At the Montgomery Hill Observatory of Evergreen Valley
College in San Jose, there is a public stargazing night on the first Friday of
every month. It is here that a decade ago I first saw Saturn through the
observatory’s 7” refractor telescope. I will never forget that magical moment.
The “Lord of the Rings” planet 750 million miles or so away from the earth
seemed so inviting that I wanted to reach out and touch it.
With Jupiter and
Saturn gracing the night sky now, I decided to visit the observatory after a
hiatus to renew my acquaintance with the two planets.
About fifty of us gathered at the observatory recently to
take in the beauty of the starry sky. The line was long for the domed building
that housed the telescope focused on Saturn.
What I witnessed, however, was unexpected and, frankly,
shocking.
Most of the “stargazers” spent more time taking selfies than
looking at the planet. Parents held their babies close to the telescope and
snapped photos as the unnatural light of their smartphones lit up the dark
interior of the building. They photographed the telescope’s view of Saturn,
experimenting until the image was to their satisfaction.
What I found incongruous was that everyone acted as if this
was normal, that unless Saturn was captured in the circuitry of
their hi-tech gadgets, the physical experience of observing the ringed
planet through a telescope wasn’t worth much.
It was the same with Jupiter in the adjacent roll-off roof
building. Jove and his moons took a backseat to the selfies, to the
document-by-camera excitement that gripped so many of the visitors. A remark I
overheard put the selfies in perspective. A man turned to his spouse and said,
“It’s already on Facebook and Instagram.”
The standalone selfie was apparently not worth much by
itself, unless authenticated by social media and “liked.”
I managed to see Saturn, its ring tilted at a steeper angle
than when I saw it last, magical and awe-inspiring as always. But the flash and
whirr of the cameras seemed so pervasive that afterwards, when I looked up with
unaided eyes outside, I half-expected to see the image of a partially-eaten
translucent silver apple dominating the night sky.
The selfie syndrome is everywhere, not just at public events
and tourist spots but in parks, woods, shores, malls, stadiums, restaurants, museums, even at graveyards and funerals!
How is it that we have so casually surrendered substance to
shadow, real to virtual? Why are we so in thrall to our devices 24×7?
One reason is that smart gadgets and social media allow us
to unleash our very human instinct for self-expression to a degree
unprecedented in history.
But pushed to extreme, self-expression can devolve into
narcissism. In particular, in the presence of the sublime and the transcendent,
self-expression through selfies, rather than engaging through the senses, can
be foolish and short-sighted. It is like ignoring the eternal for the
ephemeral.
How to subdue this abnormal selfie craving? One way would be
to renew our acquaintance with nature.
“The world is too much with us,” lamented Wordsworth at the
dawn of the 19th century when the poet felt that people had lost their
connection to nature because of their growing attachment to materialism.
“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:/Little we see in nature that is
ours/…/For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”
Next time we go to the woods, the shore or the observatory,
let’s leave behind the devices with the flickering screens so we can
experience with our five senses the music of songbirds, the lullaby of surf,
and the pageantry of stars and planets.
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