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Sasha Sagan - For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

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Sasha Sagan For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
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For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World: summary, description and annotation

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Part memoir, part guidebook, and part social history,For Small Creatures Such as Weis the first book from the daughter of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan--a luminous exploration of Earths marvels that require no faith in order to be believed.
What is the meaning of life? Sagan finds its meaning everywhere--with her family, around the world, and especially among the stars of the cosmos. Read her work; youll have a deeper appreciation for your every step, every bite, and every breath. --Bill Nye
Sasha Sagan was raised by secular parents, the astronomer Carl Sagan and the writer and producer Ann Druyan. They taught her that the natural world and vast cosmos are full of profound beauty, that science reveals truths more wondrous than any myth or fable.
When Sagan herself became a mother, she began her own hunt for the natural phenomena behind our most treasured occasions--from births to deaths, holidays to weddings, anniversaries, and more--growing these roots into a new set of rituals for her young daughter that honor the joy and significance of each experience without relying on religious framework.
As Sagan shares these rituals,For Small Creatures Such as Webecomes a moving tribute to a father, a newborn daughter, a marriage, and the natural world--a celebration of life itself, and the power of our families and beliefs to bring us together.

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For Small Creatures Such as We Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World - photo 1
G P P UTNAM S S ONS Publishers Since 1838 An imprint of Penguin Ra - photo 2
G P P UTNAM S S ONS Publishers Since 1838 An imprint of Penguin Random - photo 3

G P P UTNAM S S ONS Publishers Since 1838 An imprint of Penguin Random - photo 4

G. P. P UTNAM S S ONS

Publishers Since 1838

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright 2019 by The Great Unlikelihood LLC Penguin supports copyright - photo 5

Copyright 2019 by The Great Unlikelihood LLC

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Advice from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Advice by Langston Hughes reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates. Copyright 1994 by the Langston Hughes Estate.

From That Does Perish, published by Penguin Random House in The Gift: Poems by Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky, copyright 1999, and used with permission.

In this Plate of Food reprinted from Present Moment, Wonderful Moment (1990) by Thich Nhat Hanh, with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley California, www.parallax.org.

Excerpt from Shijing, The Book of Songs translated by Arthur Waley, as published in Joseph R. Allens The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1996.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING - IN -P U BLICATION D ATA

Names: Sagan, Sasha (Alexandra Rachel Druyan), author.

Title: For small creatures such as we: rituals for finding meaning in our unlikely world / Sasha Sagan.

Description: New York : G. P. Putnams Sons, 2019

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021246 | ISBN 9780735218772 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735218789 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sagan, Sasha (Alexandra Rachel Druyan) | Sagan, Sasha (Alexandra Rachel Druyan)Family. | Rites and ceremoniesUnited States. | SpiritualityUnited States. | Children of celebritiesUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC GN473.S155 2019 | DDC 390.0973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021246

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

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For Helena Chaya light of my life Contents Introduction I am a deeply - photo 6

For Helena Chaya, light of my life

Contents Introduction I am a deeply religious nonbeliever This is a - photo 7

Contents

Introduction I am a deeply religious nonbeliever This is a somewhat new - photo 8

Introduction

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.... This is a somewhat new kind of religion.

A LBERT E INST EIN

A life without festivity is a long road without an inn.

D EMOCRITUS

When I was little and my dad was alive he would take me to see the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. This was a holy place for me, grand and full of answers to deep and ancient questions. It filled me with awe. But it also frightened me. I would hide behind my dads legs, nervously stealing peeks at the frozen animals.

That one just moved! I would squeal.

No, sweetie, its your imagination. They cant move, my dad would tell me.

How do you know?

Because theyre dead.

This was a foggy and vague concept at the time. Foggier even than it is now. I could see the bears and gazelles, but in some larger way they were not really there. I knew that my dad was deeply committed to accuracy. I knew he had more information on the topic than I did, so I could probably take him at his word; they were not moving. And yet my mind played tricks on me.

As we continued among the other exhibitsbright, sharp gems, early human and dinosaur skeletons, Neanderthal tools, gold Aztec figurines, Yoruba masquerade costumesall sacred artifacts in the temple of history and nature, this mystery of death followed me. And I wondered about it a lot: what it meant, what exactly it was, what I was supposed to do with the knowledge of its existence.

Its dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true.

Thats what my dad told me, very tenderly, not much later. I had asked him why I had never met his parents. He told me it was because they were dead.

Will you ever see them again? I asked.

The animals in the dioramas were dead, but we could still see them.

He told me that hed like nothing better in the whole wide world than to see his parents again, but he had no evidence to prove he would. No matter how tempting a belief was, my father preferred to know what was true. Not true in his heart, not true to just him, not what rang true or felt true, but what was demonstrably, provably true. We humans have a tendency to fool ourselves, he said. I thought about the dioramas again. He was right. The animals hadnt been moving, though I could have sworn they were.

We discussed the history of the world a lot at home. My parents taught me that there has never been any correlation between how true something was and how fervently it was believed. Sure, some things are subjective. This may be the best sandwich you have ever had or that may be the most handsome man you have ever seen. Those are in the eye of the beholder. For those phenomena that exist outside of our perceptions, things like the way the Earth moves, the causes of illnesses, or the distance between stars, there were objective realities. Maybe undiscovered by anyone on our planet, but no less real.

People once believed with all their hearts that the sun went around the Earth. But believing didnt make it so. There are certainly things we believe right now that will someday be revealed to be hilariously or abhorrently ignorant. Our understanding changes with new information. Or at least it ought to.

So if a person is interested in testing their preconceptions, in discovering how things really are and why, how does one go about that? My parents taught me that the scientific method is designed for precisely this job. My father was a scientist. He was the astronomer and educator Carl Sagan. Science wasnt just his occupation, it was the source of his worldview, his philosophy, his guiding principles. He and my mom, writer and producer Ann Druyan, taught me that belief requires evidence. They taught me that science wasnt just a set of facts to be compared and contrasted with other philosophies but a way of testing ideas to see which ones stand up to scrutiny. They taught me that what scientists think today might be disproven tomorrow, and thats wonderful, because thats the pathway to a better, deeper understanding.

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