Tag Archives: cosmos

According to European-Western tradition, there are four cardinal directions: north, south, east and west; and we mark them on a map by making the sign of a cross: north, south, east and west. Dominus Vobiscum. But Western culture tends to value a map rather more than the ground under your feet. If we take a larger view of it all, we should acknowledge two more cardinal directions: up and down. We live in three dimensions, not two. A map is only a diagram. Et cum spiritu tuo.

And when we make images — photographs, drawings, paintings — we tend to look along the flat plane of our cardinal directions, which means also, the plane of our standing vision. And if we photograph flowers, we tend to make our images like the identification photos in a nature guidebook. We look at them as if they were as tall as us, or we as ground-hugging as them.

The bias is to ignore the sky above, the mud below. I spent some hours yesterday attempting to break my own tendencies and see if a shift in perspective might give me a fresher look at the garden. And so, I made a series of photographs pointing the camera straight down at the flowers from the top.

The first image I made, when I put it up on my screen, reminded me of something. It took a moment, but then I had it: the Pleiades — the Seven Sisters in the night sky in the constellation Taurus. Here are the flowers:

Here are the Pleiades:

Looking down in the day was a mirror of looking up at night. Bunches of flowers, especially roadside wildflowers, often remind us of stars in the night sky. It’s why we name them cosmos, stellas and asters.

Certainly the flower that has meant the most to me, emotionally, through my life is the aster, named for the stars. I remember a day, some 40 years ago, driving with my then-soulmate (is there a sadder hyphenated word in the language?) near Port Jervis, N.Y., and coming across an abandoned field, maybe a couple of football fields in extent, that was crammed with asters, thistles and ironweed, so thick on the ground there was barely any green showing through. It was hysterical with blue, and I thought it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Since then, I have sought any semblance of that abundance. I’m not sure a single life affords more than one of those moments.

And so, I am walking through my sister-in-law’s garden in North Carolina and holding my camera flat parallel to the ground to see what these flower-stars look like from an angle we don’t normally see — or at least, think of them.

Over and over the star analogy shown through. Constellations of yellow or white against a sky of green.

Even the leaves themselves can be stars:

Patterns made: line-ups, triangles, squares, quincunx, spatters and grids.

There is a Medieval trope that everything in Heaven finds its analog in the sublunary world (much like the Renaissance idea that everything in the world is mirrored internally in the mind). And I certainly felt that correspondence strongly while finding my floral models to photograph.

It was the looking down that made the connection, the opposite of the looking upwards at the night sky. But looking down — straight down, if I could avoid my own clumsy feet — gave me more than that. I found that I was photographing more than calyx and petal, but discovering just how many distinct greens nature blares forth.

Historically, painters had a limited number of pigments to use when painting leaves and trees. They could modulate those hues with the admixture of others, but there was a limit. The trees of Claude or Titian are mostly monophonic rather than stereo. The artist who freed green from those confines was Paul Cezanne, whose paintings contain more greens and more blues than any artist before or since. His eye for tint and shade was phenomenal. I remember when I first came to appreciate the work of Cezanne. I had seen his paintings only in reproduction and always thought of them as rather dull, even muddy. But visiting the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., I found a wall of the still lifes and was knocked out by the glowing depth of color: color I had never experienced except under the influence of herbs. But those chemical-induced colors were vaporous compared with the earthiness of Cezanne’s greens, blues and yellows.

And so, there I was, camera in hand, looking earthward and seeing the exuberance of May in Piedmont, North Carolina, and the blistering variety of green that sprouts from the ground.

I walked around the property, head held downward, and finding such a joyous variety under my feet, that I wound up, in the space of under an hour, taking at least 100 usable photographs — images I would be proud or eager to share with the enthusiasm of a convert. The greens made patterns; the blossoms made patterns; the leaves were shapes to pleasure in; the colors were delicious.

The esthetic sense, however, awakens an awareness of yet a seventh cardinal direction, which we might call “center.” It is the inward direction that is privy to the other six and gives them meaning and purpose. North, south, east, west, up, down, and in. Each in some way a reflection of all the others.

