As my German school friends and I hurtled up the steps of McCardell Bicentennial Hall, pressing all the elevator buttons to get there fast, I felt like I was clambering through a window back into childhood, when I lined up for hours on end to gaze at spectacles in circuses.
Sliding up the staircase of the Observa- tory curled in the shape of DNA — or just curly fries — I was sucked through a time tunnel. I remember whispering to my friend (in German), ‘This feels just like the chamber where HAL lives, in 2001: A Space Odyssey!’
As you peer through the aperture, you don’t know whether you are looking through a telescope or a microscope. Saturn was so small — as if it were a cartoon on a fuzzy CRT television with a pet-moon on its hip. I felt like I was watching a scene from Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon, except, this time it is Saturn — a slight thumbprint in the sky, just barely there. At the same time, you realize you are staring into the deep abyss of space. It is strange to be in contact with something so absurdly distant. I couldn’t help but sympathize with Saturn — so isolated and far away! It must tally the rotations of its moons (how many lightyears more?!) and hurry to align itself to other planets for their timely rendezvous.
It must both love and hate the sun for holding the solar system together and yet binding it to this irrevocable and eternal rotation. At least it has its moons, its rings and the sun’s illumination, unceasing through the seasons to accompany its endless toil.
After going up to the viewing tower, we went down to the open-air podium where smaller telescopes were set. As one of my Chinese friends amd I waited in the queues, we spoke in a mixture of Cantonese, English and German. I was driven into confusion — the perfect subject-verb order was broken into the structureless combination of Chinese words, in which meaning are strained into small frames of pictures, which are then verbalized into curt, stark syllables. Sometimes I feel like Cantonese is the exact opposite of German. While Cantonese is spoken with nine tones, expressing its meaning sensually as if in music, German words arrive logically at their meaning with word particles. For example, with ‘fern’, meaning distance, and ‘weh’ meaning pain, the word ‘fernweh’ is formed meaning wanderlust (which is also an example of this logic).
We also saw the surface of the moon up close. It is a pregnant curve — a chalk-pale cheek pockmarked with craters. Mars was a jittering tungsten filament. You aren’t sure if the image was an afterimage printed in the back of your eyeballs after you stare at a lightbulb for too long.
My best friend Annie from Hong Kong goes to a school in a city. She envies me for having the advantage of height, as our school is perched on a hill. Moments when you can stare into the far distance are indeed luxurious, but we have too much of that in Middlebury. I find it impossible to ponder these bodies in the sky. Sometimes the walk from Proctor to the Library is too long and stark, and I yearn to resign my thoughts to the noise and chaos of ill- managed city planning.
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