4/5/2024 0 Comments The true story of icarus![]() But we never went back, except for those few times my father tried to collect debts from the men he had thought were his friends. They believed it to be an act of kindness. If my brother and I asked when we were going back, my parents would nod and say, ‘one day’. ![]() I thought often about my favorite path to the brook behind the barn, no longer open to me now that the brook, the barn, the house and its surrounding hills all belonged to someone else. ![]() ![]() In later years I came to recognize the look from the sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939): a wandering family, worldly goods piled high, lumbering down the road toward new horizons.įor years I dreamed of returning to the farm. Peeking out from under the tarp, it made for a tatty collection, threatening to break its ties and spill all over the road. We followed behind their rickety flatbed truck, laden with the belongings my parents had decided to keep in the downsizing: a green overstuffed couch, sturdy as a Sherman tank a rugged, knotty-pine dining room set that my father had made with his own hands my grandmother’s china set a chest of drawers filled with clothes several pairs of boots a few of our toys two bicycles a. We couldn’t afford a moving company, and since my brother and I were still too small to do any heavy lifting, my mother had hired a pair of local farmers who were moonlighting during the off-season. It was a leaden and overcast November day when we made the journey. Meanwhile it was my mother who drove our tan and white VW van down the New York Thruway to our temporary home in New Jersey, where we could be near her sisters and their families. Disappointed, nearing fifty and without a pension or much in the way of savings, my father went to work as a merchant seaman for over a year, traveling to India, the Mediterranean and North Africa. The local economy in that part of upstate New York appeared to be stuck in a years-long post-war slump while other regions boomed. My parents had tried for nearly two decades to make it work, trying dairy first, then growing corn, followed by sheep and chickens, truck-farming vegetables, and finally setting up an excavation company. We lost our farm when I was seven years old. The challenge of finding home in a world on the move. Only then will our children have a chance at being able to make a home on that far shore we call 'the future'. From the necessity for empathy and wonder to act as correctives to climate denialism, to how science fiction can school us in the vulnerabilities that make us human, Tracy's probing and humane analysis calls on each of us not just to strive to understand the world, but to learn to love it better too. Weaving together memoir, history of science, mythology, astronomy, psychology and literary criticism, these essays are a point of departure for those curious to understand how science, technology and the culture at large can coevolve. We know how that story ends-or do we? In The Icarus Question, physicist Gene Tracy offers reasons to hope that humanity's urge to transcend our limitations need not lead to inevitable disaster. But it all went awry when Icarus ignored his father's warnings and flew too close to the Sun. Daedalus, the great inventor of ancient myth, fashioned wings so that he and his son Icarus could escape imprisonment.
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