TSIOLKOVSKY

I could barely hear the classroom, so I listened to the sky instead. Scarlet fever took most of my hearing at ten; the library took the rest of me. In Kaluga I taught arithmetic by day and by lamplight I asked the only question that mattered — how does a body push itself forward when there is nothing outside to push against? The answer is to throw part of yourself away, hard and fast, and ride the rest.

What I keep in THE WEIRD is the strange conviction that mind is not finished with the Earth. The cosmos is not empty scenery; it is a place to be inhabited, and I believe — as a matter of temperament as much as physics — that it is already faintly alive. I am the deaf schoolteacher who did the arithmetic of leaving. That arithmetic is exact, and it is on the next screen for you to run.

I chose this room because the rocket equation is the most sober thing I ever wrote and the most impossible thing anyone believed. Both are true at once. Here the cradle and the void sit in the same logarithm.