I wish I was the sort of person who loved calculus and higher mathematics. If I had been, I might have ended up an astronomer. I took one astronomy class in college, and despite a professor whose every exhalation was a dry dour dusty dismissal, I managed to enjoy it. Taking the tarnish off the stars was beyond his power. There is something intoxicating about the job of measuring stars and galaxies, charting light and its path, seeing the sky tracked and mapped with endless and overlapping elliptical orbits, being the latest in a long line of obsessive night watchers and recorders to set eye to lens and pen to paper.
In the end, the equations scared me off, scuttling crabwise across endless blackboards, confusing and many-directional, trailing into corners and symbols and dusty smudges. They proved unmasterable. I remain only a blind admirer, dazzled by lights in the dark, ignorant of the precise beauties of galactic motions. To admire is joy enough, but I still would like to visit
Mount Palomar.
