http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090206.html
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<<Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655) was a French dramatist and duelist who is now best remembered for the many works of fiction which have been woven around his life story. In these fictional works he is featured with an overly large nose; portraits suggest that he did have a big nose, though not nearly as large as described in Edmond Rostand's play and the subsequent works about him. Cyrano de Bergerac's writings do, in fact, indicate that he had an unusually large nose, of which he was quite proud. Although it is true that he was a popular poet and a fine swordsman who fought many duels, his abilities were embellished by Rostand, the playwright of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Though not as famous as his classical contemporaries, Bergerac was a successful writer. The playwright Molière even borrowed a scene from Le Pédant Joué. Bergerac's most prominent works are his duo of proto-science fiction novels, The Other World: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) and "The Comical History of the States and the Empires of the Sun" (unfinished at his death) which describe fictional journeys to the Moon and Sun. The methods of space travel he described are inventive, often ingenious, and sometimes rooted in science. In his trip to the Moon the narrator takes off from the Earth in an apparatus festooned with firecrackers, and lands on the Tree of Life. The first person he meets is Elias, whom he upsets with his mocking comments about the soul. At the end he is thrown into the sky with an atheist, and lands safely in Italy. Bergerac's primary purpose in writing those early science fiction novels was to criticize subtly the anthropocentric view of man's place in creation, as well as the social injustices of the 17th century. The Other World was subjected to censorship.>>
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Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918)
Translated from the French by Gladys Thomas and Mary F. Guillemard
Act III. Scene 3.XI. Cyrano, De Guiche.
DE GUICHE (who enters, masked, feeling his way in the dark):
What can that cursed Friar be about?
CYRANO: The devil!. . .If he knows my voice!
(Letting go with one hand, he pretends to turn an invisible key. Solemnly):
Cric! Crac!
Assume thou, Cyrano, to serve the turn,
The accent of thy native Bergerac!. . .
DE GUICHE (looking at the house):
'Tis there. I see dim,--this mask hinders me!
(He is about to enter, when Cyrano leaps from the balcony, holding on to the
branch, which bends, dropping him between the door and De Guiche; he pretends
to fall heavily, as from a great height, and lies flat on the ground,
motionless, as if stunned. De Guiche starts back):
What's this?
(When he looks up, the branch has sprung back into its place. He sees only
the sky, and is lost in amazement):
Where fell that man from?
CYRANO (sitting up, and speaking with a Gascon accent): From the moon!
DE GUICHE: From?. . .
CYRANO (in a dreamy voice): What's o'clock?
DE GUICHE: He's lost his mind, for sure!
CYRANO: What hour? What country this? What month? What day?
DE GUICHE: But. . .
CYRANO: I am stupefied!
DE GUICHE: Sir!
CYRANO: Like a bomb I fell from the moon!
DE GUICHE (impatiently): Come now!
CYRANO (rising, in a terrible voice): I say,--the moon!
DE GUICHE (recoiling): Good, good! let it be so!. . .He's raving mad!
CYRANO (walking up to him): I say from the moon! I mean no metaphor!. . .
DE GUICHE: But. . .
CYRANO: Was't a hundred years--a minute, since?
--I cannot guess what time that fall embraced!--
That I was in that saffron-colored ball?
DE GUICHE (shrugging his shoulders): Good! let me pass!
CYRANO (intercepting him): Where am I? Tell the truth!
Fear not to tell! Oh, spare me not! Where? where?
Have I fallen like a shooting star?
DE GUICHE: Morbleu!
CYRANO: The fall was lightning-quick! no time to choose
Where I should fall--I know not where it be!
Oh, tell me! Is it on a moon or earth,
that my posterior weight has landed me?
DE GUICHE: I tell you, Sir. . .
CYRANO (with a screech of terror, which makes De Guiche start back):
No? Can it be? I'm on A planet where men have black faces?
DE GUICHE (putting a hand to his face): What?
CYRANO (feigning great alarm): Am I in Africa? A native you?
DE GUICHE (who has remembered his mask): This mask of mine. . .
CYRANO (pretending to be reassured): In Venice? ha!--or Rome?
DE GUICHE (trying to pass): A lady waits. .
CYRANO (quite reassured): Oh-ho! I am in Paris!
DE GUICHE (smiling in spite of himself): The fool is comical!
CYRANO: You laugh?
DE GUICHE: I laugh, But would get by!
CYRANO (beaming with joy): I have shot back to Paris!
(Quite at ease, laughing, dusting himself, bowing):
Come--pardon me--by the last water-spout,
Covered with ether,--accident of travel!
My eyes still full of star-dust, and my spurs
Encumbered by the planets' filaments!
(Picking something off his sleeve):
Ha! on my doublet?--ah, a comet's hair!. . .
