| IF THE SUN DIES Oriana Fallaci Pamela Swinglehurst (transl.) New York: Atheneum, 1967 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| LibCong 66-23576 | 403p. | HC | $7.50 | |
It was Bradbury1 who started it all. He told her that it's man's destiny to leave the Earth, to venture forth across the cosmos, leaving both the planet of his birth and the body of his birth behind, inhabiting new strange realms, becoming sponges or starfish or lichen or balls of lambent blue flame — discovering the origin of the origin of the origin. "Who created God?", he asked her; and she answered, "Man". He was in the process of surpassing even that blasphemy, when there came a thump from upstairs, and the whole house shook.2
But of course he told her nothing in that house near to Los Angeles that she hadn't already felt deep inside, during her childhood in Italy. For we are driven, by curiosity and a hunger for meaning and order and by the sheer fear of leaving not a wrack behind to push against whatever limits we encounter in our lives; to challenge ourselves against the infinite and measure ourselves by the result. This impulse is the source of all religion and all progress, whether in morality, in space exploration, in high-energy physics and molecular biology, or in simple human relationships.
That impulse can be stifled or twisted; but it always restores itself — if not in the current generation, then in the next. The journey goes on, from one time to another. This book is the story of one year in Oriana Fallaci's personal journey. During that year, 1961 AFAIK, she travelled widely within the U.S., meeting some of the original astronauts and touring many NASA facilities. She suffered a kind of culture shock, repelled by America's crude plastic motels with their crude sarcastic managers, and by modern architecture generally — too much asphalt; too many tall glass office towers, too few tall green trees.
At first she felt the astronauts, the whole American space program, had been tarred with the same brush: dedicated to technology the way Vince Lombardi was dedicated to winning; saying, as one NASA employee did in almost these words, that technology isn't everything, it's the only thing. And she feared that she was meeting a new master race who would sweep her kind of humanity away and turn the whole green breathing Earth into one giant sterile office complex surrounded by parking lots, tawdry strip malls and cheap motels, while the rockets flew to other stars crewed by Brave-New-World-creche-borne automatons who'd never seen the sky and couldn't stand to be out under it. But she came to realize in time that the dream that leads mankind to the stars will not strip him of humanity. At most, it will shift the balance toward the better angels of our nature: a bit greater intelligence; more consideration; more self control. In fact, those changes will enhance the appreciation of the arts, of ecology, of human relationships.
It is a very readable account. It carries you along, swiftly, engendering awe, a fair measure of pity and the occasional chuckle. I would bet that Ms. Fallaci, currently living in Manhattan while working on another project, is well satisfied with this one3. So will you be.
Except in this sense: that it will leave you wanting to know more about this woman who tells world leaders to their faces where they've screwed up, who as a girl of fourteen helped the Italian partisans against the Nazis, and who during her year with the astronauts hatched absurdly glorious schemes like going to the moon when it was new, scooping up all the cheese and bringing it back to sell on Earth, or setting up a chain of root-beer stands along the planets.
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