I listened to the special broadcast and NASA press conference on NPR. I don't know; I could not imagine how these men and women, reeling from this suddenness and loss, this hole in the sky, could have spoken with the eloquency and mournful determination that they did. It moved me so much that I didn't even mind when some Hallmark jingoistic rhetoric marred the eulogies -- stuff that irritated me post 9/11, viz. "This event should teach us that America will never be licked. God bless America!" and "We should always remember that life is precious. Take a second and," blah blah blah.

I don't know.

Valerie and I went out to dinner last night, the first time we'd spent any time in each other's company in two weeks; she used the conversation to harangue, I don't know, me and the food and the tablecloth and the waitstaff about the sheer stupidity of a publicly funded space program in the first place. "What use does all this space shit even have, anyway?" Valerie said. "What benefit does the Space Shuttle and the space station and whatnot have to Joe Schmoe in the street? Our tax dollars go to pay this? It's just stupid, stupid, stupid."

I just stared at her in disbelief.

All today I've been wondering how to answer her. Should one base the worthiness of an endeavour on its social necessity, on its utility? Such a life, I should think, may be productive but thin; living predicated on cost-benefit analyses. I don't know. I just think, at least right now, that humanity's ambitious curiosity is innately twined with its perfectibility; the urge to reach beyond, that impels the soul beyond, marks us, transcends us. I can't express this, why I am so awed by the daring of the curious and visionary, and why I mourn.

I'm ending this with the last bit of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"; hail, Columbia, and farewell.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always�
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.