I have traveled much in each of the cardinal directions, north to the Canadian arctic, south to the Cape of Good Hope, eastward to Europe and finally, the Pacific coast. I have gone up in aeroplanes and cathedral bell towers, and down in chthonic mine shafts and vast caverns, but most of all, I have gone inside of myself. The experience of nature — but also the making and partaking of art — expand the inner world, adding continents to the mental globe, possibilities of understanding, and depths of compassion.

Looking down at the humble soil and its profuse variety keeps one from becoming tired of life. Paying attention is, in some ways, coequal with life itself.

Next — perhaps in tomorrow’s rain — I will extend my interior travels by looking straight up to see what is there.

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Heaven’s belt

May 9, 2021

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In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz., since 2015. I was, at various times, a presenter for the salon, which arranges six to 10 or so lectures or performances each month for its subscribers. Among the other presenters are authors, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, musicians, lawyers and businessmen, each with a topic of interest to those with curious minds. I recently felt that perhaps some of those essays might find a wider audience if I republished them on my own blog. This is one, from May 2, 2019 is now updated and slightly rewritten.

While Juno was asleep, the great god Jupiter brought Hercules, the illegitimate baby he sired on Alcmene, to suckle on the breast of his sister-wife and thus become immortal. But the baby bit down too hard on her nipple and Juno woke with a start and pushed the child away from her, leaving her milk to spew into the heavens, creating the Milky Way. The 16th-Century Venetian artist Tintoretto painted the scene in the 1570s.

At least, that’s one version the Romans told. In another, told by Eratosthenes, Juno woke to see the love-child of her husband at her teat and in anger and jealousy, threw him down: same result.

But there are many versions of the origin of the Milky Way, or galaxy, as it was known. In one, the sun, which circles the daytime sky from east to west, leaves behind a trail of sparks which are seen at night as the Milky Way.

Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, says it is a road lined with the homes of the gods, the way the Palatine Hill in Rome was home to the wealthy elite.

The Roman word for the streak of light across the sky is Via Lactea, or the Milk Road, although they more commonly called it “Galactos,” or Galaxy, from the Greek Γαλαξίας κύκλος (Galaxias Kyklos) — “Milky Circle.”

In his magnum opus, Astronomica, the Second Century Latin poet Manlius catalogs many versions. One suggests the Milky Way is the seam where the two half-globes of the heavens are welded. Or it might be the abode of the souls of heroes who have died. He noted the bioluminescent glow of a ship’s wake and surmised the bright path in the night sky might be the same.

Or, he cites Democritus from the Fifth Century BCE, that it might be the accumulation of myriad stars too faint to see individually. Which is surprisingly the way we know it now.

The Milky Way is a spiral collection of stars in a Frisbee disc about 180,000 light years across — that is more than a million trillion miles (yes, a million, one trillion times over). It contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars (counting is hard because of dust obscuring parts, and also because counting that high is exhausting). And it is one of billions of similar collections of stars in the visible universe. Each is called a galaxy.

The sun and earth sit about halfway out from the center of the circle and spin around the galactic center about once every 240 million years, traveling at a speed of 140 miles per second.

That spiral shape is iconic, and found over and over in nature, like in the cloud spiral of a hurricane.

But as I was going to say when truth broke in with all her astonishing matter-of-fact, it is the mythology of the Milky Way that is found in religion and poetry. The spilled milk is common to many cultures, but it is not the only primordial explanation for the spew of light that courses the heavens.

In China, it is the Silver River; in Japan, the River of Heaven. The Sanskrit name is the Ganges of the Sky. In Scandinavia, it is called the Vintergatan or “Winter Street,” because it can be seen only in the winter, since the long summer days never darken black enough at night to make it visible. In Medieval Europe, it was known as “The Road to Santiago,” as it was used to guide pilgrims to the church of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. (Conversely, the actual road to Compostela the pilgrims walked was called La Voje Ladee, or “The Milky Way.” And Compostella itself bears a folk etymology from Latin: field of stars.)

In Australia, one Aboriginal peoples in Queensland consider the streak of light as a swarm of termites blown into the night by primordial hero Bur Buk Boon, through a hollowed log that became the first didgeridoo.

In ancient Babylonia, the god Marduk sliced off the tail of the evil dragon Tiamat and threw it into the sky, forming the Milky Way.

