ASTRONOMY

Don't you smell the stale anxiety in the rooms where exams are taken.  They have a threat 

similar to that of Dionysis when he hung the sword above Damocles. You shouldn't be

careless about final exams. You'll be fighting the whole structure of a power system if 

you do that.

Unless, by good fortune, the professor who passed you in astronomy has a cosmic view

of the established criteria of a decisive pass/fail and know that you have taken his 

Astronomy 101 in order to meet the mandatory science requirements and because he knows

his course has the reputation of being called Astronomy for Poets.

The final question on the exam was:  How would you prove to a friend that the moon had

influence on the tides.  Sitting there, exhausted and with a high fever I'd nourished for a 

week, I wrote that I would take a good friend along with a  yardstick down to the river 

for a week's observation, and that, of course , he would have to be someone who

would know that I was totally incapable of figuring out such things scientifically, what 

with the inverse square law, gravitational pull and all that stuff.  I left the hall, thinking

I'd blown it.

There were close to 500 students in that class, of whom maybe twenty were genuinely

interested in astronomy.  The teaching assistants who'd graded the exam were 

furious.  They marched into the auditorium.  Their spokesman took center stage and said 

never before in his years of experience had he ever seen such loud exams and, that

though they usually made pass/fail based on a curve, in this instance, they had had to 

base it on an arc the distance of which would land you on the moon.  Happily, we burst

out in applause while they passed out the papers and left  in disgust.

I think I passed that exam because, on the day I had my interview with the professor,

I was wearing some field flowers in my lapel, and we had spent the hour happily

talking about gardening.  Once I'd finished a quotation he'd started and had gotten 

stuck.  It was Lorenzon's lovely speech to Portia from The Merchant of Venice, 

about the floor of heaven being thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.  Other

than those incidents, there would have been nothing outstanding enough about me

or my knowledge of astronomy to warrant my eking out a passing grade.  After

that, I always sought out a professor with a cosmic attitude and a delicious sense of the

practical, despite what his superiors might say.

2013