Pathetic Jupiter
Why would I want to write something insulting about Jupiter? After all, Jupiter is the first thing I looked at through a telescope. Only last month I wrote how, when I began searching for comets, I was looking for an activity that did not involve me dealing with other people. I had a few friends as a youngster. Now in my ripe age of 77, I have many good friends, of whom the current editor of Desert Skies is one of my closest. But I still enjoy, more than anything, the idyllic solitude of looking through my telescope, field after field of sky, for a new elusive comet. A related part of that same solitude is looking at the planet Jupiter, which I consider to be a faithful and lifelong friend.
Jupiter and I have been friends since I first looked at it, with Mom and Dad, on 1 September 1960. Since then the planet has never failed to give me an emotional, pathetic look. And thus I introduce that word pathetic. Applied to a person, pathetic could mean a loser. I am pathetic. I do not want to see myself as a loser, but as someone who deals intensely in emotions. Applied to Jupiter, I do not intend for it to be considered a loser of a planet, but rather as a planet that yields always an emotional response in the observer.
Jupiter is pathetic, but not a loser, not insulting. I use the word as a derivative of pathos, an idea from Greco-Roman philosophy. The concept survived all the way into Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Brutus exemplifies the stoic, logical personality that is brought to fame at the very end, in Antony’s celebrated obituary:
This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “This was a man!” (JC.5.5.68-75.)
Pathos alludes to a person’s emotions, and it ignites feelings related to those emotions. For my sense, Jupiter is pathetic because it fosters the emotions I felt when I first looked at it. That world is incredibly turbulent; a brief look at the Voyager images from decades ago shows us the roiling of the little clouds as they circle the great Red spot. More important to me, those of us who were alive in 1994 remember the profound effect that the daily addition of big black spots the size of Earth had on that weeping world, as though some cosmic force was pounding the daylights out of the solar system’s biggest planet.
Thaxted
According to NASA, my favorite government agency, there is a special musical allusion to this mighty comet’s breakup and collision. It is called Thaxted, and on the occasion of NASA’s last SL9 press conference late in July, as a way of celebration, they played the Thaxted section of Gustav Holtz’s The Planets, from its Jupiter movement. Holtz adapted it in 1921. He loved living in that small English town. In my opinion the Thaxted portion of The Planets, from near the center of the Jupiter movement, is one of the most stunning pieces of music ever written, equivalent to Mozart’s Jupiter symphony or Beethoven’s Fifth.
The NASA presentation included many images of comet fragments, impacts, and people. Gustav Holtz lived in Thaxted from 1917 to 1925. Holtz wrote the piece as the middle section of the “Jupiter” movement of The Planets. He adapted Thaxted to fit the words of the hymn “I vow to thee, my country”:
I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.
Before returning to pathetic Jupiter, one additional thought about Thaxted and its related hymn; its final line is from Proverbs 3:17. It belongs to a song, “Eitz Chayim”, I sing at our synagogue every year on the Day of Atonement:
“Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
And all her paths are peace.”
These words help connect the emotional pathos I feel towards Jupiter with the memorable black spots that graced that world. The dark soot-like spots lasted for months and they dissipated only gradually. As much as my earlier observations of Jupiter stayed in my memory and emotions, watching the comet’s impact spots were electrifying; the emotional, pathetic impact on me was unbelievable. These impacts taught us an important lesson. Over the course of cosmic time, Jupiter has been battered by comets and asteroids over and over again, and each time a pathetic or emotional observer might detect planetary tear coming from the eye of Jupiter.
During this particular winter, on each clear night I watch as Jupiter comes up earlier and earlier and I wave at my old friend that has never failed to greet me on a million starlight nights since my teenage years. Its fabulous Red Spot is smaller and fainter than it was on that September evening 66 years ago, and it is a lot smaller than the S-L 9 impact spots. But Jupiter never fails to arouse my deepest emotions. Jupiter’s pathos is a part of me, and it always will remain a central part of my life.
This is my favorite image of Jupiter’s Great Red spot, imaged by Voyager I in 1979: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from Voyager 1 (contemporary mosaic)