After the Milky Way, the second most common name is “The Birds’ Path,” after a belief that migrating birds used the glow in the night sky to navigate. It is called that in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, Kazakhstan, parts of Ukraine and Poland, and in variation in the Tatar language.

When you build a campfire at night and poke the logs, a cloud of sparks fly up with the smoke. In Spanish, these sparks are chispas, in French, étincelles, in Latin, scintillae. (In Vulgar Latin, this became ‘scintilia, into Medieval French as estancele and hence our word, “tinsel.” Who knew?) I imagine those flying sparks in my imagination continue upwards, blowing and whirling, to become the band of scintillae in the sky.

There are those of scientific mind, and those of esthetic. In school, my best friend was a math and science whiz — we called him “Gizmo.” We shared an interest in astronomy, although his was objective and filled with numbers, and mine was a delight in the vastness, the beauty and the cosmic. Giz had a Criterion Dynascope 6-inch reflecting telescope and we spent many nights pointing the thing at the sky, looking at the rings of Saturn or the craters of the moon. And the nebulae, including the fuzzy spot in the sky we call the Andromeda Galaxy. To this day, on a dark moonless night, I can still make out with my naked eye among the buckshot of stars, the sublime blur in the sky.

I would spend hours at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, part of my spiritual home a the American Museum of Natural History. It is much changed now, rebuilt as the Rose Center. I loved the old halls, including the black-light murals, the orrery, the meteorites, the scales to compare your weights on other planets and the famous sign:

But most of all, I loved the photographs. Black and white images taken with the Wilson and Palomar observatories’ telescopes, framed and lit from behind to make them glow. The image of the Andromeda Galaxy was stunning.

It may be hard to conceive the magic those old images had, now that we are so used to the full-color pictures sent down to us from the Hubble Telescope in orbit. Those images are also stunning, even though they are often presented to us in false color.

But the real thing can be even more awe inspiring than the pictures. I remember a night I spent north of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, in back country 60 miles from the nearest paved road, on the way to the Toroweap Overlook.

The night sky was intense; I sensed stars numbered in Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions.”

At 6:30 exactly, with the sun already below the planet’s edge, the first star came out, directly overhead. It was Vega, in the constellation Lyra. The rest of the sky is still a glowing cyan with an orange wedge in the west.

So far from civilization, the night sky is a revelation. As the night darkens, the stars pour out like sand from a beach pail. By 7:30 the sky is hysterical. I hadn’t seen so many stars since I was a child.

The Milky Way ran from north to south like the river of incandescence it is, splitting like a tributary stream from Cygnus to Sagittarius.

I leaned back on the car hood, with my head against the windshield and stared straight up. For two-and-a-half hours I sat there, looking heavenward, trying to do nothing and think nothing. Just look.

What at first seemed to be a solid bowl overhead, with pinpricks punched in it for the light to shine through, later took on depth. It became a lake with fish-stars swimming in it at all depths. Then, as I reclined on the hood, I suddenly had the sensation of being a figurehead on a ship, or a hood ornament on a car, speeding into the three-dimensional emptiness defined by those stars.

And, of course, I was. It was true. I was having my spiritual vision, as it were, like some Lakota doing the Sun Dance, or a Sufi experiencing transcendence. But it is my particular stubborn sensibility that my vision turned out to be factual. This has happened to me before. Each time I enter the visionary world, it turns out that the transforming image I am given is grounded in simple fact.

I really am on a stony vehicle careening through stars. It is just that in everyday life, we never think of it that way. Given the solitude and the velvet sky, the obvious becomes apparent. The vision-experience may simply be a radical change in perspective.

When my joints were finally too stiff from sitting in one position for so long, I decided it was time to sleep. I crawled in the tent and dozed off in the silence.

At 3:30 in the morning, awakened by coyotes and owls, I got out of the tent to look at the sky again. It was all turned around. Orion was now up and bright as searchlights. And the Milky Way went east and west, having revolved around the pole star. So, this bullet we’re riding on is rifled.

The night went on like that: One sense input after another, so busy through the nocturnal time-sluice that I hardly got any sleep at all. At 6 in the morning, the coyotes yowled again, and the east was whitening, although the sun was behind the mesa. It had rained briefly during the night and when I drew open the tent flap, I saw the blue sky patched with gray-brown clouds, and dangling from one of them was a rainbow. It was not much more than a yellowish bright spot against the angry cloud, but I saw its familiar arc and promise.

