.
To stop the universe
From rushing on and on
Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star going out. Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star where we can warm ourselves. Let there be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection. Previously on The Universe in Verse: [Chapter 1]( (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); [Chapter 2]( (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith); [Chapter 3]( (trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell and the poetry of the cosmic perspective, with David Byrne and Pattiann Rogers). [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving
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KINDRED READINGS: [How the World Holds Together: Patti Smith Reads Emily Dickinsonâs Poetic Premonition of Particle Physics]( * * * [The Shortest Day: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Presence with the Passage of Time, Our Ancient Relationship with the Sun, and the Cycles of Life]( * * * [Patti Smith on Listening to the Creative Impulse and the Crucial Difference Between Writing Poetry and Songwriting]( * * * A SMALL, DELIGHTFUL SIDE PROJECT: [Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy]( [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out each Wednesday and offers a hand-picked piece worth revisiting from my 15-year archive.
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