Thanks everyone,
Your memories of Fred are much like mine. Many of us considered him our friend and saw him as a kind and gentle man with a quick wit.
I exchanged emails with Fred for several years and one particular email from him stands out for me. He and I discussed it at length because it was particularly meaningful to both of us. It contained an excerpt from a 1996 commencement address by Carl Sagan in which Sagan commented on a photo of earth taken from space where the earth appears as a tiny pale blue dot. Sagan said,
Quote:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
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Fred was moved by Sagan's words. He certainly was a kind and compassionate person and our lives are richer for having known him. Let us honor his memory with kindness and compassion and caring for this pale blue dot.
Judith
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To view a short film "We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot," narrated by Carl Sagan:
http://palebluefilms.com