jupiter takes liberties with venus

I felt like a voyeur. And if it had not been so public, I would turned away in embarrassment at such an act of wanton behavior.

But there it was. Right in front of me. Like some Victorian cad, a kiss was about to be stolen from a maiden famed for virtue -- the cad's own daughter.

It only helped a little that the two lovers were planets named after two Roman rock stars with a sketchy mythological back story -- Jupiter and Venus. Or that Venus was the fast operator of the two.

That was this last Friday. The two planets had been chasing each other across the imaginary elliptic in the night sky for the past months. Almost as if they were floats in a fantastical Mardi Gras.

But Friday was different. Because Venus has a much shorter orbit around the sun, it appeared to be running down its seemingly-slower patronym. Thus the nearly-stolen kiss. And all sorts of tawdry tabloid headlines in the making. Just imagine what the Meghan crowd could do with that.

My niece Kaitlyn had been staying at the house with her parents and me for almost two weeks. Because her flight date was drawing near, we decided to celebrate the Venus-Jupiter conjunction by watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. She had never seen it. More amazingly, my sister-in-law Christy had not either. So, into the DVD player it went. (There was something a bit ironic watching a film of Man's evolution from human form on a piece of out-moded technology.)

When, I reviewed 2001 back in 1968, it was one of my Ten Favorite Movies. Of course, at 19, the list was an exercise in The Pure Hubris. It is difficult to have sufficient perspective to develop such a list without living a bit of life.

Having added close to 60 years to my life, I would still put it on one of those silly lists. Sure, the special effects seemed dated. The acting is wooden. The dialog is almost painful. But they always were.

What holds up well is the idea behind the whole project -- Arthur C. Clarke's philosophical musings on life's two fundamental questions: Where do we come from, and where are we going? Darrel, Christy, Kaitlyn, and I had great fun kicking the two questions around. 

By coincidence, I had just finished reading Dan Brown's dreadful novel Origins (though I swore never to read another one of his grating prose pieces -- and never will again). Brown's novel poses the same two questions, and conjures up answers at the opposite pole of Clarke's. Brown sees a future where humans will meld in a utopia with technology. Clarke, of course, takes the opposite tack, where humanity evolves without the interference of technology (think HAL).

It makes for good conversation fodder with the family. I almost felt as if I was squatting in the college dormitory hallway with my fellow students talking about Important Things. But with a bit more wisdom tucked under my balding pate.

Kaitlyn is now back in Austin enjoying the sybaritic pleasures of the Texas hill country. To prove that our conversation was not a one-off, she used technology to send us a photograph of how she was enjoying her return above the border -- by mugging for the camera.

Just like your correspondent.