{"id":1227,"date":"2008-12-13T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-14T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2008-12-13T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-14T03:00:00","slug":"charpentier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1227","title":{"rendered":"charpentier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a passage from Moon Shot<\/a><\/i>, describing a moment during Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight atop the Redstone rocket, the first time an American had ventured into space:<\/p>\n

He had expected silence at this point. Atmosphere was something far below him. No rush of wind despite so many thousands of miles an hour. No friction. No turbulence. It should have been the silence of ghosts.<\/p>\n

But these ghosts were real, and they made their own sounds. It was the murmur of Freedom Seven<\/i> [his space capsule], as though a brook were running mechanically through its structure. Inverters moaned, gyroscopes whirred, cooling fans had their own sound, cameras hummed, the radios crackled and emitted their tones before and after conversational exchanges. The sounds flowed together, some dulled, other sharper–a miniature mechanical orchestral chorus. Shepard smiled. He was hearing the Concert of the Spacecraft, a strange and unexpected company to remain with him as he hurtled through the soundlessness of space. Those sounds are most welcome, he told himself. They mean things are working, doing, pushing and repeating. They were the new age sounds of life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It reminded me, a bit obliquely, of something I used to do as a pre-teen. I had a boombox in my bedroom. I listened to my Phil Collins, M.C. Hammer and Michael W. Smith tapes on it, as well as the radio. My mom would turn on the Mix 101.5 morning show to wake me up before breakfast. It wasn’t much–just a little Panasonic job–but I’ve never really liked really loud music anyhow, and I didn’t then, so it was fine for my purposes. It had a red LED light that would illuminate when the tuner was picking up the stereo from the FM station, and I remember many nights when, instead of flicking the switch to turn off the boombox completely, I would just turn the volume all the way down so that red LED would still be lit. <\/p>\n

There was something comforting about it I just can’t explain. Maybe I felt like it was vigilant through the night, watching over me? Maybe the fact that the light came on when radio reception was nominal was the boombox’s way of telling me everything was okay? There was more to it than just having a nightlight. The light performed a function more sophisticated than simply dispelling the dark in a corner of the room–it communicated something about the status of the boombox. Information was transmitted, and while the message was merely binary (either the stereo was functional or it wasn’t), it was a tiny step in the direction of consciousness, and personality, and companionship, and I think I drew a measure of comfort from the chain of implications.<\/p>\n

But regardless of the subconscious goings-on, the net effect for me was that many times when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would glance at the clock to check the time, and then over to the LED, confirming it was still on before peacefully falling back asleep. It probably sounds a little odd to find solace in an electronic “companion” like that, but on the other hand, given the proliferation of electronic peripherals and assistants in our lives these days, perhaps it’s not as strange, or at least as uncommon, as it used to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a passage from Moon Shot, describing a moment during Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight atop the Redstone rocket, the first time an American had ventured into space: He had expected silence at this point. Atmosphere was something far below him. No rush of wind despite so many thousands of miles an hour. No friction. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}