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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Walt Whitman’s Stunning
Serenade to Our Interlaced Lives Across Space and Time
How few artists are not merely the sensemaking vessel for the tumult of their times, not
even the deck railing of assurance onto which the passengers steady themselves, but the
horizon that remains for other ships long after this one has reached safe harbor, or has
sunk — the horizon whose steadfast line orients generation after generation, yet goes on
shifting as each epoch advances toward new vistas of truth and possibility.
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) was among those rare few. The century
and a half between his time and ours has been scarred by pandemics and
pandemoniums, hallowed by staggering triumphs of the humanistic, scientific, and
artistic imagination. We made Earth less habitable with two World Wars and discovered
4,000 potentially habitable worlds outside the Solar System. We gave all races and
genders the ballot, and invented new ways of revoking human dignity and belonging.
We beheld the structure of life in a double helix and the shape of civilizational shame in
a mushroom cloud. We heard Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, and the sound of spacetime.
But the most remarkable thing about it all, the most human and humanizing thing, is the
awareness of this we as atomized into millions of individual I’s who have lived and
loved and lost and made art and music and mathematics through it all.
Whitman understood and celebrated this intricate tessellation of being, not only across
society — “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” — but across space
and time, nowhere more splendidly than in his sweeping, horizonless masterpiece
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — a poem that opens up a liminal space where past, present,
and future tunnel into one another, a cave of forgotten and remembered dreams that
invites you to press your outstretched living fingers into the palm-print of the dead, into
Whitman’s generous open hand, and in doing so effects, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s
marvelous phrase, “and occasion for unselfing.”
At a special miniature edition of The Universe in Verse on Governors Island, devoted to
Whitman’s enchantment with science, astrophysicist Janna Levin — an enchantress of
poetry, a writer of uncommonly poetic prose, and co-founder of the Whitman-inspired
endeavor to build New York’s first public observatory — reanimated an excerpt from
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in a gorgeous reading emanating the elusive elemental truth
Whitman so elegantly makes graspable in the poem.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more
curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in
my meditations, than you might suppose.
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated
yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future.
[…]
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn
to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the
ebb-tide.
[…]
[…]
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
For other highlights from the first three years of The Universe in Verse, as we labor on
a virtual show amid the strangeness of this de-atomized season of body and spirit, savor
Levin reading “A Brave and Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou, “Planetarium” by
Adrienne Rich, Amanda Palmer reading Neil Gaiman’s tribute to Rachel Carson and his
feminist poem about the history of science, Marie Howe reading her tribute to Stephen
Hawking, Regina Spektor reading “Theories of Everything” by Rebecca Elson, and Neri
Oxman reading Whitman, then revisit Whitman on optimism as a mighty force of
resistance, women’s centrality to democracy, how to keep criticism from sinking your
soul, and what makes life worth living.
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