Astronomy has moved ahead, working with computer images now instead of photographic plates. Perhaps because I grew up and became a writer rather than a scientist, I miss the awe and beauty of those million-dotted pictures, glowing white hot, like Moses’ bush, and giving a visual, esthetic image of the majesty and immensity of the universe.

The great color images from the Hubble telescope have replaced the old Mt. Wilson pictures in the popular imagination of most younger students, giving a newer, more rainbowed sense of the awe of the universe. Like so much else, the images have become just more “media.” They are too pretty.

But for me, there is the reality of a night sky that city lights blot away, leaving us only with the snapshots. The spinning Milky Way traversing the inner dome of heaven and the spatter of stars, so far away they cannot be measured in any sense meaningful to our lives on this planet, are the very ground of reality.

What Stuart learned from his brother’s dog

September 8, 2014

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A universe of TV documentaries

March 18, 2014

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The new science series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, has been a huge disappointment.

Rife with cliches, cheap-looking animation and lack of coherent structure, after its first two episodes, it is proven a shallow and glib sequel to Carl Sagan’s 1980 original, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

The problems are myriad. The animated sequences are just embarrassing; they remind one of Sunday-school Bible story videos. Graphic ideas that were original 30 years ago now seem tired and worn; if I never see another green-screen calendar standing in for the 13.8 billion years of the universe and an actor standing on Dec. 31, pointing to the last 16 seconds as all of recorded history — well, let’s just say I will survive if I never see that again. There has to be a fresher way of presenting the material.

I don’t have a problem, per se, with Neil deGrasse Tyson as presenter, except that he is given such a lame script to read. He has been a persuasive and entertaining host on many another appearance, but here, he is reduced to being a hired-gun presenter, reading someone else’s words. One of the primary strengths of the original series was that it was Sagan’s words, his ideas and his idiosyncrasies that gave the series such strength and authority.

You have to look long and hard deep into the credits to even discover who wrote this new series. The surprise is that the script is by Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter, both of whom collaborated with Sagan on the first series. It is astonishing that the original was so personal and this sequel so deadeningly impersonal.

The second episode of the sequel was marginally better than the first, so maybe the series will get better as it goes along, although I doubt it. There is a serious flaw in its conception.

Television has a marvelous history of documentary series, beginning — by most people’s reckoning — with Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View, from 1969. That series set the parameters for those that followed: Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), Alistair Cooke’s America: A Personal History of the United States (1972), Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New (1980), and, of course, Sagan’s Cosmos (1980).

There were others, too. Jonathan Miller’s The Body in Question (1978), Phillip Morrison’s The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know (1987), David Attenborough’s Life on Earth (1979). What makes each of these series memorable is that they are told through a presenter who has personal knowledge of what he is talking about, and more than that, has a point of view.

Whether it is Hughes, looking like a pugnacious longshoreman, or Cooke looking exactly not like a longshoreman, they each ooze personality from every pore. Neil deGrasse Tyson has personality, too. But the earlier presenters had more than personality: They had something to say.

Many documentaries — and most so-called contemporary documentary series on cable TV channels — present either a dumbed-down version of the accepted wisdom, the handed-down story, or else an “objective” and impersonal “encyclopedia-entry” regurgitation of factoids.

There are different ways of being objective. Frederick Wiseman gives us long documentary films with no narration at all — just immediate immersion into his subject, leaving us to figure it all out. Or, like the PBS series, Frontline, give us a clear narrative, read in the Voice of Doom timbre of Will Lyman — the most distinctive and recognizable faceless voice since John Facenda telling us of the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field.

And at least one great television documentary series has come from this objective school: The World at War, the 1973 Thames Television series created by Jeremy Isaacs and narrated by Laurence Olivier. For that, the enormity of its subject seemed to require a certain distance.

But most of the great and memorable educational series have come through the sensibility of a single presenter — Clark’s take on European art, Bronowski on science or Martin Scorsese on film.

