LtE in CMO #263

From William SHEEHAN

Greetings! and hope you are well. The latest issues of CMO have arrived -- I am sure you are just catching your breath now before the GREAT OPPOSITION of 2003 gets underway. Hard to believe that in just a year we will be in the month of Mars's closest approach since (considerably) before the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux were painted!

I know you have been very busy, and will be more so next year, but I applaud you for all the information you have been kindly providing about Lowell and his visit to Japan. I have already committed myself mentally and financially to visiting you in March/April 2004, and reliving, insofar as possible, Lowell's travels as described in his delightful book NOTO. I have even begun casting around in the effort to interest a publisher in a book along the lines of NOTO THEN AND NOTO NOW, comparing Lowell's impressions with those of a new traveler (myself) to the same parts of Japan.

Without more ado, I should like to suggest the following as a brief preface to the Lowell/Mars Web Page, which is meant to be a draft only and which you and your colleagues may revise in any way you deem suitable.

(28 July 2002 email)

(Note) Our CMO Web-Page on LOWELL will soon begin with SHEEHAN’s foreword.

Many thanks for the interesting details of your recent journey, which I have yet to fully digest. I have taken a map and have attempted to trace your route. Meanwhile, I have been reading, with considerable pleasure, Percival Lowell's *Noto*, and find so many characteristic features of his personality and interests revealed. His anxious and nervous personality, which had already led to one breakdown and would lead to one or two more, frequently surfaces; his preoccupation with punctuality makes one wonder why he bothered venturing into a less efficient part of the world or traveling at all, his clinical detachment -- I was chilled when he mentioned chloroforming some of the Japanese passengers on the train, and sticking pins in them -- all are there, above all his upper-crust fussiness and his tiresome condescension toward those he considered inferiors and menials.

One really must read him aloud with a studied and affected style -- the late Sir John Gielgud would have been a superb oral interpreter of Lowell!

Having said all that, I also find it true that, as later in his astronomical work, Lowell was much more effective in describing landscapes and the colors of scenery, whether Japanese or Martian, than in understanding people. He really seems to have lacked any relationships of depth; he fails to individuate anyone. One senses he must have been very lonely and detached. An icy soul. One wonders whether his view of the "impersonality" of people in the East did not reflect more his own inability to penetrate the exteriors of others or to empathize with them more than it did the characteristics of people. He failed to recognize the assimilative character of the Japanese, or the fact that, even with the inefficiencies of their rail lines or the irritation of travel, they were already moving rapidly to modernize -- and he would undoubtedly have been utterly staggered had he glimpsed into the Japan of today. The closest thing to an animate being he sketches in his first three chapters is not his man-Friday and cook, who, despite the latter's considerable talents never emerges beyond the level of caricature, but the fish-kites which, waving in the breeze, at best produce a kind of simulated life. Lowell's figures are similarly perfunctory and mechanical.

I do enjoy Lowell's writing; it is quaint and charming and revealing, literate always, at times (in his landscape-descriptions) poetic; but it also reveals his limitations of his intellect.

Well, I thank you my dear friend, for all your insights shared. I have already started planning a kind of travel-log, in which Lowell's impressions of 1889 are juxtaposed with those of some of us revisiting Noto today.

More soon, but for now this will suffice by way of impressions,

(8 August 2002 email)

From: "Bill and Debb Sheehan" <sheehan4@en-tel.net>

To: "Masatsugu MINAMI" <vzv03210@nifty.com>

Subject: will you collaborate on an s&t article?

Dear Masatsugu,

As you know, Tom Dobbins and I have been regularly contributing articles on various aspects of planetary observation for Sky & Telescope. For 2003, we are hoping to contribute on Mars exclusively, and have two or three in the pipeline. The most urgent is one on Martian mountains as seen from the Earth. This would be organized along our usual plan of tracking the subject through the historical backgrounds.

1) We would begin with the Mountains of Mitchel, which though they turned out to be depressions rather than mountains are relevant to our theme as the one exception classical observers thought they had to the general flatness of Mars commonly accepted during the 19th century and figured in Lowell's observations of flashes from Mars in 1894. We'll give ephemerides for the Mountains of Mitchel in 2003.

2) Observations of shield volcanoes from Earth. (The irony here is that -- in contrast to the Mountains of Mitchel which proved to be Valleys of Mitchel -- at least some observers seem to have regarded these towering mountains as "craters"!) We'll include observations by Schiaparelli, Barnard (you've seen his magnificent series of drawings from Lick?--I shall send them as attached files if you haven't), Lowell (who saw the summit caldera of Ascraeus Lacus -- or Lucus as he preferred to call it -- on a smallish Martian disk in 1903), and George Hall Hamilton, who rendered Olympus Mons as a convincingly modern-looking ring with the 11-inch telescope he built for Pickering at Mandeville; Mars being at the time its maximum diameter of 25".1.

Many of the most superb drawings and images of the shield volcanoes obtained from Earth are Japanese, however, and have been previously included in your publications, so Tom and I are wondering if you would be agreeable to join us as a co-author in presenting this article? We would be most honored to attach our names to you and hope that your involvement may encourage the idea of intense collaboration on Mars by observers on both sides of the Great Ocean.

With kind regards,

Bill SHEEHAN (Willmar, Minnesota, USA )

sheehan4@en-tel.net

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