(He puffs as if to blow it away.)
DE GUICHE (beside himself): Sir!. . .
CYRANO (just as he is about to pass, holds out his leg as if to show him
something and stops him):
In my leg--the calf--there is a tooth
Of the Great Bear, and, passing Neptune close,
I would avoid his trident's point, and fell,
Thus sitting, plump, right in the Scales! My weight
Is marked, still registered, up there in heaven!
(Hurriedly preventing De Guiche from passing, and detaining him by the button
of his doublet):
I swear to you that if you squeezed my nose
It would spout milk!
DE GUICHE: Milk?
CYRANO: From the Milky Way!
DE GUICHE: Oh, go to hell!
CYRANO (crossing his arms): I fall, Sir, out of heaven!
Now, would you credit it, that as I fell
I saw that Sirius wears a nightcap? True!
(Confidentially):
The other Bear is still too small to bite.
(Laughing):
I went through the Lyre, but I snapped a cord;
(Grandiloquent):
I mean to write the whole thing in a book;
The small gold stars, that, wrapped up in my cloak,
I carried safe away at no small risks,
Will serve for asterisks i' the printed page!
DE GUICHE: Come, make an end! I want. . .
CYRANO: Oh-ho! You are sly!
DE GUICHE: Sir!
CYRANO: You would worm all out of me!--the way
The moon is made, and if men breathe and live
In its rotund cucurbita?
DE GUICHE (angrily): No, no!
I want. . .
CYRANO: Ha, ha!--to know how I got up?
Hark, it was by a method all my own.
DE GUICHE (wearied): He's mad!
CYRANO (contemptuously): No! not for me the stupid eagle
Of Regiomontanus, nor the timid
Pigeon of Archytas--neither of those!
DE GUICHE:
Ay, 'tis a fool! But 'tis a learned fool!
CYRANO: No imitator I of other men!
(De Guiche has succeeded in getting by, and goes toward Roxane's door. Cyrano
follows him, ready to stop him by force):
Six novel methods, all, this brain invented!
DE GUICHE (turning round): Six?
CYRANO (volubly): First, with body naked as your hand,
Festooned about with crystal flacons, full
O' th' tears the early morning dew distils;
My body to the sun's fierce rays exposed
To let it suck me up, as 't sucks the dew!
DE GUICHE (surprised, making one step toward Cyrano): Ah! that makes one!
CYRANO (stepping back, and enticing him further away):
And then, the second way,
To generate wind--for my impetus--
To rarefy air, in a cedar case,
By mirrors placed icosahedron-wise.
DE GUICHE (making another step): Two!
CYRANO (still stepping backward):
Or--for I have some mechanic skill--
To make a grasshopper, with springs of steel,
And launch myself by quick succeeding fires
Saltpeter-fed to the stars' pastures blue!
DE GUICHE (unconsciously following him and counting on his fingers): Three!
CYRANO: Or (since fumes have property to mount)--
To charge a globe with fumes, sufficiently
To carry me aloft!
DE GUICHE (same play, more and more astonished): Well, that makes four!
CYRANO: Or smear myself with marrow from a bull,
Since, at the lowest point of Zodiac,
Phoebus well loves to suck that marrow up!
DE GUICHE (amazed): Five!
CYRANO (who, while speaking, had drawn him to the other side of the square
near a bench):
Sitting on an iron platform--thence
To throw a magnet in the air. This is
A method well conceived--the magnet flown,
Infallibly the iron will pursue:
Then quick! relaunch your magnet, and you thus
Can mount and mount unmeasured distances!
DE GUICHE: Here are six excellent expedients!
Which of the six chose you?
CYRANO: Why, none!--a seventh!
DE GUICHE: Astonishing! What was it?
CYRANO: I'll recount.
DE GUICHE: This wild eccentric becomes interesting!
CYRANO (making a noise like the waves, with weird gestures):
Houuh! Houuh!
DE GUICHE: Well.
CYRANO: You have guessed?
DE GUICHE: Not I!
CYRANO: The tide!
I' th' witching hour when the moon woos the wave,
I laid me, fresh from a sea-bath, on the shore--
And, failing not to put head foremost--for
The hair holds the sea-water in its mesh--
I rose in air, straight! straight! like angel's flight,
And mounted, mounted, gently, effortless,. . .
When lo! a sudden shock! Then. . .
DE GUICHE (overcome by curiosity, sitting down on the bench):
Then?
CYRANO: Oh! then. . .
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Space Station in the Moon (2009 February 6)
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neufer
- Vacationer at Tralfamadore
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Space Station in the Moon (2009 February 6)
Art Neuendorffer
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johnblanding
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Re: Space Station in the Moon (2009 February 6)
Thanks to the people who got this fantastic shot.