[APPLAUSE]
Well, before we go to the Galapagos,
let's go to another desperately barren place, Death Valley.
I'll read a few of the poems from the Death Valley sequence.
I got to go there with Stephen Strom,
a distinguished astronomer, retired from our faculty,
and who's taken up landscape photography as a huge project
in his so-called "retirement."
And I went there and wrote this series of poems,
and they're in that gorgeous book of his photographs.
I'll just read a few of these.
I tried to really--
I guess you can probably tell.
I try to learn things about science
through geology, evolutionary science.
And I try to figure out, how can this science sound like a song
instead of like a boring science textbook?
So that was one of my challenges with this series of poems
in Death Valley, learning everything I could about
what is this place.
And how is it so stark and bare?
And what's going on here?
What's its history, human and natural?
And what kind of songs might it make me want to sing?
So I'll read a few from the Death Valley sequence.
It has an epigraph from Rilke.
"The future enters us--"
[LOUD CAR ENGINES]
[LAUGHTER]
--and so does the present.
[LAUGHTER]
"The future enters us in order to transform itself
in us long before it happens."
One.
"Forget what you think you know about beauty and what lasts.
These forsaken hills and salt flats, erosion, dune,
and crustacean are ghosts of a lake, a storm, a savannah,
all here and gone, like the stars
that blew apart to make the complicated molecules here
now organized and named Funeral Hills, and Eureka
Valley, Dante's View, and Zabriskie Point,
a vast space where the land can think about itself
without distractions.
Perfect in its desolation and yet,
full of the long story of invention
that has been spilling out of space.
The dull force that has been pulling the valley apart.
The blazing heat that has purified the air
and made the past lie down to rest,
the future to wait for a moment before descending."
This is number two.
"Black ribbon of asphalt unspools through the Amargosa
chaos, as you leave the dull glow of towns
forgotten when mines shut down.
And you descend through chalk hills
stained with iron red bands to rain gutted and gutted by time.
A place where migrant and miner picked their way through rock,
made tea from twigs, forced water
to rise in a dry pit they came to call a well.
And marked with stovepipe.
Their lost voices distant as the bells that
hung on a mine mule's harness.
Echoing long the tasks once necessary in the world's
machinery, then lost.
The place opens a rift in you, right down
to the fossil bed of your cells."
This is number eight.
"Land this impoverished and vast could be another planet.
Not Earth, with its celebrity glow
of blue ocean and green terrain.
Salt stain leaks across the flats.
Dirt flow and rubble seam out from the Panamints
into alluvial fans.
And the Funeral Mountains rumple like the ruched, black silk
of Victorian mourning.
Heartless and sear, the desert does not
nurture the complacent.
Whatever lives here has learned.
The kangaroo rat, to live without water.
The coyote melon, to let its above ground parts die.
Rock, bent and re-bent.
Slopes jarred with fault and slippage, force of the planet's
slow flex and strain.
The valley rent in two as underlying plates
grind past each other.
How perfect the illusion of stillness."
[APPLAUSE]
You don't need to do that.
You can do it a lot in the end.
Number nine.
"Sometimes it seems as if time is the material of which we're
made.
Grain by grain we add up, like sand ground
down to gritty beads by an archaic sea.
Chalk hills built up, grain by grain
from crushed mollusks and crustaceans.
How many clamshells does it take to build an Acropolis?
Ridge after ridge lined up like dancers
in reciprocating gesture, flirting with embrace,
but keeping their distance.
Posed at just so intervals, as if choreographed into pattern
and form.
Though it is the eye that choreographs."
And one more from this series.
"Some scientists say it was inevitable
that the universe would make beings able to comprehend
the cosmic story.
And that we'd keep looking into the dark energy of what we
don't know for something we perceive that isn't.
It was never enough for us just to survive.
We had to make something of ourselves,
give something back of ourselves,
register our inner lives in the record of what is.
We are not just made of the same material as stars,
but of the same self-ordering force that
thinks it can do something about entropy.
The universe, a glitter in a salt pan."