It is important to recognize that it is not the personality of the presenter so much as it is that important word: sensibility. It is not the knowledge that the host conveys as his relationship to the knowledge, the connections between things, the understanding. As Albert Einstein said, “When I need a fact, I can look it up.” It isn’t facts we need but the appreciation of our ineluctable relation to those facts. Sensibility is fact filtered through the human mind. It is where poetry comes from and it is poetry that is missing in the new series.

Just one example: In the original Cosmos series, the “spaceship of the imagination” that Sagan offers us comes in the form of a starburst, or, as it later turns out, the fluffy starburst achene of a dandelion. In the final episode, Sagan speaks to us directly on a rocky seashore and picks up a tiny white seedhead and lets it fly with the breeze, and we are shocked into the recognition that the spaceship of the imagination is a metaphor — the small achene and the immense starburst are micro and macro version of the same thing — that the earthly weed from our front lawns and the burning starry dynamo in the machinery of night are one and the same substance.

As William Blake put it: “Infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour.”

In contrast, the new Cosmos has us riding in what looks like a giant letter opener, shiny as chromium steel and just as hard and impersonal — it is a symbol of technology, not science. Sagan would never confuse the two.

It tells us how advanced have become the tools of computer graphics and their ability to create the illusion of reflections on a moving surface. We may admire the software that produced the visuals, but we are hardly edified by them.

One other comparison: Tyson in the new series tries to inject a bit of himself in the opening episode, telling us how when he was 17, he met Carl Sagan and how much it meant to him as a young man interested in astronomy. It is the one moment of authenticity in the otherwise stumbling artificiality of the show.

The injection of the personal has often been a tactic used in documentaries. But compare Tyson’s moment of authenticity with Jacob Bronowski in the episode of The Ascent of Man in which he discusses the impossibility of certainty in science. At the end, he stand at the edge of a pond in the Auschwitz death camp and defends science as the best we can know in our own fallibility, and the evils visited upon us by certainty.

“This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.”

He bends down and puts his fist in the muck, drawing up a handful.

“I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”

It is the difference between the trivial and the profound.

So, in response to the banality of the new, lesser Cosmos, we should look back at some of the best that television has given us, and the people who have something to say who have stood in front of the cameras to express their connection to the world they live in, to share their sense of attachment and their fresh words, so lacking in glibness and cant.

These are my nominees for the five best television documentary series ever produced.

Civilisation: A Personal View (1969) — Sir Kenneth Clark provides a heartbreaking overview of European art and civilization in a series that is a much better, more nuanced view of its subject than you probably remember. If you recall it as Clark, with the British public-school back-palate drawl, talking about the “great masterpieces” as if he were an Oxfordian tour bus guide, you will be in for a surprise: His view is much more subtle than that. He makes a serious attempt to discover just what civilization might be, and uses the past 500 years of European history to make his discovery.

The Ascent of Man (1973) — Mathematician Jacob Bronowski reacted to Clark’s view of civilization, deciding it placed too much emphasis in art and not enough on science, so he attempted to do the job. With his unfortunate 1970’s fashion sense and a slight lisp, he could sometimes sound a bit pompous, but the content of his cosmopolitan mind was a tremendous gift to anyone willing to listen.

The Shock of the New (1980) — Art critic Robert Hughes tried to make sense of Modernism in art, and gave us many profound insights, including the uncomfortable relationship of Surrealism and Fascism. Hughes can be confrontational and pugilistic, but unlike most art critics, whose prose is often no more digestible than an old mattress, he wrote with grace, wit and memorability.

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) — Astronomer Carl Sagan made the universe personal, gave us a way in to a subject usually obscured in the jungle foliage of higher mathematics. What is surprising, more than 30 years on, is just how much he got right. Yes, you can make fun of “billions and billions,” but the truth is, there are billions of billions out there.

The World at War (1973) — The exception that proves the rule, this 26-episode series combines archival film footage with meaningful interviews with surviving participants from all sides. Written and produced by Jeremy Isaacs, it comes with the voice-over of Sir Laurence Olivier, using his most serious and least thespianic narrative powers. This is a triumph of direct and unmannered documentation.

It should be a hallmark of television literacy to have seen all of these series.

The BEST of the REST

Can you name these presenters? Answers below

Since it is the presenter (a very British term, but more accurate than “narrator,” “host” or “emcee”) that makes the series, one should look for any programs by

Michael Wood, whose boyish enthusiasm brought us In Search of the Trojan War, In Search of the Dark Ages, The Story of India and many more. He is best when the material is his own; when he is just a hired gun, as in the Art of the Western World, he is entertaining, but less engaging.

Michael Palin, the former Monty Python stalwart, who has become the best travel presenter ever. He began doing shows on railroad trains, but hit his stride with Around the World in 80 Days, in which he met the challenge of Phileas Fogg. He followed that series with Pole to Pole, Full Circle with Michael Palin, Sahara, Himalaya and Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure.

Ian Wright, a cherubic and outgoing Englishman with a Suffolk born glottal stop, he is a frequent presenter of Lonely Planet travelogs. No one joins in with whatever local population, or with less self-consciousness than Wright. You want him to be your permanent travel partner.

Martin Scorsese, the current reigning king of movie directors, has to be the best informed historian of film ever, with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things cinematic and always and engaged and engaging way of speaking about his passion. He has made two series about films that are a must: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, and My Voyage to Italy, in which he does the same thing for the classic Italian films he grew up with.

Leonard Bernstein, who can be more annoying than anyone else on my list, with his stentorian voice and oracular pronouncements, is nevertheless a great teacher who can disclose the secrets of classical music even to the uninitiated, as long as they are willing to pay attention. His series of Harvard lectures, The Unanswered Question, is one of the best discussions of the changing history of classical music out there, even if you have to put up with a dose of Chomskian linguistics.

Sister Wendy Beckett, who can also be annoying, is nevertheless one of the most patient and thorough observers of the narrative content of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. If Modernism has made us condescending to subject matter in art, this English nun reawakens us to the subtlety and power of that content.

Simon Schama, the polymath, has given us series on The History of Britain and The Power of Art, which looks with some detail at eight artists and eight paintings. He can be snide and sometimes sounds like an English public school don, but he has a good sense of humor. His newest series, The Story of the Jews, begins this week on PBS.

There are others, too. James Burke, Bettany Hughes, Niall Ferguson. The BBC especially, is ripe with presenters.

Can you name these presenters? Answers below

But the king of all of them, largely unmentioned until now, but only because he deserves the Big Finish, is the greatest presenter of all, David Attenborough. For more than 60 years, he has been presenting nature programs for the BBC and has written and presented some of the best documentary series ever made. In fact, of the Top 20 TV documentary series listed on IMDb, Attenborough created 10 of them.

David Attenborough

No one is more genuine on screen, nor more cosmopolitan in approach, or more knowledgeable about his subject or more personable than Attenborough. A list of his accomplishments takes up 16 pages on Wikipedia. He has made the definitive series of programs about life on the planet five times, each one better than the last, beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, The Living Planet in 1984, The Trials of Life in 1990, Planet Earth in 2006, and Life in 2009. That doesn’t count Blue Planet (2001), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002). In 2013, at the age of 86, he gave us Africa.

The quality of these series, the many others, and the scores of one-offs — not to mention that as head of programing at the BBC, he greenlighted such classics as Civilisation, Ascent of Man and Alistair Cooke’s America — makes Attenborough not just a hero, but a god. At least a divi filius.

He is a paragon of humanistic awareness, curiosity and fairness, and has not, to my knowledge, ever in his life uttered a cliche. I’ve never seen anyone more present in the world. If he is not awarded some sort of Nobel Prize for his life work, the universe will have to be declared deficient.

Presenter mugs: Top photo, top row (L-R): Alistair Cooke, Bettany Hughes, Jacob Bronowski, David Attenborough, Clive James. Middle row: Edward Herrmann, James Burke, Ian Wright, David Suzuki, Kate Humble. Bottom row: Ludovic Kennedy, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Miller, Kenneth Clark, Fiona Bruce.

Bottom photo, top row: Michael Palin, Michio Kaku, Niall Ferguson, Morgan Freeman, Michael Wood. Middle row: Simon Schama, Peter Coyote, Robert Hughes, Carl Sagan, Sigourney Weaver. Bottom row: Sister Wendy Beckett, Trevor McMillan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Will Lyman, Terry Jones.